A present

A friend of mine, decided that she wanted to learn about patchwork. Naturally, I offered to show her the basics, and we spent a lovely day constructing star blocks and making them up into a bag. (I thought that if when she starts piecing, she decides it's not for her, at least she'll have a bag to show for it, rather than a few oddd blocks!). Not surprisingly, she's hooked, and is now planning a sampler quilt, to get some techniques under her belt!

Which is why I was mystified when she came with a large squishy present for me. She had been busy sewing, but not her sampler blocks.

She had made me a beautiful bag as a thank you for the help I'd given her! She had chosen pink and green fabric (some of the green with writing on it - my all-time favourite kind of fabric!) She's already branching out, as she has added a diamond to the centre of one of the stars,

and on the other side, a scrappy heart block and a block of her own invention! (She said it went wrong, but I know the truth - she made it up specially for me!) Thank you so much, Pauline. I'll be looking forward to many happy hours of quilting together!

Confession time

I belong to several quilting groups, but my favourite is called 'Flutterwheels' (well, we had to call it something!). This is an informal group of nine quilters who want to push their skills a bit. We meet 6 times a year in each others' houses, and have a great time. Some people had been on an unsatisfactory City & Guilds course, so as an alternative to this, and the fact that they had ended up with lots of little samples of things which were neither use nor ornament and certainly wouldn't go together to make anything at all, we decided on a raffle format. Each member makes one block (or more, depending) and then the blocks are raffled at the next meeting.

This year's theme is stars and I was the lucky winner of some lovely purple stars from Nancy Johnson Srebro's book 'Stars by Magic'.

Don't they look fabulous? It's lucky that there are nine members of the group, because it makes a perfect quilt arrangement.

Now comes the confession. The only rule of the group is that you must make the blocks up within a year of winning them. This is to stop people getting burdened with UFOs, but didn't work in my case. In November 2006 I won some sizzling strips blocks, and although I put the blocks themselves together, I have only just finished the top!

I was really hoping to do something clever with the border - extend the top into the border or something, but this week I decided enough was enough and I needed to finish it. I'm quite plesed with the border treatment (although, as usual, I didn't have enough of the light blue border fabric to do the whole thing). I'm just quilting it at the moment, so don't let the other memebrs of Flutterwheels know that I'm so tardy, will you?!