Ah sweet colour...

I am working on project for a large cloth, more about that later... in the meantime, I need to find larger pieces of fabric. I am used to making small things, so I don't often buy anything larger than a fat quarter, my scrappy stash just isn't cutting it, and seems to be made up of novelty prints (I am such a sucker for a print). I need big cloth and solid colours.

I am hoping to dye a couple of old sheets, but I am also very tempted by the shot cottons by Oakshott Fabrics, so I ordered a sample pack of all 83 colours, 83! It is SO hard to choose just a couple.





Whilst the sample pack is £12.50, you receive a £10 gift voucher to use on your next order, AND the samples are a very generous 2.5" x 5" in size, that's quite a lot of fabric! I couldn't resist snipping off a few wee pieces and stitching them down to one of my scrapplique cloths, to see how they stitch and fray.



The needle just glides through, and the fray is so pretty, I love shot cottons. Now I just need to choose, I am liking the blues and violets most of all. I think I will keep stitching with them a while, see which one's sing to me.

Oh, and I just found this. Glorious colour, good enough to eat, it made me drool on to my keyboard. Chawne is like a rainbow goddess, for sure.

Scrapplique

What to do with little fabric pieces? I mean the really little pieces, less than 1", I keep them all, I can't help it. Those little scraps of colourful joy, scraps from the childrens projects, old bedding, scraps of family, scraps of life.
I looked for projects online, but there isn't alot you can do with very tiny scraps, so I stitched them down, on slightly bigger scraps.



It became quite addictive, a simple kantha stitch, rainbow arteries connecting cloth to cloth, to create new colour and new cloth. I have a pile of these "new" cloths, and I will keep adding to the pile, and maybe one day I will connect those too, and have one big cloth, who knows? There is no plan, the only plan is to keep stitching. I call it scrapplique, it seems fitting, raw edges, no fancy pants precision, just cloth on cloth.

















Some of them are gifts, yet to be gifted.

The base cloths are all hand dyed with tea and tumeric, and mostly cut from my old linen maternity pants. I guess those pants were pretty big, I seem to have an awful lot of that cloth.

Scraptacular

Finally, after many months of cutting and piecing, cutting and piecing....



I have a quilt top!





I am super nervous about quilting and binding it (this being my first quilt and all).
Note to self....



You can find the pattern (yes there is a pattern - as higgledy piggledy as it is) HERE.

Every little scrap counts

It's Growing.....

I'm finding this scrappy patchwork somewhat addictive!
Thank you for all your well wishes, I am back on my feet and working like a dog again.

I am SO excited about my scrappy quilt and cannot stop thinking about it, more soon...

One block later...

I did come home that night and complete another block, I stumbled to bed at around midnight and complained of feeling dizzy, I thought it was the tiredness, but the next morning I had a raging temperature, swollen glands and pounding headache. I slept for 24 hours straight, and this morning I only got out of bed because my body aches too much from lying down for so long.

So now I am toiling with the guilt of not being at work (knowing Simon and my colleagues will take the brunt of my workload),  that my mum is looking after the kids - who are off school for Easter. Ambear has stayed home with me to be my nurse, bless. It's nice her and I have some together time, we don't often get that, my sweet eldest and I.

So here is my block... extremely wonky.





I may be absent from this space for a couple of days whilst I mend. Wishing you all a most wonderful Easter <3

Time

In my world, there are simply not enough hours in the day right now.
Time rolls forward relentlessly at such a pace I can barely catch my breath.  I work an average 80 hours a week, as does Simon, and so it goes on, and on, and on.
There is of course some point to all this madness, but that point is not to be laboured upon here, for frankly, it is simply too long winded and perhaps not all that interesting to most folk.

When time is short, it is precious, and precious things ought to be treated with the utmost consideration and valued for all they are worth. Time is indeed precious to us right now, as a family, as a couple, as individuals. Time together and time alone. It is the time alone that Simon and I struggle to find the most. When we are not working in the literal earning money sense, we are working as a family, caring for our home and brood and trying to enjoy quality family time. There is just not much left over at the end of it all for alone time.

All that said, I am learning that it is amazing how much one can achieve when time is against you. How much you can pack into a few hours or minutes. I am learning what is really important and what is quite insignificant.
Each week I am hit by a great wall of tiredness, each week it is greater than the last and just when you think, surely it cannot get any worse, it does, and yet we carry on, of course we must.

Winston Churchill said 'When you're going through hell, keep going' and really what choice do we have? You learn how strong you are when you are required to show strength. I realise I am rambling now, the end point is this. The more tired I become the more alive and capable I feel.
 The less time I have the more I seek to find and eek out minutes here or there. In short, I am incredibly productive right now (by my own standards at least) and in some perverse way I actually relish the challenge of dragging my sorry arse out of bed each morning and telling myself that 'Today I am going to give a little bit more', I have to, and I do.
I have momentary lapses and minor meltdowns, sometimes I just head outside for a breath of fresh air and a sob, but carry on we must, and we do, Winston Churchill was a wise old bastard, wasn't he?

I came home last night at close to 10pm. I have felt a  rising sense of frustration in recent weeks over the lack of me time, specifically time to create. I try and do a little each day, but as the great wall of tiredness has become greater, I have created less and less. Last night I came home and told tiredness to get bent. I came home and set up the sewing machine and silently began sewing bundles and bundles of strips. My time, precious time, I'll take it whenever I can. Sometimes sleep is overated.



So, I made a start on the Scraptacular Quilt, a good start, and then I slept like I have never slept before. Cried like a baby when the alarm clock rang out, and got up and did it all over again. Tonight, I am sewing some more, tomorrow I will cry like a baby again when the alarm goes off, and so it goes on... It's all good though, when your head hits the pillow and you mentally tick off the To Do lists and creep a little bit closer to the end goal, all the while enjoying the little victories against time, it feels oh so good.
When this madness is over, I will never take time for granted again. Oh no.