It was a busy weekend, and it didn't last nearly long enough.  I love having a stretch of time to devote to one thing only, and that's rare in my life. I always try to do two things at once, which is time efficient, but not mentally relaxing.  But I did manage to get a lot of sewing time, while I was cooking and doing laundry as well.

I put the borders on the Doors and Windows quilt yesterday, and I'm pleased that I chose to add a pieced strip.

It's a bit playful and I like those little corner pieces.

 I'm really scratching around for 2.5" strips now, I will have to cut some soon, but not right away.  I have about 7 new projects started and lying around in various boxes and baskets; I need to sort them out before I start cutting to replenish the strip drawers.

Spring is just around the corner, and the plants in the garden know it.  I bought 18 roses this year, and I'm looking forward to seeing them in flower, but not ready to see the back of the cold weather yet.  Summer is getting closer all the time, ughh.  But there are months on nice weather and beautiful flowers yet to come.

I think these pink and navy blue Arctotis are my favourite flower rght now, so cheerful and the colour combination with the silvery blue-green leaves is wonderful.  What a quilt that would make!

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I spent most of the day in the garden yesterday, after a customer dropped off some quilts.  It was a lovely sunny day, so it was a pleasure to be outside, digging, barrowing dirt and planting seedlings.  I have to ration my garden time, otherwise my back seizes up and I have to creep around for the rest of the week, groaning.  I can't even blame old age for that, the damage to my back occurred when I was 18; it's such a bore to have to be sensible.......

I wasn't sensible last night, and stayed up till 3am, putting the borders on the Triple Irish Chain. I had previously chosen the border fabrics and cut them out, and then I was walking past the bolts of fabric at ths Hall, and one of them demanded to be on this quilt.  So I had to abandon my other plans and substitute this striped fabric, which required mitering at the corners, and a lot of extra work, but I do love the way it looks now. 

I use the instructions for mitering borders on Jinny Beyer's site, which is a great place to check out anyway, full of lots of info.

My daughter Seonaid is up to lots of exciting things in Europe, but her latest escapade tops the list of crazy things.

Here she is (on the left) with her mate Tarley, all suited up and ready to go.  Bravo girls!!

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Alas, four weeks have just flown by, with not a single post.  It's been an incredibly busy time, and when I had time to blog there was always an excuse not to; photos on the other camera, no phone cord to download them onto the computer (I really need to start blogging on the phone, that would make things easier), lousy internet connection, too tired, head too scrambled to think straight.  I did achieve a huge amount of work though, which was excellent, and hopefully I can slow down a bit and have a bit more leisure time.

One exciting thing was taking delivery of my new state-of-the-art colour laser printer, which has revolutionised the way I print my patterns.  I've converted the original files to pdfs, and now all I need to do is click 'Print' and I can have an order done in minutes, without any input from me.  No feeding documents into the machine, no stacking them for double siding, no collating or sorting.  It will even add the coloured covers in the correct place, and store the print job for another time.  It's an amazing machine.  We have big plans for the future, including printing patterns for other people.

 He does take up a lot of space, and he weighs 79 kilos; thank God my dear brother is a super strong man, and not a weedy pigeon.  Otherwise it wouldn't have been possible to get it off the delivery van.

I've been making inroads into updating my website, which always takes up a heap of time, and I also finished an enormous quilt on the Statler. 

It was 110" x 117", which really stretched the limits of Millhouse, but we managed to get it done.  The finished quilt was gorgeous, but there was no way to take a photo, it was just too big. 

I hope we never get a bigger quilt, it would be too much hassle loading it onto our 12' machine.

The feather border turned out well, the quilt loked pretty special with such an elaborately quilted border.

Apart from quilting, working on the computer, gadding about the countryside with family, working at the postie job (the Parcels, what's with the Parcels!!!)

I've been putting a lot of time into the garden, trying to get plants in the ground before Spring arrives.  That should be any day now. 

So there hasn't been a lot of free time, but that's no excuse for not blogging.  Bad Me.

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