This Wertheim machine was on Ebay, a steal at $10, and seeing I was in Adelaide anyway I decided to add it to the collection.

 It has a belt that will fit several other of my machines that are without belts, so I can take that with me when I go to buy replacements, and in the meantime I can sew on this.  I haven't tested how to get a quarter inch seam  yet, but it would be fine for crumb piecing or paper-piecing.  These old girls with the sideways bobbin case, and the sideways needle, sew a wonderful seam with beautiful tension and even stitches.

I love the beautiful blue and cream paint, what a lovely finish.
 

I managed to finish the Celtic Soltice, or my version of it anyway. 

It needs to have 2" mid green borders all around, but Mereth is donating the fabric for that and hasn't brought it round yet.  I'm calling this done, and it will only take half an hour to add those final borders.  Mereth even found a nice backing fabric in her stash, so that's all ready to go.  We've added a few metres to the stash already this year, so she's glad to be able to claim all the fabric in this as used.

My visit to Tricia's resulted in quite a few new shirtings, and some more batiks.

 I can't buy batiks online, the pictures don't do justice to the fabrics and the colours are all wrong so I don't know what I'm really getting.  When I see a wall of batiks in real life it's a pleasure to pull out favourites and choose a few to bring home.

Now that the design wall is clear again I'm sewing more Triple Irish Chain blocks, and making some progress at last.  I have all the pieces just sitting there waiting, so it won't take long to get this to a decent size.  It's such a nice pattern to sew, and I love the red, white and blue colour scheme.  It hasn't made a dent in the stash though.

 After I've made a decent number of these blocks I'm going to pull out another ancient UFO and start working on that.  This year I'd like to work on the new projects side by side with the UFOs, and whittle that list down to manageable proportions.