Here comes the summer

What a lovely couple of weeks I've had. Work is great and I'm embarking on some wonderful projects and home is lovely. Last weekend was pretty cultural, and I got out and about with visits to the beautiful walled rose garden at Mottisfont Abbey, the brand new Constable & Salisbury exhibition at Salisbury and South Wiltshire Museum and to the Made to Last exhibition which is being hosted in the cloisters of Salisbury Cathedral  as part of Salisbury International Arts Festival.

I took literally hundreds of flower photographs at Mottisfont, both on the Olympus PEN and the new Diana F+. The colours of the roses, and the foxgloves, and the clematis were all staggering, and in the warm sunlight, the flowers seemed to glow. This time of year is so precious, I want to try and capture every second, every glint of light and every shade of colour. If any of the film picture come out okay, I'll upload them when I next post here. Watch this space...

The festival is wonderful for the city of Salisbury with events and activities taking place at dozens of venues for a jam-packed fortnight. Sadly, I missed one of the opening events which was an aerial ballet by the Argentinian dance company, Voalà. It would have been great to see, but I had a prior engagement for some baby cuddles with the adorable Flora, which could not be missed for all the dancing in South America! The Made to Last exhibition was well worth the visit, with some really unusual modern sculptures in the quiet and contemplative setting of the cathedral cloisters. I posted a handful of pictures on instagram (which, yes, I am still smitten with) and here's one of my favourites. 

This weekend has been all about family and friends and, very importantly, music. D has always been an amazing musician, but a non-practising one until this weekend, when he re-emerged onto the scene with not one, but two, amazing acoustic sets at the local. He totally rocked and I am very proud of him! Special thanks to George and Sarah and to my mum and dad, who came along to support him on Friday and Sunday respectively.


Here are a couple more instagram pictures that I've taken in the last fortnight of the bunting celebrating the anniversary of the Festival of Britain at the Southbank Centre and the stunning alliums from outside Salisbury and South Wiltshire Museum.

 

On the craft front, I am delighted to report that I have finally found just the right colour orange for Bunting. It was pretty tricky and I needed the help of the lovely knitting departments of both Liberty and John Lewis (frankly, visiting any knitting department is no hardship) but I am there. I've also started Bunting in earnest and have rediscovered the lost art of french knitting thanks to this superb tutorial from Donna Vokes. My parents moved house two weeks ago and my mum discovered an old french knitting dolly, made from a wooden cotton reel with four teeny tiny nails hammered into the top. It turns out that I had completely forgotten how to create icord with a dolly, but now I've started again, there's no holding me back!

Coraline is still growing. I did get to the yoke, but then decided that I would actually prefer a longer line cardigan, so I'm adding an additional
couple of inches, which means fourteen more (very long) rows of stocking stitch. Gah!

The good news, though, is that my quilt is almost, almost finished. The pieces have been pieced, the sandwich quilted and all I need now is some dark brown cotton to match the ribbon that I am planning to use as a border. I can hardly wait to be snuggled up on the sofa, on a chilly autumn afternoon with a good book and a cup of tea, all wrapped up in my own hand-made quilt. I just have to resist the urge to make a matching blanket from Jane Brocket's The Gentle Art of Knitting, which I finally received this week. No new projects until I've finished something! (Let's see how long that lasts...)

It's been a while...

The last four weeks have just flown by - I've been so busy at work and at home that I've found it hard to find the time to sit quietly with my laptop and get a few words down. However, I have had time to keep crafting. (Phew!) Coraline is coming on steadily and I hope to hit the complicated yoke smocking in a couple of weeks time. It's slow-going, and repetitive, just now, but it is about to get interesting and when it's all blocked and I can wear it, I know it will all be worth it!

Aside from knitting, I've been spending a fair amount of time beavering away on my big quilting project. Over the last four weeks, I've cut out all of the pieces (all 252 of them!) and I've started to put them together together. It was great fun playing with the different coloured pieces, spreading them all out on the floor in my den to see what went well where and to check that nothing looked out of place. That there weren't too many repeats or blocks of similar colours too close to each other.

Following the instructions from Jane Brocket's Gentle Art of Quilting I labelled each square-to-be before machine-sewing the four strips of each square together, then patiently ironing every single seam flat. I swear, I did more ironing in the last four days than I've done in the last four years! I've now sewn the squares into rows, and once I have sewn those rows into one giant piece, I shall begin hand-quilting in earnest. I've just run out of cotton (and bank holidays) so I shall have to wait until next weekend before I can finish off the front. 

It's lovely to see something come from nothing; to create something so large from scraps of material. Although I'm a long way from finishing this particular project, I'm enjoying it so much that I'm already imagining what my next quilt will look like! Since my last post, I visited The American Museum in Claverton, near Bath, which has the most inspirational collections of handmade quilts. They had them all in one room in gigantic poster sleeves and I only wish that I could have had the place to myself so that I could really have studied them in detail. I did buy some beautiful fat quarters, none of which are actually in this quilt, but they will be in something lovely before too long, I'm sure!

I've also treated myself to a very exciting new camera. The Diana+ is a lomographic camera - and isn't she the most beautiful camera you've ever seen? I've only had one roll of film developed so far and I wouldn't say that I was particularly proud of any of the pictures (especially as I'd bought the wrong speed film!) but it's a start and I'm going to have lots of fun with analogue photos. I love the unpredictability of shooting with a film camera and I love the nostalgic warmth of the end results. Here's a link to the Ten Golden Rules of Lomography - whatever you take your photos with - these are all lessons well-learned!

This move to lo-fi has done absolutely nothing to dampen my enthusiasm for Instagram! I've made the bold move of having some of my snaps printed out on 5" x 5" matt paper by the lovely folk at Photo.com. Some of the images aren't quite hi-res enough to be blown up to that size, but somehow, when you're looking at them in the pages of a gorgeous album it doesn't matter in the slightest.