Harvest

Please be distracted from the fact I haven't blogged for 2 weeks by the lovely photo of todays harvest from the lottie. There in all their magnificence are 4 small courgettes, a lovely little round courgette, some broad beans and some radishes. That was all I managed to collect before the heavens opened and I had to make a dash for the car to avoid drowning.

The weather has been conspiring against us - whenever we have a bit of free time it has been raining - not just a little bit of namby-pamby rain that you could garden in but full scale SAS strength torrential rain where you would need scuba gear to do any weeding. Hence the lack of allotment updates on the blog.

I have no excuse for there being bo other sort of posts other than that I've had nothing to write about. I did knit a pair of socks for a work colleague as a leaving present, but I've forgotten to photograph them. Duh. Hope you liked the socks, Bex.

I finished reading The 19th Wife which I did enjoy but I thought it lost it's way a bit towards the end. Now I'm reading A Darker Domain by Val McDermid. I seem to remember not being overly impressed with her previous book (Beneath the Bleeding) but this one appears to be good so far. I've also been reading Women's Work: The First 20,000 Years - Women, Cloth and Society in Early Times, which is a fantastic social history of women and textiles right back to neolithic times. Because textiles have very rarely survived from those periods the writer has used language and the specific words which refer to weaving or spinning or to clothing which have survived and spread across Europe, plus the depiction of women working with textiles on ceramics and in pictures, to trace the evolution of the various types of textile work, almost all of which was done by women. I found it totally fascinating.

Still not knitting...

But of course, even in the almost complete absence of knitting from my life, there is still crafting of one kind or another.

I have finally completed the Civil War Crossing quilt - you may remember that I bought the fabric for this way back in last September when we were in Florida. Today I finally finished quilting it and did the binding. It had spent a long time in limbo while I pondered on a pattern for the quilting. I could see that it might become a UFO so I made myself a quilting rule - I couldn't start a new project until I'd finished this one. In fact I've decided that will be a general rule in my quilting - one project at a time. There is the exception to this of course (hey, I'm still me, what did you expect?) The block-by-block quilt doesn't count as a project until I start to assemble the blocks -that's only fair because at the current rate of completion I will be 167 before I finish it and that seems like a long time before I start another quilting project. The block-by-block quilt was always going to be a long-term thing given that I am teaching myself a whole lot of new techniques as I go.

This quilt was pieced using the Garden Trellis pattern from Jelly Roll Quilts by Pam & Nicky Lintott and a jelly roll in Civil War Crossing by Barbara Bachman for Moda. The border is not part of that range, but was bought from a US supplier who specialises in repro civil war prints, to be authentic. (Sorry, I can't remember who it was.) I used some of the same fabric in the quilt to balance the fact that it there was a bit more pink in the jelly roll than I had anticipated. The backing is a bit of fabric I bought on eBay and it was this fabric that decided me on the quilting pattern. The backing fabric has long snaking vines with stylised roses - I just followed the path of the vines and added a few swirls to pick out some of the roses. It seemed obvious when I'd thought of it - I can't believe I spent all that time dithering.
So, what's next? You can be sure that I have another project lined up - how else was I going to get the push to finish this one?

Here's a hint -