Back again

Oh dear!  I should never make a New Year's Resolution as I can't keep them - here we are in august and this is only the second post this year - no excuses really apart from laziness.  So what have I been up to?  Lots of travelling round the world and in Europe, lots of stitching related things, enjoying our newly landscaped garden and a little bit of housework. Here is what the garden looked like before 

and after the landscaping - 

This quilt is one that I designed and organised at the machine embroidery group I belong to - we made the star blocks using a technique of foundation piecing in the hoop which presented us with many challenges which many in the group don't want to repeat!  The embroidered blocks were digitised to represent significant landmarks in the 5 local counties and the quilting was done 'as you go' with the borders and binding added after the blocks and sashing had been assembled and quilted.  The quilt is to be presented to a member of the Armed Forces in the next few months - I just need to make a bag to put it in with some of the spare blocks.

A lot of my time recently has been spent improving my machine embroidery skills - below is a table runner that I made last week for a wedding present for a friend.  It took a lot of practising and false starts before I managed to get the design to stitch out to my satisfaction with a minimal amount of puckering and with all of the elements of the design positioned in exactly the right places.  Now I hope they like it!

These are just 2 of the stitching things I have been doing recently - more to follow.