Well Christmas is now just a distant memory and its taken me until the middle/end of January to get back in gear……

All was good and the weather did not interfere with any of our planned get togethers.

Its months since I worked on a project of my own and as usual I’m finding it hard to get back into the swing of either completing a part finished project or knowing what to start as the next one.

In the run up to Christmas we successfully completed the cushions that the girls wanted to make for their teachers.  They were a nice size of project for the girls to focus on and they did all the patchwork on the front cover by themselves.  Lucy’s tutor even phoned home to say how much she loved hers which was great.

It was one of those projects that makes you glad you’re a fabric hoarder, keeping all the off cuts from previous projects.  The majority of the fabrics were from the first Quilt I ever made back in 2009/10 on an Introduction to Patchwork and Quilting at ‘Millie Moon’ in Frome.  The course started  this journey off and these pieces used again make me look back on how many projects I have undertaken since then and how many skills I have gained.

Its so easy to forget how far you’ve come and only concentrate on all the things you still don’t know!  This mindset is one of the things I am really going to try and work on in 2014, also that techniques worth knowing take practice – you can’t just be great at them first time!  I would have hoped that by my mid-forties I would have grasped this idea, but no!!

One of the huge bonuses of doing all of this is creating things with the girls.  Children have such great imaginations and unlike most adults are prepared to ‘Just do it’, not over think the idea or obsess about what may go wrong or the colours not matching etc etc.  I will happily admit that I have ‘over-controlling’ tendencies, so there is nothing like one of your children telling you they know what they are doing and they want to do it themselves ‘its our project’ and, do you know what, they do a great job without my micro-managing.  Not all the pieces line up as they should, but, do you know what neither do mine!

My youngest daughter wanted to make a Christmas table runner last year and my last blog showed her starting the project. We really did do this one together as I had bought a limited amount of fabric so it needed to be used as set blocks, there wasn’t enough to just mix and match (OK some control tendencies crept in as I wanted it to match!).  The fabrics are beautiful and not glaringly festive which has allowed us to still have it on the table now.  The range was designed by Anni Downs for Henry Glass.

Well on that note, a very Happy belated 2014!  Heres to many more projects….