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I've just been flicking through some of my photos and came across some of my hand made quilts that I haven't shared with you before.  Tumbling blocks They are all hand pieced; I tend to use the American method now. Using Jinny Beyer's Quiltmaking by Hand as my bible. I find it very quick and only marginally slower than using a machine; with the extra upside of being able to take it with me if I'm out. Saying all that the top quilt was made using traditional English paper piecing; which makes for very accurate piecing but very slow work. Inner City The Inner City quilt was for a friend, who is a big traveller and the border fabric is of  old luggage labels. A little gimmicky but seemed to work well.  Compass points I forgot to take a photo of the compass one when it was finished. The photo is of the top just before basting.  It was a gift for my Mother-In-Law. I was especially thrilled with the compass points (all the points are there - when machine sewing i...

Another lovely gift I was bought by my husband was this beautiful notebook from Kate Bowles , who makes handmade notebooks from recycled material. I absolutely love it and the finish to it is just gorgeous - I especially love the spine. I'm using mine as my little Knitting Bible. There is square, plain and lined paper in so I can add little charts in too.

Already for that mince pie making marathon on Christmas Eve. A quick little plate I did at my local Ceramics studio this week.

Finally put the finishing touches to my latest quilt this month. Unfortunately it's been one of those projects that has stuck around for far too long. The inspiration came from Scrap Quilt Sensation by Katharine Guerrier, which I bought from the Festival of Quilts after seeing the beautiful display of the quilts from the book. The colours were fantastic and I just had to have a go too. The whole quilt was both hand pieced and hand quilted which is why it took such a long time to make. It was the quilting that took the majority of the time. I think i was quite ambitious to quilt a double bed size quilt by hand, as well as the fact that I used feathers as part of the quilting so it wasn't a simple design either. The below photo shows some of the quilting detail. I made the quilt to keep for myself and it's large enough for two to snuggle underneath comfortably in the cold months. I used all my favourite pieces of fabric from my stash and it's been quite a good stash bus...

Rolling Star This Rolling Star quilt is one of my proudest creations. It was made as a Christmas present for my Mum. Her favourite colours are purple and green; so this was the colour theme. The whole thing is pieced and quilted by hand; no machine involved. The design was inspired by a lovely book by Jinny Beyer called Colour Co nfidence for Quilters . It was borrowed from a friend but the basic ideas that I took from it were to use a dark (black in this quilt) and a bright (the bright jewel green) and then all the shades in between. Jinny Beyer had made several different quilts by just using one quilt block and then fragmenting each shape into little versions. The quilt block I used is the Rolling Star. I'm a bit of a Jinny Beyer fan and I used her Q uiltmaking by Hand for all the techniques to make the quilt. Out of every book I own (which is a lot) this is my favourite by far. It is just beautiful to dip into and the quilts in there are to die for. It is crammed full of inform...