http://needleandthimble.blogspot.com/ is a wonderful site that I've just stumbled across. She has podcasts on her site. One of which I've just watched by Bonnie McCaffery aat the New Zealand quilt show. I recommend taking a look.

More pictures of the quilt in last blog.

This is one of my favourite quilts. It catches the light beautifully, wherever you put it, it changes mood. We used to have a shack at Milang on the river front and for the year 2000 Karen (who's business name I would mention if I knew it) one of the local's at Milang dyes silk. She made scraps for us all to wear as scarves for the street party. They were beautiful with firework images and all sorts in the background see photo above. I was lucky enough to grab a bag of her offcuts from the little craft shop at Milang and so began a new quilt. After piecing and machine embroidering all the squares it sat in the cupboard for years. It was stitched on batting and the magazine I was using with instructions on how to make it went missing. It's a quilt as you go type pattern. Well time passed and every now and then I'd get it out and spread it on the floor thinking what will I do. I finally decided to zigzag the patches together, lay down the backing then stitch the borders down and finally handsew the other side of the borders. For what was supposed to be a quick and easy quilt it was quite a truama. Never mind it's turned out to have lots of memories and to be one of my favourties.

TAST knotted cretan

Knotted cretan is a stitch I have never tried before. In fact I looked in my stitch books and couldn't find it. This is why I find the tast challenge so good as Sharon's ideas take us on to a new level. I struggled with this stitch as I couldn't work out how to knot the bottom of this stitch. Sharons dictionary of stitches is great but my brain wouldn't let me flip it to form the bottom knot. Finally go there.

For anyone unfamiliar with TAST of take a stitch tuedsday it can be found at http://inaminuteago.com/blog/index.php/take-a-stitch-tuesday-challenge/ it has flickr site and is fantastic to browse through.

I have been digging around in my stash for this piece of material. My hunting finally paid off. I wanted to include this for interest in tast couching last week. The picture probably doesn't do it justice. Silky wraps are coiled and couched on net. I don't know how I would use it as it is quite heavy and bulky, but it is quite fascinating.

Small Mountmellick project

My finished mountmellick project. It took a while to do the fringing and due to the heaviness of the canvas type material I had to do it in stages as it actually hurt my hands pulling the threads through. I love it anyway and think it needs a larger one to go with it perhaps with the knitted fringe.

Mountmellick work stitch sampler.

I love to try different types of embroidery, mountmellick work is one that appeals to me. I also like to learn about the history linked to the work and why and when it was popular. Mountmellick is a form of white work embroidery that originated in Ireland. There is a very good article about mountmellick at http://islandireland.com/Pages/folk/mountmellick/embroidery.html