The Sewing Dilettante

Last month, a good friend back in Belfast sent me a little gift for my birthday: a lovely tea towel from Flax Fox , one of the vendors that sets up stall every weekend at St. George's Market. So lovely was this particular tea towel that I just couldn't face putting it to work on all the chores I usually use tea towels for. It would be grimy and battered within days (if not moments. Nothing's more hardworking in my kitchen than tea towels!). Plus, I still have a lot of empty wall space in the new house to fill. So, this weekend, hubby and I undertook a little home decorating project involving said tea towel, an old kitchen cabinet door, and a stapling gun. As modelled by ever obliging hubby A fantastic reminder of Belfast and all my friends back there! This is destined for a place of honour just above the kitchen table, from which vantage point it can supervise my use and abuse of other, less fortunate tea towels!  xx Tina

About a century ago, I promised Sarah that I'd make two Churn Dash blocks for her Siblings Together Quilt . With six months to make them, I figured there'd be no problem whipping them up at some point. In hindsight, I now see that I should've made them as soon as I'd made my promise, but life intervened, and I kept thinking about just how much time I had to make the blocks. Of course, when I finally sat down at the end of August to make them, my machine promptly broke, and it was still in the shop when the big move took place. Long story short, it was only last week that I got to return to the pieces I'd cut back in August and put these two blocks together. There was a third block involving a striped fabric that defied all attempts at uniformity. There were stripes going every which way, and my brain just couldn't wrap itself around how to get them all to line up with each other! So, that block's gone into the scrap box. Otherwise, though, I really e...