2012, i think it’s gonna be a good one.

It’s certainly started off well anyway,

Friends, quite literally, wandered in on a whim about 8pm New Year’s eve to see what we were doing…

…which wasn’t a lot,  but we soon had something celebratory happening.

And it was 2012 when they left.

We have had very hot weather here during the first week of January, several days of temps around 36 to 40 degrees C (97 – 104F) so it was way too hot to be over in the cottage/studio.

Instead I decided to work in the house and get a couple of my own quilts quilted.

Quilting this quilt top was on my Summer hol’s to do list after I finally embroidered the three pairs of legs and four eyes required to complete the quilt about a month ago.

I started this quilt back in 2008, it’s a Nonie Fisher pattern from a quilt she started in 1998 which she called ‘As Time Goes By’ after the (fabulous) British TV series of the same name starring Dame Judy Dench and Geoffrey Palmer.  I’ve known Nonie for many years and she told me the quilt was based on the one which was always on the bed in this show, but you only ever saw the sides (masses of pinwheels) and not the top of it so we never knew what the whole quilt looked like.

So Nonie drew up the centre from the 1818 Ann Daggs quilt and placed that in the centre of her pinwheel quilt.

Fast forward to 2008 when I was doing a class with Nonie, and she very kindly gave me the pattern sheet for the centre of this quilt and a photo of her quilt for reference.

My quilt then evolved just a little bit more as I took out two of the birds from the Ann Daggs quilt and replaced them with the Peacock and Elephant from the 1858-1863 Bird of Paradise quilt top in the collection of the American Folk Art Museum.  I had been in Rajasthan, India in 2008 and was looking to have a reminder of that.  The Peacock is the State symbol of Rajasthan and, well the Elephant needs no explanation, I saw plenty of those on the roads.

So at last my quilt is done, after I’ve stitched the binding down!!

Name…? it’s working title has been The Rajasthan Quilt but I’m not sure that now feels right.  I’ll ponder it a while.

Next on the list was this…

…which I talked about back here

Quilting in progress

I had fun quilting this, randomly choosing between bricks for the houses and trailing vines

Today it’s a bit cooler so, after lunch, I am heading off to the cottage/studio to complete the two half drafted Maltaville Blocks which are lying in wait for me.

Look at this though…I have made sure I’ve remembered to “slow down, smell the coffee“