Inspiration and a linky

Still the school holidays here, and it's very difficult to fit in any creativity, but I'm squirrelling away ideas for the future.   I'm keeping up with the great posts and tutorials on the Let's Get Acquainted blog hop - tomorrow's hosts are Liz from What I Did on My Summer Vacation and Susan from Canadian Abroad - and this weekend I also found inspiration in:

Pink and hot orange - what an amazing colour combination!

Graphic shapes - I love these lollypops emerging from the softer surroundings.

Natural pattern:

and manmade:

In case you were wondering, the two pictures above show part of the stone interior of one of my all-time favourite buildings - just beautiful, like being inside a giant sculpture. It's a stone dovecot, built in the 1500s.  Each little niche would hold a pair of breeding birds - the whole thing could hold up to 2000!  Here it is from outside:

I really like to know what inspires other people, and so although this is a very small blog and it seems scarily presumptious I thought I would have a go at starting a Linky feature.  If you would like to share a post about something which has fired you up,  please do link up.   Maybe you have seen something - anything! - which has set you off on a creative train of thought, or would like to explain what it was that originally inspired you to make something - it's all interesting!  A few suggestions:

• Please link to the specific post rather than your blog address to make it easy to find (you can click on your blog post title, then copy and paste the url from your browser).
• If you have been inspired by someone else's work, make sure you link to them in your post!
• If you want to share both pics of your inspiration and the work inspired by it, then that's even better!

I would love to read about it.

Catherine

Hello Blog!  It's good to be back!  I'm catching up with other blogs, and still in the midst of school holidays, but today I'm linking up to Really Random Thursday at Live a Colorful Life with some of the strange and wonderful things seen over the last couple of weeks:

Some actual sunshine, in Wales even

A masterpiece of engineering - Telford's aquaduct

A tiny monk hiding in a 13thC abbey

Did you spot him?

A garden (designed by students) at the Tatton Park flower show

A hoverfly on cow parsley

Bee on lamium

Tiger Moth found on the pavement outside a shop

Ragwort growing by the riverside

Strange tree with eyes

Ornamental thorns

Got to love pigs

and:

Someone admiring the view from a first floor window

I'm working my way through the great tutorials I've missed on the On the Let's Get Acquainted blog hop and I'll be making a point of visiting the two bloggers who are up today:

Jennifer from GH Quilting
Danny from MommyFor Reals

Back soon....

No progress on quilting this week  - plenty of other unwanted excitement including a trip to the sick kids hospital with smallest child following a dramatic fainting episode combined with cracking her head on the laminate floor.  Instead there was a little more therapeutic embroidery (can highly recommend this for calm).

There is no plan to this embroidery at all - the tree could have been a coconut palm or a weeping willow but morphed into a larch as it went along, partly because I'm trying out new stitches and the cones were the result of learning french knots.

I'm not at all happy with the baby and may unpick it and start again - please contain your excitement:-)

The guest advice post on the Plum and June blog hop this week was from Kati of From the Blue Chair  It was a really good article about her reasons for blogging and her determination to stick to these and continue to go her own way.


Like almost everyone else, I guess, I started blogging because I love learning and making things - and wanted to share this process warts and all with like-minded people. It's very easy (well it is for me!) to worry that perhaps the things you make aren't good enough, or "original" enough, or perhaps just coming off the production line fast enough! I think I will start a Slow Blog movement - want to join me?!

Please check out the latest hops on the Let's Get Acquainted blog hop. This week Rebecca made a clever travel bingo, and Marti made some pretty colourful placemats.

July 12

    Rebecca from Sew Festive Handmade

    Marti from 52 Quilts in 52 Weeks

July 17

    Katie from Kati's Quilting

    Claire from Sewing over Pins
    Caroline from Quilting in the Cold

Embroidery WIP

There seems to be a lot of embroidery going on in the quilt world at the moment and it's really inspiring!  I love Jo Avery's embroidery and this, at Needles Pins and Baking Tins is really fun.  

A while back I made this mini-quilt and have been wanting to try to do an embroidered version so I started working on this:

You can see I have no idea what I'm doing - I could vaguely remember lazy daisy stitch, but everything else is a bit mad.  It took a while to realise I could separate some of the strands from the embroidery thread for finer stitches, and look what I did at the back!

Apart from the general untidiness, I managed to catch the edge of the fabric and am going to have to cut it free so I can get the finished thing out of the hoop.  (I am ashamed to say, I also sewed it to the lap of my trousers...)

Still I like her little face and I'm going to keep going - how else to learn?!

Please visit the following blogs on the Let's Get Acquainted blog hop today:

 Jenelle from Echinops and Aster  

 Julie from Bedsheet in the Kitchen

A little while back I posted an admiring comment on [Amy's] Crafty Shenanigans - her mosaic of makes for June was really impressive and I thought it would be a long time before I could do one like that in a month (I'm a bit slow).  Amy sent me an encouraging e-mail, followed by this little package in the post:

She had very sweetly put together a little kit, complete with instructions, for making a flower brooch. Her idea was that it was so easy and satisfying to make that perhaps I would have something extra to show at the end of the month!   I made it yesterday afternoon while watching Andy Murray's valiant effort at Wimbledon.

I can see why she called it a "procrastination brooch" - it was fun to make and I can imagine sewing lots of these while I should be doing other things! 

Thank you, Amy!

A bit of a linky post

Now that I've got my tutorial done (good thing for everyone concerned - I was not an attentive or patient mother:-) I've been finishing off the top of stack of coins.  In the end I decided, having consulted my wise readers, not to sash in linen between the stacks but made a couple of extras, joined them all and added a border in the linen instead.

It's proving impossible to get a decent sunny picture of the whole top, but here's a close-up:

To give you an idea what it's like here I have watered this hanging basked twice in two months.

Thank you very much to everyone from the hop who dropped in and left a comment.  I try to reply to all comments, but sometimes the commenter is a "no-reply" blogger.    If you don't hear back, this may be why.  Find out about what it means and what to do about it here (or google "no-reply blogger").

Sometimes, too, I can't pay a return visit to a blog because the address isn't visible when I click on a commenter's profile picture.   Amanda at Fabric Engineer has just posted a little tutorial on how to make sure your blog shows up - here.

And......another handy link.  Some bloggers like to use word verification to avoid spammers, but I thought I'd turned it off on my own blog.  I found I hadn't when Chrissie D posted this tutorial!

Final link  - for anyone who's read to the bottom of this post - Lynne at Lily's Quilts has an amazing giveaway. She's offering an Oakshott Cottons colourbox.    A mere 1236 entrants so far:-)  I'm off to get my entry in with fingers and toes crossed.  Please let it be me.