WIP Wednesday

Hooray! Back in the saddle again!

Photos taken in the gloom of Scottish winter - Christmas bunting:

and a little peek at the beginnings of a quilt I have been wanting to make ever since I first saw Oakshott:

It's a long time since I've been able to link up with WIP Wednesday!

Festive spirit

I am hopeful that the creative mojo will return because I had a moment of weakness and bought some Christmas fabric.  It was folded up in the shape of a star, who could resist!

Somehow, some red and white craft felt, some robins, and a grown-up stripe also made their way into my bag.  

Blah

It's a long time since I posted anything I have made. For the last few weeks I have been creatively stuck.  Part of this is due to lack of time, and part of it is due to lack of inclination. It's not like there isn't a list of stuff I'd like to be getting on with, it's just that I seem to currently be incapable of getting on with it!

It is always reassuring to see other bloggers write they aren't getting as much done as they'd like too - a bit easy sometimes to compare yourself to people who seem to casually knock together a quilt or a purse every couple of days and despair!

Anyway.....I tried to get unstuck this weekend and got the watercolours out - there are so many beautiful colours in the fallen leaves round about.   It's pretty rough but it makes me happy to be doing stuff again.

Annekata posted this fantastic lecture from John Cleese about creativity - the brief gist of it is that you need Space, Time, Confidence and Humour to be creative.     If I can make space and time, try not to see imperfection as failure, and keep a sense of humour about my rather pitiful rate of production in comparison with other people, then maybe I'll have something worth posting soon.

In the meantime I'm really grateful to other bloggers for keeping it real!

Tag!

Camilla has kindly invited me to join in a tag!  (If you don't know Camilla's blog, you should check it out - her photography is beautiful as are her quilts.)

The rules of the tag are: 

• Tell us 11 things about yourself
• Answer the 11 questions that the person who tagged you has asked you
• In turn you can tag up to 11 bloggers and ask 11 questions of them (the people you tag should have less than 200 followers). But skip this if you prefer!
• Mention the blog that tagged you, but don't tag them back of course!

I really enjoyed Camilla's post - it's a fun way to find out about another blogger.  So here goes, with 11 random things about me, me, me:

• I'm rather partial to Colin Firth.
• Except for bright, clear, snowy days, I do not like the winter!
• I love red wine and it was the only thing I craved when pregnant - I could smell an open bottle across the other side of a restaurant.
• I struggle to find a true blogging "voice" - I'm essentially quite reserved and shy in real life, but have to rein in a tendency to burble on a bit.
• My favourite thing about blogging is making contact with some really nice people who are interested in the same kind of things and face the same kind of difficulties in managing to do them!
• I don't like heights - this is me, taking a photo to prove that on the third attempt I'd managed to make it to the middle of a rope bridge over a river crashing through a gorge.  Husband and kids had already crossed to the other side, had a good look around and come back.  You can see that I am hanging on for dear life.

• I met my husband eleven years ago at a party that neither of us had planned to go to.    
• During a stint as a Literary Agent's assistant, I briefly hobnobbed with the rich and famous who  aren't nearly as nice or interesting as the poor and obscure:-)
• I never could understand why Mr Rochester had to lose an eye and a hand in order to have redeemed himself.
• The bravest thing I have done in life is undertake an overnight bus trip from India to Nepal while suffering from dysentery - from Camilla's story about the goat I'm guessing our experiences here have been somewhat similar.
• I love food and will eat pretty much anything except raw oysters. 

and here are Camilla's questions:

• What is one of the best places you've been to?    In my backpacking days I went to a tiny island, called Siberut, off the west coast of Sumatra and trekked through the tropical forest with a local guide, staying with tattooed Mentawai people in log huts on stilts above pigs and chickens. From the depths of the forest we could hear the sound of chain saws so I hate to think what it's like now.

• Where would you like to travel to, even if not possible at the moment?   Tibet. Or Ankor Wat in Cambodia.  
• What's the best thing you've made?   I was pretty proud of this quilt, but generally feel that the best is yet to come.
• What do your family/friends think about your blogging?   I tend not to mention it to anyone else in case they scorn it!   But my lovely husband is very supportive, sometimes literally.  

• What else do you like to do in your spare time other than make stuff?  Reading, listening to music, walking, playing the piano, taking photos, going to the cinema, drawing/painting/etching, eating, and gardening on my allotment. Exciting, huh?!
• What's the last good book you read?  I just re-read Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro. By today's standards it's a short book, but there's so much in there.  It's intelligent without being unreadable, enjoyable on many different levels, and the character drawing is amazing.
• What's on your "to read" list? There's a big hole in my knowledge where Charles Dickens should be.
• What's your real job?  Jobbing gardener.
• Would you choose it again? Why or why not?  At this stage of my life, definitely.  My entire career until babies ate my brain was in publishing, but I like to work outdoors, for myself, and whenever I can fit it in around family life. 
• How many places have you lived in since you were born?  Three. NE Scotland, SE Scotland, London.  Now I'm back in SE Scotland again!
• If you weren't living where you are, where would you live?    In the last six years we managed to save enough for road trips with the kids through British Columbia and New Zealand and we briefly considered living abroad for a while.   We are too close to our families to up sticks permanently but I think Vancouver would have been the place, if we had been rich enough to live next to Stanley Park! Or almost anywhere in NZ!

Now my questions for you:

• Why do you blog?
• What is your favourite thing about blogging?
• Would you consider that you are the same person in real life?
• What would you change in your life, if you could?
• Where is your favourite place to be?
• Do you admire anyone (historical or contemporary) and why?
• What would you do, given sufficient funds?
• What makes you happy?
• What is your favourite food?
• Have you ever had an adventure?
• What is the thing you've done of which you are most proud?

Thank you, Camilla, for inviting me to take part!

I'm tagging eleven lovely blogs below in the hope that at the very least this directs some extra and deserved traffic their way.  But although I found this great fun I know that this kind of thing fills some people with horror - or maybe you have already participated in something like this recently - so please, people, don't feel obliged to participate!

Weekend Doings

Sy, Els, Lev

Celtic Thistle Stitches

Chez Roo

Strandkorbtraum

Quilting in the Cold

Don't Drink and Sew

Bryan House Quilts

Kettle Boiler

Sarah Lou

Sarah Sews Quilting Blog

Really Random Thursday

I love this plaque:

It manages to be both comical and at the same time terribly tragic!

Autumn is beautiful.

And if sometimes, as you head towards a long grey Scottish winter, it's easy to feel a bit like this:

Just remind yourself:

:-)

Linking up to:

Slow Blogger on Halloween

Happy Halloween! 

Looking for the Slow Blogger's Linky Party?  It's being hosted today by Martha over at her beautiful blog Weekend Doings   Please do link up there, and support other Slow Bloggers by visiting.

Here at Knotted Cotton it has indeed been a slow month for making with plenty of work (should be grateful!) and the October school break right in the middle.    It's easy to feel slightly despairing at the lack of productivity, but sod it, on the other hand my love of English Paper piecing has been reawakened by this

and it really has been a great month for getting out and about.  Just when we needed it most we had some glorious weather for a couple of days so I can't complain!

As usual, I will look forward to next month and hope for the best!    What about you?

Now I'm off to ready myself for an influx later on of small children tastefully dressed as vampires and the walking dead in school uniform (zombies seem to be de rigeur this year) - luckily they are still at the stage where crisps, lots of black icing, and sausages dressed as fingers will make them happy.

Catherine

Sea and Sand aka Hot Chocolate and Marshmallows

 

I wasn't going to link up to the Bloggers Quilt Festival because I'd been worrying that the last few months have been a bit slow on the productivity front and completely forgot that I had in fact actually made this quilt recently until a prod from Camilla reminded me ( her quilt is beautiful).  So I'm getting it in just under the wire (excuse the second post of the day.)   

I don't know why I forgot about it, because it's the first quilt I made for myself and I love it.

I wanted a quilt to throw over the sofa, to snuggle up in (and keep the toast crumbs off).  It started as a stack of coins quilt, but the separate stacks became one panel - a scrappy mix predominantly of blues, browns and greens, with a tiny bit of pink thrown in - with a linen border all round.

It is organic straight line quilted - more densely down the linen sides in tan thread, and then in grouped bands of beautiful variegated blue/green sulky 12 down the central panel to leave some space where the fabrics could speak for themselves.  My previous two quilts had been made without a walking foot and this was the first quilt I made using one - it was wonderful not having to heave and push the quilt through the sewing machine!

A binding didn't seem right so I ripped strips of the backing fabric (cotton sheeting), sewed them to the front, and then just pulled them right round to the back making a "non-binding binding" like this.  I caught down the edges at the back by machine sewing down the front edge.

In my head the quilt was called Sea and Sand, as that was its inspiration, but Moira said it reminded her of Hot Chocolate and Marshmallows which suits its snuggly nature.  

Stats:

Finished quilt measures: 70 x 50 inches

Binding: "No binding" binding

Quilted on my domestic sewing machine
Entered in: Throw Quilt, Home Machine Quilted Quilt

Thank you very much for visiting:-)