Spring blossoms?

After I had finished my  flowers for One Flower Wednesday today, I went hunting for some spring blossoms to photograph with them... we have had some lovely warm days lately and the Magnolia tree is blooming (and smelling divine) but none of the fruit trees are putting on a show yet.

Oops - nosey sheep!!

I found one lonely blossom and one out of season plum!
What's happened to our beautiful Northland Blue Sky?? - a bit of a grey day today.

I've discovered lately how wonderful the Go! Baby is for cutting hexagon shapes (my quilting 'local' has one for hire)- I had a ball cutting more hexagons for my filler blocks, but wish I had come across this a year ago!! How lucky we are these days with wonderful things like Go! Babies and Glue pens :-)

 And this is what happens when you do some REAL gardening for a change - you find out where the old brown hen is laying her eggs!

 If you want to be inspired by more beautiful hexi-flowers, go to 'Journey of a Quilter' and click on the link on it---he he, Karen has some worms in her garden today.
Have a great week everyone, happy stitching, and thank you for visiting,

Cute things.

Just a quick post to share what I have been up to recently.
The stitchery is a CrabApple design, Trimming The Tree, and will become a cushion.

 I enjoyed doing this; it is so sweet!

The baubles are felt circles covered with the DMC thread.

 Our Round-Robin group is making a quilt for charity; We are each making a block from the Mother Goose Nursery quilt.  Here is my block - it still needs some sashing and stars but is nearly done.

More eyes done with the eyelet stitch on my machine (see here) - the pattern recommended using buttons for the eyes but I decided not to use those for a child's quilt.
Hope everyone's weekend went well - and you managed to squeeze a bit of stitching in somewhere,

A Floral Mystery

How time flies!!
We've all said that before, I know, but when I realised that this is my first post for August (and it's halfway through the month) I couldn't believe it!! Seeing as I use my blog as a bit of a diary, that means theres's now a pretty big gap in my life :-)
A couple of posts ago I hinted at busy times coming up with the arrival of our first calf... well it's been all go since then. All of a sudden we are nearly three quarters of the way through calving - boy, have we been busy, but thank goodness, everything has gone fairly smoothly and we have lots of healthy calves and cows.

Sewing time recently has been spent finishing a quilt I made this year -I was lucky to make the shop sample for this year's Country Yard Mystery Quilt.
The fabric was a gorgeous Robyn Pandolf range, 'Fancy Hill Farm'.

I put together the quilt top a while ago but then needed to franticly quilt it in readiness for the grand reveal.

I sweated over the quilting - after all it had to hang in the shop so needed to be of a reasonable standard - and those of you who know me, know that I am still a "beginner quilter"!!
So I did a bit of stippling, free motion style. Then I carefully used the darning foot to go around the appliquéd and embroidered flowers.
I got stuck next, as my fmq wasn't up to fancy stuff in other blocks, but finally decided to use the walking foot to fill more gaps.

Megan made a second version, using a Nancy Halverson range. Here is her's (below), quilted by Leeanne (see more of it here).

As always, amazing to see two versions of the same quilt in different fabrics.

I've finished ONE more block of my Life Is Beautiful quilt. This is the project I pick up in between other ones - there's no time pressure or obligations with this one!!

The appliquéd heart appears grey, but is actually blue. There seemed to be more light than darks in the variegated thread this time.

 And it's back to Beanies by the Fire weather again!!!  We aren't as affected by the Polar Blast as other parts of the country (see here and here) - although we thought we saw a little snow on the hills in the distance this morning (??) - but for us it's still been pretty cold and miserable.
Once the farm jobs are done it's nice to come inside and stitch by the fire!