A tale of two purples (and more)

It's obvious that not even 31 days of non-stop blogging is enough to get me into a regular blogging habit!!

It felt like there was a lot of  'other' life stuff catching up to do once August finished and here we are looking at the tail end of September start of well in to October already. 

Although it seems like little sewing has been done I have been chipping away at a few projects so some progress has been made. During September I made the Purple Split 9-patch blocks for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge. Once the month's colour of Purple was announced, I was intrigued to see if I could come up with enough fabrics to make a block. I don't use purple very often and wasn't really sure what I would find.

I did actually manage to find quite a few but it got tricky - as with all colours, who knew there were so many shades? I really didn't like how some of my purples looked next to some of the other ones (mauve vs plum - or whatever all the different shades are called!), so ended up making two blocks —

They are very different from each other. I also admit to purchasing a very small piece of purple to get the last 2 ½" square!!

Back in June, pastel was the chosen colour of the month. I left it out as I didn't know what to do - now that I've made two blocks for September I am back to nine blocks for nine months so that worked out quite well.

And now, for October, the RSC instruction was light or dark neutrals - along the lines of sashings or borders. I'm not ready for sashings or borders so when the urge and a colour family hits me, I'll make another block to add to my collection. (These blocks are 12" finished so I'm not quite ready to make them into a quilt.)

In other stitchy news, I've made a good start on the NZ 365 days kiwi cross stitch. I spent some time going through Mum's thread books and managed to find most of the threads that were needed.

As a reminder, this is the book I bought —

There's a little New Zealand flavoured picture to stitch for every day of the year. The book started with January, naturally, but because of where September was positioned on the chart it was quite easy to start there. When I first wrote this blogpost, this is what I had done —

(Ice-cream, pie, flax flower, Auckland Harbour Bridge and Wellington hills)

And this is where I'm up to now — 

I've not quite finished September so I need some serious stitching time if I'm going to make it within the year - I'm not sure that will happen but because several other friends are stitching it too, I'm hoping that I'll stay motivated to keep going!

I've done a bit of quilting on a baby quilt I'm trying to finish. There's a border of feathers - of course they show up much better on the back than the front! I spotted them in the early morning light one day and thought they looked quite cool —

One reason why I seem to take so long to write a blogpost is that it takes me forever to decide which are the best photos to share! And then another day goes by, and another day goes by.......

Biting the bullet, here's some from the other day when I had two/three of the kids for most of the day. It's been school holidays so Ganma duties were called for.

Lily and George saying hello to a newborn calf - they were very excited as it was one of a set of twins - one boy and one girl - perfect they thought, being twins themselves —

Picking up cousin Odie for a ride out the back (no, they didn't stay on the buggy like that while I was driving!) —

Ganma's idea of fun, climb the hill to look out over the back of the farm —

And back down to the buggy again - you can just see them running down that hill) —

Lily and George wanted to visit the pet calves they had this time last year - they've grown! —

More running, more hills —

And later on, after some food and a play, they 'helped' Gandad bring the new set of twins in —

It was a fun day!
One last picture. I thought Tammy cat looked really cute sleeping here in the kids' room —

'til next time,

happy stitching,

Raewyn