June Meeting

Our June meeting will be a making day towards the Quilters Guild Tombola at Festival of Quilts. The theme this year is HEARTS.
This can be anything with a heart on it it, using fabrics with printed hearts or heart shaped items.
Bring ideas, patterns, fabrics and trimmings plus your sewing kit.

March meeting

Our thanks to Debbie and Jill for a really good day on Monday. We were introduced to a design exercise devised by Jenni Dobson titled "Fifty Shades of Grey".

Armed with a selection of grey fabrics we each started with a rectangle of grey fabric and worked in groups of three or four.

Through four rounds of adding a shape and making a cut through all the fabrics we ended up creating these.

Four very different effects.

Our conclusions were that one needed to add larger shapes at the start; include multiple elements and more than one cut at some point.

Love your sewing machine

Happy Valentines Day ....... to your sewing machine!

Just a follow up to Monday, some links about cleaning your machine:

http://www.nobigdill.com/2012/06/friday-feet-clean-oil-your-sewing.html

http://www.makeit-loveit.com/2012/09/how-to-cleanoil-your-sewing-machine.html

http://amyscreativeside.com/2010/05/13/basics-tutorial-cleaning-a-sewing-machine/

Remember - clean before you oil.
Check in your instruction manual to find out if you need to oil.

Future meetings.

These are the plans for the next few months meetings. Members are free to choose to bring their own work to continue with or join an activity.

March:  A design workshop called  "50 shades" details of what to bring have been emailed out.

April:  Soy Wax technique workshop materials needed will be sent out in March.

May:  Exploring embellishments on our quilts.

Early warning that the August meeting will be on 18th August rather than the usual second Monday because of the FOQ.

February meeting

We had a great day yesterday. Working on our own projects and getting lots of tips and guidance from members on machine quilting. Thanks for the very generous sharing of ideas and techniques.

It's Christmas...........

Lots of nattering and stitching. 
A wonderful lunch ...........

 

and a recipe as promised............

 

 

Sweet and Salty crunchy nut bars.

Thanks to Nigella for this simple but wicked sweet treat.

200g milk chocolate
100g dark chocolate
125g unsalted butter
1 tablespoon golden syrup

250g salted peanuts
4 x 40g Crunchie bars - crumbled

Melt the chocolate, butter and syrup.
Add the peanuts and crunchie bar.
Mix well.
Press into a lined 9" square tin.
Chill in the fridge.
Cut into 16 pieces.

Some slight alterations:
I added an extra 50g of peanuts and 2 extra 40g Crunchie bars.
Tip - I bought a six pack of Crunchies and bashed them with a 
rolling pin in the packet.

Enjoy.

Merry Christmas...........

Tee shirt transfer, Fuse Ex and Bondaweb.........

Thanks to Jill we had an excellent day on Monday. Uncertain what I was going to try and do with the materials I was to bring along, I now know that my choices were limiting, the birds being too much of a contrast.

I tried using crayons to add colour, not very successful but I should have made more of the mushrooms!

Here are the pictures of what I did on Monday and a sample I tried later for making gift tags.

Layering paper photos, voile, newsprint and trains foils.

Isolating a smaller area gave a better image.

At home I then experimented further.