The Quilting Retreat!

 

I went on a quilting retreat on the weekend with the ladies I sew with in real life. We threw around the idea back in November and as always it takes awhile to organize but we packed up our machines and headed to the beautiful Lake Argyle on Saturday. This was the view just from our cabin. It was our 10th wedding anniversary on Saturday so I thought I better drag Daz and the girls along too but they went out on the boat for the day with friends while the ladies sewed!

 

We were doing a bargello runner. The strips had been cut a few weeks earlier. Here is my view for most of the weekend while inside.

 

Concentrating while cutting and unpicking the strips ready to sew back together.... Don't chat to me while I'm cutting! 

 

 

Here we all are on Sunday with our projects. Some ladies worked on cathedral windows or kaleidoscope blocks. A jelly roll race was held on Saturday night after a few wines.... I didn't do that one as I don't want to break open the only jelly roll I have! Wish I did now though cause they turned out pretty well.

 

 

Here is my friend Nardia and I with our finished table runners looking pretty pleased with ourselves on Sunday. You can't tell some of our seams don't match up from this distance!

 

And while we were sewing, Grace was catching brim. A productive weekend all around!

20 "Circles"...

 

I have finished sewing 20 "circles or 80 quarters to make 20 circles. I have 16 blocks cut to make 4 squares for the centre circle blocks. Does that make any sense??!

Flooded!

We have had a bit of excitement in our little town over the last few days, we got flooded! It started on Thursday night, we woke on Friday morning to the above view of our backyard. It's been like that before. We got ready for school but I packed the girls a towel each in their bags and shoes were in their bags too, we all went to school with bare feet!

And the rain just kept on coming! A river started flowing through school. Grace's classroom is in the building on the very right, you can just see it's pillar.

 

This is the river a little bit further down from the previous photo.

 

Students started leaving at noon on Friday, the girls and I left spot on closing time at 2.10. Daz stayed longer to assist with kids that weren't picked up. This is the school car park!

It was getting pretty bad here. Note you can't see the road in the background!

 

We drove through this! Grace was taking photos with the phone. Someone has put some amazing footage on YouTube here. We got home fine, our house was fine, it kept on raining, Daz got home at 3.30, we made a curry for dinner and went to sleep with rain on the room. It rained 163mm from Friday 9am to Saturday 9am. 

Sunday, today, it hasn't rained as much, 25mm so we have been out exploring. Because of all the rain they opened all the gates of the Diversion Dam so Lily Lagoon has been drained. This is were we put our boat in. It normally looks like this....

 

Here is the Dunham River flowing quite quickly!

 

We went out this morning to visit friends who live out of town, this is their driveway! So it has been a very wet few days, 389mm since Thursday night and raining again as I type this....

Back to School!

Back to school today for the girls. Grace is in year  6 and Milly is in year 4. Can you tell they are happy to go back??! It should be an awesome year for both of them.

Sewing Circles.

The lovely Sandi was so kind as to offer me several suggestions about what pattern to sew with the material that I had featured a few blog posts ago. I followed her links and somehow found myself on someone elses blog and then another blog and a pattern site, then another, I got lost in a maze! But I did come up with an idea for the "wonky Circle Quilt". So I cut out some squares, put a new blade in the rotary cutter, watched a "how to sew curves without pins" video on Youtube and pretty soon I had all these blocks.

I had in the back of my head that sewing curves was really hard but these were so easy! I think the trick is lots of starch. After laying all these blocks out I figures I want to do four large circles in the middle and then these ones around the outside.

These curves were cut freehand. I am happy with the curves and happy with the design. Now off to sew 30 more small quarters and 16 large ones.....