Bizarre creatures - quilters

I have a very good friend over here who loves to go to charity shops and the equivalent of car boots and buys up old cotton dresses, blouses and shirts, bedding also.  She then takes it home, washes it, irons it and cuts it up.  She then spends quite a few evenings cutting up brown paper into squares and the result is this .........

A huge pile of brown paper squares

A huge pile of cotton squares

So when we have lots of paper and lots of beautiful cotton squares, what do we do with them?  We wrap the fabric around the paper and tack it on.

Part of the process

This is actually a wonderful part of the process because you come across so many different kinds of fabrics which have been dresses, shirts etc.  They are quite faded with the washing and pressing they have had in their lifetime and you can't help but wonder who was lucky enough to walk around in the amazing patterns.  Quite a few I recognize and realise that perhaps my mother-in-law had a blouse in the same fabric, or my mum has a dress in the same fabric.  It really is quite nostalgic and very satisfying.  What is even better is the fact that my friend has done the searching, the washing, the cutting and then realised she didn't want to do any more so I now have the task of trying to make a couple of quilts for my twin grandchildren.

The first 9-square of many

Squares tacked ready to sew together in piles of 50

A really nice part of the challenge is putting the colours together and blending them into quilts.  Of course the girls are very different and Millie is going to want pinks and lilacs and Jaime will go for the lellow (I know that should be yellow, but she makes it sound so much nicer) and greens.  I know I am going to have a lot of help with this when I go and stay with Clare and Kenny in a couple of weeks.  All this is hand stitched so I think I may be doing these in my sleep!!!  So much to do and I really wish I lived close to a friend of mine, Sharlene who would be able to quilt the end product for me with her special machine. So you see, quilters really are very strange, we buy fabric just to cut it up and stitch it together again.  Surely there has to be an easier way?

Bird church time again

Away from quilting now and as you can see, it's that time of year again when all the swallows are gathering before emigrating.  They fly in in their thousands and it really is an amazing sight. We are so lucky that they seem to do this within the area of our garden.  Every telephone line is absolutely full when it's time for them to leave.    When William was here, he saw all the birds on the wires and he called it "bird church" because he thought they were all sitting in their pews singing to God.  How cute is that?  It will always be bird church for us.