The Flower & The Cat

Still no stitchy picture, I'm afraid, but I AM stitching and still focusing on Tail Feathers Quilt. I have pulled apart block 1, because I'm happy to report my piecing has improved a lot since I started two years ago.

Last week this is what I saw on and behind my living room window. Pity about the dead earwig, but that's nature for you!




By now you are probably bored out of your mind with pictures of Kruimel, but here are a few more, just to show you what a nuisance he is when I'm trying to stitch:

Here he has squeezed himself between me and my stitching and the daylight lamp:

When that doesn't help, je starts fetching so I will throw his favourite toy for him: for the Dutch amongst you, a Beesie from AH:

And this is only a few seconds after I threw it away for him:

What a cutie, eh?

Lots of stash buying has been going on here. There is just so much around at the moment that is beautiful! The biggest buy was an order for ALL the Black Bird Designs quilt books. The result was lots of inspiration, the main one being Home Sweet Home. Can you imagine my thoughts going to my stash, thinking of what I could use to applique those wonderful blocks and even more wonderful border? All that whilst I'm trying to get some progress done on Tail Feathers Quilt.

I promise I will not show myself here again before I have a progress picture or two to share :o)

Thanks for all your lovely comments!

Not Much Progress...

Here I am, wondering why I am not making much progress on my projects :o)

Tail Feathers & Herbularius

Thanks for all your lovely comments, and welcome to my new follower.

Yesterday I thought I had better be good and pull out an UFO and work on it with the aim to get it finished in the near future :o)

This is Tail Feathers Quilt by Nathalie Lymer of Cinderberry Stitches. The very quilt which got me into patchwork, stitchery and applique exactly two years ago.

This is a snap of the quilt which I took this afternoon, after I had pieced rows of three blocks each. I discovered that I haven't actually finished the stitchery on the last block. I still have the tree to stitch and the borders to add to that mini-block, and also to piece all the little squares which come with each block.

Once that is done, I need to make 24 logcabin blocks, using these strips which come from two honeybuns.

I'm not sure whether to just stitch them up in random order, or whether to find some sort of order to place them in, so making four the same for instance, one for each side. Given that there are six of them on each side, there is no middle block to start with, and make two the same on each side. Doing random placement is not really my forte. I like things to be relatively symmetrical :o)

Once I had pulled this project out of my enormous pile of WIPs, Kruimel thought this was very amusing, and he started to lend me a paw.

No wonder I didn't manage to make any progress on this quilt for ages and ages! Although he has calmed down a lot over the past months (so much so that we got worried that there was something the matter with him) he is still very interested in this one, for some reason.

Once I heard from Ineke that two of our stitching friends are so kind to send us a lenght of their Eterna floss, I worked some more on Herbularius. This is the most time-consuming Chatelaine I have ever stitched. It is going very slowly, but what a lovely design this is. I'm looking forward to stitching part 3, which includes some plants and arches. But I still have quite a lot of work to do before I start part 3. These borders need to be filled in and there are golden scrolls with half cross stitches and beads to go around them before part 3 starts.

A big thank you to Abi and Joyce, for sending us some of their floss!


Kruimel has gone outside in the cat enclosure, so I had better get to work on my little birdies!

If you are all still here, thanks for having a look and reading what I'm up to at the moment.

Herbularius problem

As you saw in my previous post, Ineke very kindly sent me half of her skein of Eterna Silks mini twist 4220 which she got in her kit from ECC, so we could both use this thread in part 1 and 2. In ordered another skein from ECC with the plan to share this one with Ineke. A stitching friends plan with no problems we assumed, and we happily used the half skein of Eterna we both had. We thought Cindy would ship within some weeks because it was on backorder. But Cindy told us last week there are severe problems with the Eterna backorders: 'We might not ever get the Eterna'. I also ordered a skein from Thread Express, who hasn't shipped nor acknowledged my order, and hasn't answered to an email I sent to enquire about the Eterna.

So now we do hope some of our fellow Herbularius stitchers will be so kind to send a little part of their skein to us so we can both finish part 2 with the Eterna. We dare to ask because Martina writes 'approximate usage 0.55 skein' and therefore there will be plenty left over from a whole skein. We would be very happy with some 25 centimeter lengths. And do hope some kind stitchers will help us. We are, of course, very willing to refund the postage via PayPal.

PS: Martina has revealed today that the Eterna 4220 is only used in parts 1 and 2 of Herbularius. Hope this helps! :o)

Since it has been a little while that I showed you pictures of our furry friends, here are a few I took over the past days:

We got rid of the 'telescopic' scratching pole which kept going crooked, and bought our sweeties a scratching castle. As you can see, Kruimel and Luna love it!

Luna has taken up residence in the tower. She loves to have a snooze there.

Thankfully our very shy little girl Minty has also accepted this alternative as her scratching place. She doesn't like changes very much.

This is how I found Luna and Kruimel on our bed yesterday afternoon. In this picture you can see the enormous size difference between them.

Luna was being her adorable little self. Aren't they sweet when they are asleep.

As you noticed by my lack of posting updates, I haven't had much time to stitch over the past two weeks. There was lots of translation work and this took up most of my time.

We also re-landscaped our garden - well Marcel did mostly, with some advice from me ;o) - and it is now nearly ready. Marcel took the month of September off to do this big job. We usually spend three weeks in Ibiza at this time of year, but instead we stayed home and he spent his holidays working on this big project.

Once it is all neat and tidy and finished, I will show you pictures of how it looks now. Much tidier and bigger too, because we bought the piece of land adjoining our garden from our local council several years ago, and finally got a permit to move our fence 1m80 outward. Our garden grew by approx. 20 square metres! Totally worth the trouble and the money spent on erecting new fencing and landscaping the whole garden.

Hoping to show you some more stitchy pictures next time!