Inkwenkwezi Game Reserve

In my last post, I meant to explain that we didn't have much time to sightsee in Cape Town, so we jammed as much as we could into one day.

Next stop on our trip, we visited Inkwenkwezi Game Reserve. It's approximately 45 mins from East London on the east coast of South Africa. It's a private game reserve and has been developed by purchasing farm land and returning it back to native vegetation. 

As we were there mid morning, we didn't have high expectations of seeing a lot of wildlife, but we were lucky enough to see everything but cheetahs and crested cranes. We were driven around in jeeps. It was a lot of fun and we had a really great guide.  If you ever visit South Africa and are in this area,  I highly recommend visiting this game reserve.

Ostriches "hiding" in reeds.

A giraffe playing peek a boo.

A pride of white lions.  We only saw the lionesses not the lion.

Impala

Wildebeest 

White Rhino

Travelling again.

Cape Town

BP and I are travelling together again. She has a three month summer break and this could be the last opportunity we have, travelling on an extended break, before she finishes university and goes out into the wide world. This time our first stop is Cape Town. It's our first time in South Africa, or even Africa. We have only been here a couple of days and thanks to a lack of sleep, haven't been doing bucket loads of sightseeing. 

We left Brisbane on January 1st, after being awake to see in the New Year. Not the most intelligent thing to do when you are facing 27 hours of travel. Consequently we both feel like crap on and off and fall asleep at the stupidest hours. 

You will be seeing lots of travel posts and very few sewing  related posts over the next couple of weeks. 

Flying into Cape Town

Lunch on the terrace looking at Table Mountain

We took a day tour on our first full day in Cape Town and tried to see as much as possible with the limited time we have in this beautiful part of the world. 

The brightly painted houses in the Malay quarter. 

Hout Bay

Amazing to see a penguin colony in the suburbs. 

A memorial to a Great Dane who helped soldiers in WWII

Cape Town

The canopy walk at Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens. 

An amazing space for outdoor summer concerts. Look at the backdrop, stunning. 

Morning fog yesterday, which cleared up during the morning to a sunny but slightly cool day. I am really really loving the lower humidity here, heaven. 

Travel

If you follow me on Instagram, you will know I was away……….again, in July and August. This post is so late, like six months late. I'm hopeless at keeping a diary, not much better at posting on this blog either as you can see, but at least I will have some reference and photos here. 2015 will be my year of getting back into blogging (she says). Let's just see if I can do it. 

I am very blessed to have some really good friends. One in particular, happens to own a house in south west France. This friend was going over there and asked if I would like to go with her. I didn't even have to think about it, I jumped at the chance.  So I spent the last week of July and the first half of August swanning around France.  2014 has well and truly turned into the year of travel for me.

If you are bored seeing photos of France turn away now.

The bridge at Avignon (Pont d'Avignon)

Puissalicon

The view from my room

Beautiful old architectural details

Massive range of wine in the supermarkets

Seafood at the market in Pezenas

Squid and chorizo, yumm

YUM, what more can I say!

Breakfast on the terrace

Beziers

Flower markets at Beziers

Meze

Pezenas

Gorgeous quilting and embroidery shop in Toulouse

Coffee shop in Toulouse

A house in Homps along the Canal du Midi

Canal du Midi

Where we spent quite a few evenings with a glass of wine, and watching the world go by.

Churn Dash

It's been a beautiful long weekend here. The weather has been perfect, not too hot, not too humid and lots of sunshine, and what did I do? I spent most of the weekend sewing.  You gotta do what you gotta do when your sewing mojo comes back. I did go out and enjoy the sunshine in between sewing stints.

I procrastinated for ages on what to do for the last border of the medallion quilt I have been working on since the beginning of the year. The orange peel blocks were finished and I don't think I showed a photo of them once they were added.

 My quilt holder upper isn't here so it's floor shots for now.

The original plan was for churn dash blocks. As usual, my unwillingness to commit kicked in and I spent ages trawling through books and the internet looking for alternate block ideas. I drove Shay insane, coming up with the perfect block then ditching the idea.  I even made a couple of churn dash blocks in the meantime to see whether they would work. Didn't think much of them at the time. Eventually it was just too hard, I needed to make 40 x 6inch blocks, and I already had 2 churn dash blocks, so I took the easy option and went with it.

40 blocks = 160 HST's that needed to be sewn, cut and trimmed. My Bloc Loc HST ruler came to the rescue, and if it wasn't for that ruler, I would have given up.

Twelve made, only 28 to go!

28 blocks finished.

I'm almost at the end now, I have 12 blocks left to sew.

These are the last 6, laid out on an old cutting board covered with batting,  I can take blocks to the sewing machine to sew, and not sew them in the wrong order. It's been very handy, my stuff up rate has been reduced considerably.

Meanwhile my trusty assistant found a nice place for a cat nap or two.

Aqua, red and orange

I ca't believe I have actually finished a quilt. It's not a big quilt, but it's a finish.  I wanted to make a quilt for the Mary Potter Hospice, after I saw that Shay had made a couple of quilts for this wonderful cause.

This quilt was originally intended to be a gift for someone, but after I had started sewing it together, I realised that it probably wasn't quite right for the intended recipient.  So the pieces languished in a box for over a year.  I wanted to make something quick for the hospice. As you all know I am the queen of procrastination,  and usually take years to finish anything, but I remembered I had the blocks half sewn and pulled them out.  These were cut from a layer cake and I can't remember for the life of me the name of the pattern, but it was a free one I found on the internet.  I can't remember the name of the fabric either, other than it was a Riley Blake line.

For the hospice, the quilt has to be no more than 48 inches square. As I already had these blocks cut and they were 9 inches finished, I went with a 45 inch square layout.

The excess blocks were used in the backing. The rest of the backing was from my stash too, which was an almost perfect match to the Riley Blake fabric.

 I wanted to have a scrappy binding, so I carefully unpicked the rest of the blocks that were left, and cut pieces for the binding strips. Unfortunately I didn't have enough, but I found a Bella solids jelly roll in aqua, hiding in the back of a drawer, which matched almost perfectly.

I quilted 1/4 inch either side of some of the seams, and also added some random lines to make sure it was quilted enough.  The hospice prefer the quilts to be lightly quilted so they stay soft.

Now I just need to wash and dry it so it's all nice and crinkly and send it on it's way.