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.

Surprise! It's me again and it's not three months later or 2015.

We have another finish at Chez Sunshine. 

Speaking of sunshine, we have had THE most amazing weather here. We have had days and days of beautiful sunshine, although some of the days and a lot of the nights have been freezing cold.  Down to 3 or 4 deg C at night. That's cold, really cold.  It has been good for my sewing productivity though. Cold enough for me to be quite happy to hand quilt with a quilt on my lap. None of that horrible humid, sweaty OMG I'm going to die from heat exhaustion stuff happening here at this time of year. Yay.

I digress, I was talking about a finish. I've finally finished the Red Letter Day quilt top. Unfortunately it's not exactly an award winning photo, but I've realised that if I wait for the perfect light etc to take a photo, the photo never happens. Then the blog post never happens either. So for the rest of this year, you get to see photos, good or bad, and I. will. be. blogging, even if it kills me!

 All 9 blocks completed. Like I said, not a great photo, but you get the idea.  If you follow me on Instagram you know I had a bit of a problem with the lack of grey background fabric. Fortunately with a bit of creative unpicking and re sewing, I had enough to finish the middle block. It is supposed to be the reverse of the rest of the blocks but as usual, I had to do my own thing, so I played around with the fabric in the middle block, and came up with something  a little different. I just noticed the middle block looks like it has measles or chicken pox. Great!  At least it doesn't (I hope) look like that in real life.  I used a variety of fabrics from lots of different lines. Not one piece of fabric was bought for this quilt, it all came from my stash. 

I'm pretty happy with this quilt top even though it hasn't exactly turned out how it was in my mind. Don't you hate that! I always have these visions of amazing quilts, but when I start putting it together, it's often not quite as awesome as I thought it would be.

Here's a close up of the centre block, with some AMH Innocent Crush.

Not my finest sewing skills, but I'm pretty happy with how it's come together.  Don't hold your breath for a complete finish on this one any time soon, as I have a lot of WIP's that I really want to finish first, including the one below.  Gee, hand quilting takes a looooong time, so I'm very slowly quilting Starflowers.

The hand quilting thread is a variegated perle 12 cotton. I love the subtle colours and they work really well with the colours in the blocks. I'm slowly perfecting, ha ha, or at least improving, my stitch length and the ability to quilt in a straight line. Who knew that could be so difficult on such a short distance.

A lot of socialising and enjoying the Noosa weather has been on the agenda too.

This steak was as good as it looks, from Little Humid, Noosaville

We spent a couple of hours at Hasting St in Noosa last week and had lunch in the Sheraton bar. I love the decor in this bar. Even though it was cold enough to be wearing boots, and a cardigan, it was nice to soak up the tropical ambience.

BP and I went to Lake Weyba in the late afternoon last week, just before sunset. How beautiful is this view?  I sometimes take this piece of paradise for granted, I need to get out and about more.

Best laid plans

Lots of sewing happening at Chez Sunshine until Tuesday when my machine started having issues with the tension.  After playing around, trying to fix it, with no positive results, it's now gone in to sewing machine hospital. It was well overdue for a service and it's going to take two weeks, sigh. So after finally having my mojo back after misplacing it for most of last year, I now have to put my sewing plans on the back burner. Fortunately I have a few hand stitching projects to work on in the meantime.

I've finished 10 of the 38 orange peel/petal blocks. Lucky, I really love making these and I can concentrate on making a few more over the next few weeks. I'm doing the needle turn appliqué method so they are not fast but it's satisfying making these.

9 of the 10 I've finished

The Starflowers top is finally finished, full photos to come later. I really need to think of a new name for it.   I've also made the backing, lucky me, that was the last thing I sewed before the sewing machine called in sick. I still have to get down on the floor and baste this baby, my favourite job, NOT.  I was thinking about sending it out to be quilted but I would really like to hand quilt it. I could get a start on it while my machine is in hospital, although I'm not sure how easy or pleasant hand quilting is going to be with temps in the 30's and high humidity, yuck.

I've also been working on the hexies, slowly, very slowly, I sewed two today!

 Up until the last couple of days, the weather has been really lovely and I've been walking a lot and taking Karma for a walk each day too.

 There's always something to see on our daily walks.

Stand up paddle boarders.

Life this week

I'm not sure what's happened to me but, in a very small voice so I don't scare it away , I'm still sewing and enjoying it. My mojo has not disappeared ..................................yet.
The flying geese have been made and are all attached.

Hanging geese

Flying geese border finished

I used the Bloc Loc ruler, it's brilliant. My geese were perfect.

Lots of trimmings and teeny tiny HST's left over, to be used at a later date.

I'm merrily appliqueing orange peels to blocks for the next border, and at this stage, aiming to make one a day. So far I've finished 5.  It's going to take awhile but I'm really enjoying it.

This was the first one, I'm getting better at centring them.

Last weekend, BP asked me if she could go through my stash to find some fabric so that I could make her a couple of cushions.  I let her touch my fabric, secretly hoping she didn't pick any of my favourites. I have a lot of favourites.  She's another one in my family that's not so keen on patchwork, so all that was required was a single piece of fabric that was big enough to make into two cushions. I even managed to find zips that matched. What is it with my family,  most of them don't like patchwork?  Is my work that bad?

Here they are, playing with my cushions.

This morning I asked BP to vacuum but instead of doing it herself, she put the robot vacuum cleaner on and didn't shut the door into my sewing room. She has been doing a jigsaw puzzle on the floor in there, yes, amazing, there was actually enough clear floor space for her to spread out and make a start on it.  Unfortunately I have spent the last half hour picking bits of jigsaw puzzle out of the vacuum cleaner and searching around the house for any other pieces I can find. She is out at the moment but when she comes home, it's not going to be pretty! Fortunately the jigsaw wasn't anywhere near finished, but I have a feeling, it's now going to go back in the box.

Finally, I've been trying to walk more often, I don't have any excuses when it comes to the views around here.

Wet weekend away

Some non quilting photos from my non quilting weekend on the Gold Coast.

The weather was wet. Surprise, surprise.
The view from our room. It was raining. My friends were staying in the green building.

The other direction, still raining.


The hotel pools. The weather was too cold, wet and windy for wimpy Queenslanders to swim.

The pool in the foreground has fish in it, you can swim with the fish, it's an awesome pool. It would have been great to go for a swim if we had normal summer weather instead of mutant weather. I think the kids that were in the pool must have come from somewhere very cold.

Despite the awful weather we had lots of fun meeting up with friends from Melbourne. They didn't mind the weather at all, it was just us locals whining about it.


Our room, at least that was very nice and it didn't matter if it rained or not.

I love the detail on this screen in our room.

Favourite Things Friday

 I love living a few minutes from this view.  It used to take me 20+ minutes to drive to it. Now it's just around the corner.

Linking with Mrs P at Quilting In My Pyjamas/

It was well and truly worth it

After all the hair pulling, crying, panic attacks, and swearing (lots and lots of swearing), I think it was well and truly worth the hours and hours and hours and hours of working on the house.  At the risk of boring you all witless and/or making you hate me because I'm lucky enough to live in paradise, I'm posting some photos that will be used for marketing.

I wasn't going to put the house on the market until next month but due to being pushed by the real estate agent to get it ready for sale, I pulled my finger out over the last couple of weeks, now it's done, and a couple of people have looked at the house already.  It's still not up on the internet but these are some of the photos that were taken by the photographer that will be used for advertising.

I'm so pleased with how it looks, and now I'm having second, third and fourth thoughts about selling, as it looks so beautiful, even if I do say so myself. It's so annoying that I didn't make the most of the house while I've been living here and now that I'm selling it someone else is going to benefit from all the work.  Typical, and I swore I'd never do that. HA!!!

Look at the beautiful blue sky, it's the middle of winter here and we have had the most fabulous weather, not today though, it's been cold and wet and horrible.

A similar view to the one on my blog header

You've seen these doors before but not the cushions on the chair.

From the studio looking across the pool to the house.

The pavilion

Living and dining areas.

The kitchen is not as huge as it looks in this photo.

Look at those floors!

The hammock and sofa on the verandah and there's Wonky Owls in the foreground, just!

Look at that fabulous view, I'm really going to miss it.

There are 30 photos all together that were taken, most are great, a couple I'm not loving, you can see a few more, but not all of them on flickr.

Oh and I would love it if you could tell me which photo from here or on flickr would be THE photo that should be the first one that will be seen on the internet. There are so many great photos and we are having a very difficult time trying to choose which one would be the best.