What's on my ironing board

Most people work at a desk, not me - I do most things (apart from sitting at my sewing machine or somewhere knitting) at my ironing board. 

Very little actual ironing goes on!  So, what's on my ironing board at the moment:

From left to right:

I'm making a blouse for F from some spotty purple fabric using the Oliver and S music class blouse and skirt pattern.  I've made the skirt a couple of times before, but never the blouse - I'm making the size 10, have added a couple of inches to the length and intend to sew some shirring elastic around the sleeves on Fs request after her seeing that on a top I made for myself.

There's also a yarn label for Creative Bubble by Rico Design.   I had one ball of this to try making washing up tribbles from, it was successful so the yarn label is around as I went looking for some more. 

Next is my Geo Yoked Fair Isle Sweater by Di Gilpin.  I received the pattern and yarn for this from D for my birthday last year after seeing it (and trying it on) at Di Gilpin's stand at Yarndale.  It's in a bag as I'm having to pause as I have run out of the main colour - I don't need a lot more as it's mostly just the yoke to do, and Di has been very helpful in finding another ball for me, so hopefully it won't be in the bag for long.

In the red folder is the paperwork for the first assessment piece I submitted to City and Guilds and which I intend to work into a publishable pattern.  At the moment I'm rewriting the charts from excel into Stitchmastery before I get the pattern into shape and then look for a couple of test knitters. 

I'm off to the Swiss Yarn Festival tomorrow - I wonder if I'll find any goodies.

Knitting update

I'm pretty good at keeping my Ravelry project list up to date.  I was just looking back at it to see how many projects I've completed since before the blog hiatus - and there's one or two:

Thirty five, actually, and there's two completed items (a jumper and a cardigan) that aren't on here as I haven't taken a post blocking picture to put on Ravelry yet. 

Seven of these projects are all related to one larger project that I've finally finished - and that's the City & Guilds level 3 in knitwear design.  It's taken me a while - I was pretty slow at first, but managed to speed up and concentrate on it so that I was able to finish it within the designated C&G time frame. 

I've learnt a lot during the course - knitting techniques, art techniques, design process, knitting confidence - all sorts of things.  Four of the modules had knitted assessment pieces associated with them, so my plan now is to try to publish those four items (seat cushion, summer top, shawl and cardigan).  I'll start by self publishing through Ravelry, just to get a feel for the process and then go from there. 

I'm keen to do this, but am also keen to preserve knitting as a hobby, rather than getting too bogged down in deadlines and stress.

One crossed off.

I've decided to blog again as if there hasn't been a three year blog hiatus - hiatus, what hiatus, I don't know what you're talking about... moving swiftly on...

The beginning of 2019 has been jam full of finishing off some really large projects that have been on the go for longer than my blog hiatus (I thought we agreed we weren't going to mention that), and as I originally set up this blog in order to track my progress and keep me a little accountable to myself - here I am again!

The first project that I'm going to blog about that finally got finished this year is my ten year quilt project - wowsers, that was a long 10 years!

It had a number of stalls and also moved house a number of times (9 house moves in total and between 5 countries!), so I'm really pleased to finally be able to call it finished and have it on the bed.

Here it is being held up by my three trusty helpers.

I quilted it on my home machine using techniques from the book Walk: Mastering Machine Quilting With Your Walking Foot by Jacquie Gering.  I found this a really useful book, and although the quilt is huge (220cm  x  240cm ) I managed to do it on my machine.

I also decided to label my achievement by machine embroidering a bit of information about the quilt itself and some words to remember:

 

 "It is astonishing how long it takes to finish something you are not working on"

As you can see from the picture, the back drifted a bit when I was quilting, but a bit of extra fabric pieced in made it alright and has added to it's imperfect, scrappy nature.

Onwards - what's next for the finished pile?