Snowball Fight

I hopped out of bed this morning at 0630 needing some of the laundry to be done before we left the house. It also meant that I had some quiet time to try and catch up on my blog reading - I am way behind. And reply to emails that I wanted to reply to. I succeeded fairly well with the emails but with the blog reading its between me and Reader, and Reader is winning. I have a feeling three days in London will put paid to me ever catching up.

The rest of the day was taken up first with swimming lessons - where I found out that trying to crochet snowflakes and have a good old natter with my friend results in seven pointed snowflakes. Not the look I was going for at all. From there we went to dance, with a little side trip to Halfords to buy a spanner. My life, huh! The level of excitement is unbelievable!

Home to feed those who required feeding (all of us) and then get a chicken in the oven. Outside for some quality time with himself measuring multiple wires and running it through conduits to make cable. Please don't ask for further detail, sometimes I just do as asked to be helpful and the finer details go flying over me as I daydream.

So what do I have to show for myself then? Well, I did get a wee bit of sewing done last night. I have been contemplating what to do for the backing for my Modern Christmas Tablerunner for the swap. I have another snowflake completed.

It isn't my favourite. But I am happy enough with it. My favourite snowflake, so far, is the one I am working on right now. I do hope my partner likes decidedly wonky because this next one most certainly is that, but I love it none the less. Some people are good with patterns, others - like me - wing it and sometimes it works. Not perfectly but in its own wonky way. Could be why wonky appeals to me so much. It goes well with my lack of planning or proper design ethic.

I have been embroidering these snowflakes without the backing on the quilt. This is what the back of the snowflakes look like.

I do have the longer thread ends to sew in some and trim, but as you can see this is not something that you want exposed to the public eye once the runner is finished. So I have come up with a plan.

When I cut the Drunkard's Path blocks to make the front I had to cut twice as many as required. Once pieced I was left with all the outer parts of the square in white, and all the blue inner circles. So I have taken those bits and pieced them. The theory being, that if I trimmed everything well, cut the sashing to the same dimensions, etc, then the backing would be a bit of a mirror image of the front.

And all those blue circles would hide the messy back of the embroidery. That's the theory! It's going to take some careful basting to make it all match up though! I have decided to call the front of the runner 'Flurry' for the snowflakes, and the back can be 'Snowball Fight' for those big blue circles. Then my secret partner, if she happens to spill some gravy on one side, can flip it over and use the other. Not that she would ever spill gravy on this runner of course!!

Susan