A thank you, genealolgy and a quilt

Hello, how are you?  I would like to say a big thank you to Louise of Ramblings of a Roachling for sending me two books and the most beautiful card for my birthday.

I love the two books Louise selected for me. In this post Louise talks about reading "The Uninvited", a true story about a family living on a farm in Wales being visited by creatures/aliens not of this world.  I'm quite fascinated by the whole UFO thing and made a passing comment that I would like to read the book one day.  So Louise went to the trouble of tracking down a copy for me for which I'm most appreciative.  I read the book in one sitting and must say that parts of it were a little scary but compelling reading, for me anyway.  :)  The book about the interesting and at time weird exploits of some Brits is so much fun to read.  I love it when people can go out and do something difference and have a lot of fun.

And just how cute is this card?!!  You have the most beautiful cards in England.

 I've been kept very busy this past week continuing to delve into the intriguing world of genealogy.  I met two second cousins for the first time and it just happened to be the 60th birthday of one of them so I decided to have a little fun and bake her a cake.  Decorating this cake with silver ball things and butterflies was most interesting.  I ended up with silver balls all over the kitchen bench top and floor with very few on the cake and the butterflies wanted to fly away. 

I also made her a card from one of my sketches.  Very handy to have a stash of little sketches to make into cards.

I had a very nice visit with my new found cousins and was able to scan some old photos of family members, some of which I had never seen including my great grandmother Annie Ashby.  My granny is the baby and my great aunt standing.

About a month ago I discovered Annie's grave in an old part of a Melbourne cemetery posted about here.

Here is a photo of her grave, in the middle front of the photo without any markings.

It is a very special thing to have a photo of my great grandmother.

When I can tear myself away from my genealogy projects I have a quilt to complete.  Some months ago I put these squares together.

I found this cotton quilt on sale, it's a summer weight at a bargain price and had the bright idea to use this instead of the normal insert batting.

I need some advice from all the quilt making ladies out there.  The bought quilt is a Queen size and the squares I've sewn cover the top of a Queen size mattress so there is some extra fabric that needs to be joined to the edges to make wide enough.  Can I also have some suggestions as to what I could use for the backing fabric?  I was thinking maybe a quilting fabric but it would have to be joined down the centre to make it wide enough.  I'm also wondering what would be the best method of quilting the layers together? Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks so much for taking the time to read this long post.  I hope you are all having a wonderful day/evening.

Anne  xx

The benefits of elbow grease

Hello!  How is your weekend going so far?  We've had sunshine today, the perfect day to be up a ladder and using a little elbow grease.  Where live beautiful though it is, has some draw backs.  It is cold and very damp in winter and slime and green muck tends to grow on everything outside including the guttering.  I wanted this 13 year old guttering to look like new again.  This photo doesn't show just how grotty it really was.

 

 And here we are at the end of the day, no sunshine but lovely clean guttering and eradication of all spiders and webs.  My arms have had a very good workout.

 This week I've been fiddling with a pen and watercolour pencils to make a few cards for Father's Day, one for my lovely Dad and one for my hubby.  Dad received a card with this sketch on it.

 

This was inspired by a photo of a vase of flowers taken at Chateau de Villandry in France.

   

  The sketch below is on the card for hubby.  Luckily he never looks at my blog so he won't have seen this when I give it to him tomorrow for Father's Day.  This sketch was also inspired by a photo taken in France.  After visiting Monet's gardens, we had a lovely meal at hotel down the road.  The had beautiful gardens to explore and this little/big pot was tucked away in a corner, planted with Impatiens and flanked by a large pillar and huge chunk of stone.  Trying to create the patina that was on the walls is very hard with watercolours, I might try this same photo in oils one day.

 I prefer the first sketch.  The Impatien sketch was done quite quickly today in between elbow greasing and when hubby was out visiting his black and white camera club exhibition in the city.

One of the other things that has been taking up my time this week is genealogy.  I'm researching my Dad's Mum's family and certain members are proving to be quite elusive.  It is so much fun and I had a very good friend come over on Thursday to help me out which was wonderful as she has quite a bit of experience with genealogy.

Wishing all the wonderful Dads a wonderful Father's Day tomorrow.

Anne  xx