A Dragon and a Sunflower

For a long time now I've been wanting to share some of my Mum's quilts with you. She took up quilting when she retired and left us a beautiful collection of work. Many of her quilts were her own design and all of them were hand quilted. 

Most of the quilts are in her old house and I don't have photos of them so, for the time being, I'll show you just two. First of all, her dragon quilt.

As with all her quilts, this one was hand appliqued, machine pieced and then hand quilted. Often Mum would take her applique out and about with her to do when she and Bob went for picnics; she saved the quilting to do in her armchair while watching TV.

The dragon quilt was made for my son Jack when he was 17 and, for once, she added a label.

I was always trying to get her to sign her quilts like this but she didn't often bother.

Looking through her old computer files today, I found her original sketch for the dragon too - I don't know why some lines are missing..

Mum's quilting always reflected the theme of the quilt so this one included a fantasy castle which I'm hoping shows up in this picture.

The other quilt I want to show you today is Mum's sunflower quilt. This one is also labelled so we know that it was made for a competition run by Sunflower Fabrics in 2001, in which it won a prize.

This was probably the quilt that my stepfather Bob knew the best as it hung over the stairs at their house for nearly twenty years. It was the one he used to point out to people when telling them about Mum's quilts. Because of this, we had the sunflower quilt draped over Bob's coffin during his funeral, continuing the tradition we started when Mum died and her coffin was draped with her favourite quilt.

If you like this little sample, there are lots more quilts I could show you. There are quilts based on my children's drawings, lots of floral ones, inspired by Mum's garden and many, many more. I wonder if Jack could bring me the Christmas quilts to photograph ...

I'll leave you with a picture of my Mum. I miss her every day.

Ann Brown

Woven Stars

It may have taken me much longer than usual but I've managed to design another pattern. What's more, it's not a scarf this time.

These little Woven Stars are quickly knitted from scraps of yarn. They're made up of two identical triangles, one woven through the other and there are only five rows to knit for each triangle.

You can vary the size by using different weights of yarn. Most of my stars were knitted with DK weight yarn but I also tried a few in thin sock yarn.

I wanted to get this pattern finished as I thought it might be a useful resource for all the knitters making things to sell for charity. As my copyright notice says at the end of each pattern, I don't allow things made from my patterns to be sold for profit but I'm always happy when people use them to support a favourite charity. If you do this, Id love to hear about it.

I have to say, knitting small things in bright colours makes taking photos so much easier. I can never resist the urge to re-arrange them into pretty patterns.

In the absence of a Christmas tree to hang on, I plodded out into my wet and muddy garden to hang them on the ivy for a picture too.

The cats supervised the garden photo shoot, intrigued by what the human was doing now. We are a constant mystery to each other. 

I enjoyed knitting these little stars which is more than I can say for the other Christmas knitting I'm doing at the moment. I'm working on a Christmas version of my Woodland Wreath  - not a new design as I'm using existing patterns. I'd forgotten just how dull it was knitting all those leaves. So far, I've knitted two sets to represent the honeysuckle and the ivy in my garden.

The yellow embroidery is my attempt at the ivy flowers and took me ages to get right. I must have cut out hundreds of french knots before realising that less is more in this case. Next are the holly leaves. I've knitted those but not the berries to go with them. Then there's the mistletoe ... It will be nice to get on to something that isn't a leaf.

I hope that you're enjoying your Christmas knitting and that you have time to add in a woven star or two.