Monday 8 October 2012

Bits and Pieces

We have been on a road trip, driving from Riga to SW France and back so I have a lot of catching up to do. Although most of our trip was on the main roads we did take a couple of detours to have a break from service station food!

Our route took us through Poland, Germany and France and here are some examples of the places we have been.

Check out the patterns on that German town house, do you think a quilter might live there? If not, they definitely should.

Naturally I took some sewing along with me. My day on the Travelling Pic Stitch Blog Hop is fast approaching so I needed to get in some English Paper Piecing practice. Basting is easy but I discovered that bumpy roads and careful sewing are not a good mix. Still it is nice after a long day on the road to have this little pile to show for it.

They should keep me busy for a few more days.

As a break from the stitching I also took along some buttons to have a go at making a necklace in the August issue of Beads and Beyond. The necklace design was based upon the eye of a peacock feather but I adapted it slightly as I had found some Mondrian-inspired buttons that I wanted to use.

The necklace is really simple to make as the buttons are threaded and then knotted onto the cord. This pink necklace was my first attempt and not bad even if I do say so myself :) I found when wearing it though that the buttons were rather too big as they tended to fall forward rather than lie flat. So I had another go with smaller buttons.

This is a much better size. I think too, because the large buttons are flat rather than with a lip like the black buttons above that makes it lie flatter too.

My daughter-in-law admired these buttons when I bought them, so with her birthday coming up next month I think they may just find themselves heading her way!

Now I am off to catch up on all the happenings in Blog land that I have missed :)

Linking up to TNT Thursday





12 comments:

  1. Lovely photographs - I hope you had a great trip!

    Your button necklaces are great fun - they make me want to go button shopping:-)

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  2. those are gorgeous necklaces, what fabulous buttons! Glad to hear you enjoyed the road trip, I hope you gave Warsaw a kiss for me!

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  3. Beautiful photos, Fiona. Still can't get my head round driving all that way though!! Great necklaces - very effective use of lovely buttons.

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    1. Thanks. The hardest part of the trip was making sure we had the right money in the right country! Thank goodness for card payments :)

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  4. Great projects to take with you, hope you had a great trip :o)

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  5. I really love the button necklaces - very pretty!

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  6. Looks like a great trip! I like the necklace too!

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  7. Sounds like you had a nice trip. The projects you took along really advanced. Pretty necklaces.

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  8. Wow!!! Sounds like a great road trip, even if you mainly stuck to the main roads. How do you manage to sew in the car? Apart from wonky stitching and stabbing myself with the needle, I wouldn't feel the best.

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  9. Welcome back! Looks like a great trip - some fab photos!!

    Nice to see you still managed to fit some sewing in amidst the sight seeing too!!

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  10. What a fab trip, sounds like you had a good time. Lovely necklaces too!

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  11. What fun necklaces, I've not seen this style before. I've made "infinity" ones before, but they take *loads* of buttons and are very chunky, I think I'll try one of these next! Looks like your road trip went well

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