Burning the (scented) oil

Welcome to November's New to Me link party!

As you know the New to Me link party is our chance to celebrate our attempts to move out of that comfort zone and have a go at something new.

Until yesterday I had nothing New to Me to show you but, fortunately, I had booked places for myself and my son's girlfriend to go on a candle making workshop whilst the men in our lives attended the international rugby match up the road.

These lovely candles were the results of our labours!

The workshop was run by Kerry at Can to Candle and was a great experience from beginning to end.

We were provided with all of the materials to make our own hand poured scented candle. We selected a fragrance from the extensive collection shown above and mixed that with our melted soy wax before pouring it into the glass and leaving it on the windowsill to set.

Then, we set about creating our own bespoke fragrance oil.

We had all of these different fragrances to select from so it was a slow process! We were advised to daub the fragrances on a paper taper and choose no more than three in combination to create our blend. It was much harder than it sounds, but after much deliberation I eventually decided on a combination of Frangipane, Fig and Cedarwood for my fragrance oil. The blended oil has to sit for several days before being used to scent wax, so we purchased two of the starter kits that you can see in the bags above to make our own bespoke scented candles in the next week or so. Along the way we were given all sorts of insights into candle creation and use, so smoky candles and burned out middles will be a thing of the past in the Celtic Thistle household!

So, that is my New to Me for this month now it is your turn to link up anything that you have tried for the first time in November. It doesn't matter whether your attempt was successful or not, as we are all about keeping it real here so successes and failures are treated equally here!

As ever the link up will remain open until the end of the month, so if you have been thinking of trying something new but just haven't managed to get around to it here is the gentle nudge that you need :)

An InLinkz Link-up

Tucked Away Treehouse

Today is the day for the next reveal in the Endeavourers Quilt group, this quarter the theme was Improv. I must confess that my heart sank when I read the post announcing the theme. I have made Improv blocks in the past for Bee mates but I cannot honestly say that I enjoyed the process.

As usual I dithered over how to approach this challenge for (too many!) weeks and finally decided that I would take a slightly different approach to the theme from the Improv blocks that I had attempted before. Rather than stitching up wonky blocks for a wonky quilt I decided that I would try a new technique and then switch it up and see where it went.

Here is what I ended up with - I am calling it Tucked Away.

The piece, which is comprised of three 6" Chenille blocks, was inspired by this tree seen on a recent woodland walk.

Each block consists of 6 x 6.5" squares of fabric layered on top of each other and then stitched together with random lines of stitching.

 In the first block that I made, which I blogged about here, I stitched the wavy lines a bit too close together as the Chenille cutter wouldn't fit through so I had to resort to scissors in places.

So on the next attempt I left a larger gap between the stitched lines and had no trouble fitting the Chenille cutter in between them. I also switched up the order that the fabrics were used in between the blocks.

For the third block I opted to give the circular Chenille blade a go and so drew out a rough spiral to stitch around. I ended up ignoring the drawn outline though, as I had the block in the machine the wrong way round for the drawing so just had to wing it!

The blade guard on the circular cutter is much shorter than the regular cutter so it went round between the spiral lines without any problems.

Once the blocks were washed they looked like this.

In regular patchwork loose and frayed ends are not a good thing but in this type of quilting they are a positive bonus, it is quite a freeing mindset!

Now for the fun part, embellishing the blocks

with beads, you can just see them peeping out between the frayed edges in the bottom right and middle top,

with stuffed silk Suffolk puffs

and with a padded felt door and machine wrapped creeper cords!

Here is my Tucked Away Treehouse in its' natural setting :)

I am not 100% sure that this hanging fits the Improv theme but I really enjoyed making it and there was a fair bit of improvisation involved in creating the end result so, hopefully, it will pass muster!

Head on over to the Endeavourers blog to read more about the improvised aspects of this piece and find out how my fellow Endeavourers have risen to the Improv challenge.