In September we enjoyed a weeks holiday in Surfers Paradise, Queensland.

 The view from our self contained apartment showcased the river one side and the beach the other.
 We visited a wildlife park and did a tree top walk in the rainforest, both of which were lovely.

 Possibly the most exciting (and exhausting) was visiting Sea World, which was very busy but had

lots to see and do.  

The kids only wanted to go to this theme park.  They really wanted to see the new

polar bear cub. It took four visits to his enclosure and we finally struck him awake, creating havoc with a ball, bashing into the trees and having glorious destructive, only a toddler could fathom type fun. 

There was also plenty of time to relax on the beach, watch someone elses kids teach yours to body surf while they made friends, play beach cricket and dig holes in the sand.

Then the lovely week came to an end.  

There was some stitching (but far more reading) but its hard to see the progress on wool applique, trust me, it doesn't warrant a photo!

Happy quilting, Sue

March is Yellow

Yellow is the colour for March in the Rainbow Scrappy Challenge.  I haven't had a very productive month of yellow and we only have a few more days left of March!

I only made nine leaves.  I must say that I like yellow but struggled to find a sufficient number of scraps so I had to resort to cutting up some stash - not that it is a bad thing!  

Lisa pointed out to me that she has been adding the bottom row of background squares to her leaves as she goes.  So I spent a lot of time leader and ending a row of background squares to previously made leaves.

I did use rather a lot of yellow in this project (AFL Hawthorn football quilt for DS 8 yr old)....but it was brought especially....so didn't make a dent in the stash at all :(  Please excuse the wonky photo DS 6 yr old was more interested in watching cartoons then happy snaps!

In my reproduction stash I had two chrome yellows.  The April 2015 Quilt Mania magazine featured a reproduction mini quilt pattern (Framed Nine-Patch Doll Quilt by Ann Hermes) based on the antique pillow/cushion cases the author collects....it seemed sensible to start a new project at the time...in the effort to use more yellow!  

I am not sure if the instructions got lost in translation or I lost the plot (they include inches and centimeters in the pattern), but the measurements were a bit off and I struggled with this pattern.  Mum told me she didn't like my colour choice for the border...I thought brown was "safe" after following their colour choices of poison green, chrome yellow and hot pink...the border was suppose to be red!

We had in a mini beach holiday.  Warm enough to get sunburned during the day and cold enough to affect DH chest at night...nobody expect it to be 2C overnight on the coast!  Luckily my friend was able to loan us a heater to use in the caravan and we were toasty warm.
The kids are now on school holidays, so I am hoping to get lots of machine quilting done to finish off some of these quilt tops.
 Happy quilting, Sue.