Back from Belstead

Had a great weekend with my sister Linda's patchwork group The Flying Geese, at Belstead - and my quilt is finished!!  (Excuse the rubbish photo)

Well, I say finished.  There's still some handquilting to do, and it's still held together with little plastic tag things until the quilting is finished (those little black dots that look like fleas in the picture).  BUT, it's put together, and the edges are done, and I've put it on my bed so that it makes me finish the quilting, and so there's one less bag on the floor of my sewing room.  And I will take a proper picture when it's completely finished, and ironed (I couldn't do it yet or the little black plastic fleas will melt).

Linda and I visited a great patchwork shop on the Saturday morning, East Coast Quilting in Walton, near Felixstowe - it's quite new apparently but already has a really good range which is apparently expanding all the time

They run workshops too - I'd like to do this one ...

Having spent a bit of time (and money) in there, we went to Bags of Handles which (as it says on the tin) sells handles for bags, as well as numerous other must-haves for bag making, patterns and books and also knitting yarn.  We eventually managed to drag ourselves away though and back to Belstead (didn't want to miss lunch!)

Here's a selection of some of the work produced over the weekend.  I haven't got photos of everything - some people had packed up before I got my camera out and some of the photos were less than successful, so apologies if I've missed anyone.  The first two are Linda's - a little bag/box for holding her fabric postcards, decorated with some of her hand-dyed buttons

And then some handstitching on scrim and silk velvet - a work in progress ...

And now I'm just going to show the photos in case I can't remember who they belong to!

Sorry it's short and sweet but I'm dashing off again.  Excuse any spelling mistakes - no time to check!