It's a Machine World

Yesterday Janet and I went on a morning course not too far from here.  It was a birthday present to her, from me, as she has a big birthday (shhhhhhhhh - she'll be sixty) next week, and we both needed something to get us back in control of our sewing machines. The course was run by Laura Conolly Gillard who runs it at her Grange du Patchwork.

We had a great morning and learnt to clean and oil our machines as well as lots of things about feet (for the machines) and winding bobbins (an eye-opener for me) as well as meeting some lovely new people.

So today I got down to cleaning and oiling my New Home machine, that I nearly sold a couple of months ago.  It runs much sweeter now and I had a go at lots of the embroidery stitches and a little play with automatic buttonholes...



...and now I'm just going to do some plain sewing - I'm making a curtain for the Le Dorat shop/apartment.  It was a pair of short curtains, but I need floor length for this window, so I'm just going to pattern-match the material and make one long curtain.  It's a room on the third floor so the curtain might not actually be ever drawn across, but it will just sit there and look pretty.



I've never tried this kind of thing before, but it's not too hard, I don't think. This is the window where it will hang...



The room is nearly finished now, but this photo makes it look hardly started. I had to move everything to that end to paint the opposite wall, which is probably going to be white or  pale yellow, as every other wall is buttercup yellow, and it's getting a bit much...

Because I decided to do this today, the sun is shining and the birds are singing - typical!  But I should be able to show you some more photos of it soon, although they might well be on my other blog, so keep looking there as well as here :-)