All Quiet on the Western Front

Just checking in. It's got hot here again, 35ºC, if I get up early enough, it's bright and cool and I can get stuff done before the heat sets in, but during most of the day, it's stultifying.

I'm desperately keen to play with free-motion quilting, I've tried again with the plastic foot, and got it to work a little better, I'm bidding on another over at Ebay, I've bought the two books above, my favourite local haberdashery shop has started selling white cotton (yippee!)..... but I'm still waiting on the wadding I ordered from the UK to arrive. I do still have some polar fleece blanket, but the pale blue colour shows through the white cotton.

The Encyclopedia of Quilting and Patchwork Techniques arrived this morning, so perhaps I can get some ideas for piecing, and have a top finished by the time the wadding arrives. I'd like to have a go at making a bigger quilt, I'm really enjoying watching Genie's coming together over on her blog, but want to make a couple of smaller projects to get used to the free motion bit first.

I also found some replacement Olfa blades for sale on Ebay (US seller) for less than half the price I can get them from the UK, they arrived earlier this week. Wow! Much easier to cut with. Which sadly leads me to believe that I must have been sent a cutter with a duff blade by the shop I ordered the rotary cutter from :-( It looked like it had lint on it when it arrived (in new packaging) but I thought this might have been from the fabric I'd ordered at the same time, and it was the first time I'd seen a rotary cutter in real life, not a picture. Which is a bit naff, the fabric was also really badly cut, the curve of the cut was so bad I had to scrap 3" to straighten it up. Hopefully they were just having a bad day, it's only the second time I've ordered from them, the price of their wadding is good, and theoretically it should be quicker for things to arrive from the UK than the USA, Australia or Canada. It's just annoying because it's the sort of thing that you might query if you were in a shop, so it's like being taken advantage of because you are buying online.

And what about this jacket? This is from the book my Uncle Michael gave me when I was about 12 years old. It was the picture of the quilt on the front of the book that really got me interested in patchwork (even though it isn't featured as a project in the book!) I had plans to make both the jacket and the quilt at the time, but couldn't afford that amount of fabric - not on my pocket money! ;-)

In the end I started a smaller hexagon English patchwork project (unfinished) and made a zippered hooded jacket. What do you think of this log cabin jacket though? Is it unique fab and wearable, or too, hmm, I don't know... boxy/hippy/ gapey sleeved?