I mentioned that I had nothing to do but sew this weekend, and, apart from a trip to Tesco on Friday after work, I’ve not ventured out.  I managed to get the following done though: 

FPPFTT blocks 5 and 6, and the posts written and scheduled

Tutorial for Rhonda’s FAL is 3/4 of the way done, hope to get finished tonight.

Now, I’ll give you fair warning of what I’m planning to do for my FAL post.  I’m scheduled to post on the 5th April, and will be posting pattern pieces and instructions for a clutch.  The pattern pieces will be available for free for 2 weeks, at which point they will be removed from my Google Docs, and the pattern will then be available in its entirety for sale on Craftsy.  I’ll let you know when my guest post comes up, and remind you again at the time, but don’t say I didn’t warn you ;o) 

I should also say Happy Mother’s Day to my mum, and any other mums in the UK and Ireland (and elsewhere in the world celebrating today) who are reading.  It always slightly baffles me that as a fairly non-religious country, our mothering Sunday is tied in to Easter (it’s the 4th Sunday in Lent, and yes, I actually had to Google that…) and in North America, who seem far more religious, their Hallmark holiday is in May.  Anywho, Mother’s Day it is, and here’s what I sent to my mum, my super secret project from earlier in the week (and really, a disappointing number of readers had completely failed to spot that that was 3 teapots in the post earlier in the week… ;o) ) 

I used the fabulous Kerry’s teapot pattern from issue 8 of Fat Quarterly magazine (I used my birthday money from my granny to buy not only the next year’s subscriptions, but also the first 8, so I got to enjoy all the paper piecing fabulousness).  Kerry also has a pattern on her blog for a tea cosy, along with instructions, but as this one had to fit a coffee pot as well as a tea pot, I had to wing it on my own for this one (although really, there’s only a certain number of ways one can draw a standard tea cosy!)  The tea cosy has a layer of woven interfacing on the outer side, holding a layer of insulated batting in place, and the lining is some muslin type fabric.  The tea pot/coffee pot stand has a layer of quilt batting under the tea pot piece, which has been echo quilted on, then a layer of the insulated batting, and backed with the same muslin.  I used Klona white for the solid, Half Moon Modern for the green dots and red paisley, Delighted for the yellow with red dots (coincidentally Jenna sent this in her bee block pack and I thought it looked familiar until I went rummaging in my fat quarter stash for fabrics for this and came across it!), Robert Kaufman’s Primatex Basics for the blue dots, Robert Kaufman’s On A Whim 2 for the orange birds and some random blue flowers from Mandors fat quarter section that has no selvedge on it…  The binding on the stand is a red Egyptian cotton solid I picked up at the quilt fair recently. 

Here’s some photos in situ from this morning, complete with captions from dad:

Mum tries on her new hat. She wonders if it will keep the sun off in India. 

Well maybe this is what it’s for, but look! it’s too short:

Of course it works much better with the plunger down!

Here’s one that came earlier – much earlier!  (I was about 8…)