Go Set a Watchman

Well, what to say?  Having really enjoyed To Kill a Mockingbird, I was very nervous about reading this 'follow up'/'previous' novel. Lets just say To Kill a Mockingbird was a far superior book. I'm not entirely sure about why I thought it wasn't as good a book. It may have to be how the characters in the first book were amazing, and incredibly honourable... They loose that in this book.

This book sees Scout all grown up and living in New York. She returns to Maycoomb for a vacation and to see her family. Whilst there, Scout discovers some unpleasant truths about her family. I can't write anymore without revealing what happens. I think that this is a case of a book that shouldn't have been published - it spoils your appreciation of the previous book.

Quilt for Baby Annabelle

I used left over fabric for this quilt, and used the half square triangle technique. I decided fairly early on to try a different design, and as I had left over white squares from my brother's quilt, I decided to use these as a big feature, and put the colours around it. 

The back is made up of leftover fabrics that I had as I didn't have any single piece of fabric to fit the back. The bigger solid block of colour is actually made up of lots of little strips of the left over and trimmed backing from my last quilt.

This quilt is my first attempt at free hand quilting. I looked up several videos on line. I even had to change the foot on my sewing machine - scary! It took a little getting used to as you really have to move the quilt around. I went for a random design as I wasn't sure what to do. I'm glad that I tried it on a small quilt to start with. I ended up having to pull out metres of stitching when it went wrong, I sometimes forgot to make sure that the foot was down as you can't really see the difference, and that meant that it didn't always take. 

The binding is a mixture of the fabrics that are used in the quilt, so this quilt is really a bit of a fabric stash buster. Over all size : crib sized.