Five and Dime - My First Finished Quilt for the Year

I’m so happy to have completed my first quilt for 2026.  It is a very simple quilt entitled “Five and Dime”,  as it is designed for five inch squares and ten inch squares.  As you can see, it is a bit breezy here today.

This quilt started out from some gifted strips of fabric.  I wanted to use them rather than just add them to the stash.  I found this simple pattern and then searched for a contrast fabric.  

The pink is left over wideback.  I chose the green, from an op shop, for the outer border, but as you can see, I didn’t end up adding it, as the quilt was already a good size.

I cut everything out and kitted it up to take to Scrub Stitchin’ last year, where I got all the pieces joined into pair and laid them out on the design wall…….and it has been sitting in a tub until last week.

I pieced the top together last Saturday, while joining in on Chooky’s Zoom session. Yes, two weekends in a row.  Happy dance.

On Thursday I prepped the backing and batting in readiness for a quilting friend’s visit on Friday.

It turns out that one of my quilting group friends has the same long arm set up as me and hasn’t been game to use it.  Therefore, she came over for the morning to get a bit of a lesson from the “expert”.  I say that very tongue in cheek, as I’m just learning.  YouTube is my friend.  Anyway, we got the quilt loaded, chose a quilting design and got it started.  She now feels much more confident to have a go with hers and has a big list of YouTube channels to watch.

Elly May played nicely.  This shows the quilting pattern well, but the colour of the fabric looks nothing like this photo.

This photo shows the true colour.  I used leftover backing fabric for the binding, which I attached by machine.  The backing fabric is some that has been lurking in a tote for many years.  It has the date 2006 on the selvedge.  I bought a heap of fabric on clearance at Spotlight not long after I started quilting. I paid $60 and came home with well over 60 metres of fabric.  It has come in handy on many projects over the years, and yes, there is still plenty of it left.

The quilt will be donated.

Anyway, here are the details of the quilt, for my information:

QUILT INFORMATION    

Pattern - Five and Dime - a free pattern by SeasonedHomemaker.com

Measurements - 71” high x 55” wide

Quilting Design - Daisy Panto Leah Day e2e

Batting - Cotton/Polyester

Backing - Fabric from stash

Thread - Glide - Pink Rose

Binding - Backing leftovers

Yep, it was a bit breezy.  Thanks Mick for your patience.

The Last Days of our Trip Home From Baradine

The posts of our most recent trip, at the beginning of September, have really dragged out. I promise this is the last of them. 

After our visit to the Nundle Woollen Mill we kept on our way.  Our route this time was via Muswellbrook and the Bylong Valley.  We haven’t travelled that way since all the heavy rains in 2022, which caused quite a bit of damage to the road.  Hopefully, it would be much better by now.

Of course there was lots of lovely scenery along the way.

It was a bit nerve wracking crossing this very narrow bridge with the van in tow.

The area around Muswellbrook was all lush horse studs when we travelled this way as kids and in our early years of marriage.  Now it is all huge coal mines.

Once you get past that area there are the stunning rocky hills.

Our destination for the day was the Bylong Sports Ground. We have stayed here once before and it is a lovely quiet and pretty place to stop.  There was only one other van there on that night.

This was the view from the caravan door.  You can’t get much better than that.

There is a pretty stone church just over the fence, so of course we went and had a little explore. Let’s go for a walk.

We were intrigued by the rustic bell tower.  Of course Mick had to try it out.  We didn’t even think to have a look through the windows of the church.

As the afternoon was getting a little chilly we lit a fire and had a relaxing time before tea.

There were so many jet streams criss crossing the sky as the sun set.

In the morning we were visited by a very friendly magpie.  You can just see it at the bottom of the photo. No swooping by this one.  We think it is very used to campers giving it tit bits.

I had another quick wander around the church and it surrounding cemetery in the fresh morning light.

Now, the road condition…….  It wasn’t too bad for the first part……

But once we moved from the Muswellbrook council area to the Midwestern Council area the road deteriorated  significantly.  Patches on patches on patches.  We took it nice and slow.

Then it was the climb up the windy road to leave the beautiful valley.

There were loads of wattles at the top.

There were more jet streams as we drove along.

Our final stop before getting home was the little town of Kandos.  This former cement industry town was looking pretty with the spring blossoms.

It was so nice having the luxury of extending our Baradine trip this time, but it was also nice to get back home.

I wonder where our next caravan trip will be?  Your guess is as good as mine at the moment, but I’m sure we will come up with something.

Other Craft Progress

Not only have I been spending some time at the sewing machine, I have been working on a couple of other projects as well.

I like to work on something while sitting outside when travelling with the caravan and on our way home from our latest trip to Baradine it was the Corner to Corner Blanket.

Since we returned home I have continued to plug away with it.  This is the most recent photo, but I can confirm that the last corner has now been completed.  It is time to add the borders, which should WILL be finished this month.  I had originally bought six balls of yarn, but realised I would need more, so bought a seventh.  In the end, I needed an eighth, but of course they have now sold out of the colourway I have been using.  An option was to use random eight ply, but this yarn is a tad thicker, so it wouldn’t work, particularly on that final corner.  Fortunately, there was a ball that had some similar tonings in some of its stripes, so I was able to use some of it.

Of course, I have started yet another project.  I seem to be an expert at that this year.  I have had this linen/cotton/acrylic yarn in my stash for a couple of years.  It was an op shop find.  This is a tension swatch to see how it knitted up. There should be enough for a simple summer sleeveless top……… fingers crossed.  The plan is to start at the bottom in the blue and then gradually add some stripes to transition to the cream.  A small start has been made.  I hope there is enough yarn…..  the pattern says there should be… I do hope so.  Wish me luck.  

A Tale of Two Socks

Knitting a pair of socks isn’t really that exciting, but this pair seem to have been around the world and back.

Before we headed off on our most recent trip I had planned to just take my slow stitching pouch to work on, but at the last minute, decided that I needed something a bit more portable.  Being winter, there seems to be a lot of socks being knitted and I decided to join the trend.

Being me, I decided to use what I have to hand and that includes a large collection of sock wool scraps, despite the fact that I had only ever knitted one pair of socks.  You see, back in 2019, we went to the local swap meet and a lady was destashing a lot of wool.  I bought some Bendigo yarn, a few skeins of sock wool, some of which has been used for scarves, and a large bag of scraps.  I seem to be drawn to scraps.

Anyway, I decided to knit some scrappy socks and pulled out what I thought would work together and took them away with us, together with my digital scales so that I could try to get the two socks the same, so I supposed the plan was for controlled scrappy.  This is just a small selection of the scraps.

I made a start while we were at the RSL Club in Trangie to watch the State of Origin Football.

The next day I made a little more progress while sitting in the sun at Byrock.

I continued to do a little each day as we travelled along and by the time we had reached Tambo I had turned the heel and was working on the foot.  My initial plan was to have uneven stripes, depending on the amount of wool I had, but one large scrap was actually self striping, so that made things easy.  It goes from the light blue near the top of the sock to the tealy green, below the peachy/ochre colour down near the heel. I found that the cup holder in my camp chair worked beautifully as a yarn bowl.

I had knitted up to the stage of working on the toe when I received the phone call that had me flying home.  A quick trip to Spotty had me buy an aeroplane safe thread cutter, but I was unsure if I would be allowed to take my knitting needles on the plane.  To my relief I was.  Therefore, while sitting at Gladstone Airport I transferred the first sock onto the DPN needles to free up my little circular needle to start on the second sock, as that would take much less brain power to work on.

As you can see, I didn’t make a great deal of progress, as this was taken on the train travelling from Sydney to Bathurst.  I suppose I was a bit too distracted to knit.

I finished off the toe of the first sock once I returned home.  

Back home, I finished the leg section of the second sock and then put them aside for a little while when it came to knitting the heel flap.  Once again, too much brain power needed at the time.

Gradually, I knitted a bit here and there and finally finished them off today.  They are far from perfect, but they will keep my tootsies nice and toasty.

By the way, do you like my cute little stitch marker?  I found a packet of four of them in a op shop last year for 50c.  They looked like they must have been a freebie on the front of a magazine.  Anyway, I had to use one when I knitted some socks.

Oh, and I still have this much leftover from the socks……and that was just the little bit I pulled out for them.  I have enough to make many pairs of scrappy socks……or maybe scrappy something else.  Time will tell.

Now to find something else to work on….I have plenty of options.