General Chat

I think I have mentioned that I am working towards finishing a patchwork bedspread I started in the seventies.Now, I can't pretend that I know how to quilt or even exactly what quilting entails but sometimes the whole process is referred to as quilting.

Anyway, I was looking at the Hobbycraft site and they offer a beginners essentials kit for quilters. It contains a rotary cutter and a quilters rule. Now, after many years of patchwork, I have no idea what these are. I have bought new metal templates because I can't find the original ones I had, these are used to cut up the old cornflake packets and to draw round on to the material which I cut up with my pair of scissors.

I am sure that, had I known these were essential a hundred square feet ago I would have acquired them.

I am not sure either lol. I do have a rotary cutter than my granddaughter has used. Looks better than scissors and a board with feet and inches on. Hope you get to finish that quilt x

I think I am being a bit specialized because I now have three pairs of scissors but I don't even think there were rotary cutters when I started.

A desk diary on my lap in front of the tele, metal template and a biro. Draw out the shapes on a pile of material and then cut it out and tack it round the old bits of cornflake packet.

It does make you wonder how our ancestors turned out wonderful things without all this specialised stuff :-D
For years I slept under an eiderdown made by my great aunts, ate from a table with a hand embroidered cloth, wore clothes made or knitted by family, ( as good if not better than shops)

I couldn't believe it when I saw a pom-pom template!! :-0

Surely you just cut two rough doughnut shapes out of a cereal packet - use a compass if you want them 'perfect', and get to work with the wool!

The problem with the template, (apart from being unnecessary) was that it was one size. At £3 a go, if you wanted different sized pom-poms, expense would rise rapidly.

French knitting was an old cotton reel with four brads in it and a thin knitting needle or a darning needle.

...... and now you buy a kit

Ah, but cotton reels are now plastic :-(

I still have a few wooden reels in my sewing box :-)

So have I - courtesy of my gran and ex's aunt.

I remember making tractors...............(or was it tanks?) out of wooden cotton reels...my mum worked in the rag trade, and would fetch home all sorts of different reels......

Matchstick and a rubber band, been there ,done that.

I had,and probably still have,a match gun that looked like an artillery gun and it could have your fingers off and your mates eye out all in one firing.

I wonder if you can still get them.

maggie .............

my wooden reels are my own, some brought over when we emigrated, as in "I might as well take that cotton". Others were bought over here, in the late 1960s and early 1970s