Playing with My Best Friend

Karen arrived yester-day morning and after a light breakfast and a 3-hour nap, she was ready to play. For weeks she's been telling me about a handbag she bought in a thrift shop that had several plastic windows on the outside on one side in which one could put photos. She had put photos of me at various ages and her plan was to swap me the photos for mini-quilts to decorate the bag with.

Yesterday afternoon we went into the studio with the bag and began to look for just the right materials for making her mini-quilts. We settled on a black-and-white base fabric in silk, fused that to a piece of Pellon innerfacing, and added a piece of batik fabric as a backing. Then we went through my box of sheers and glitters and pulled out a piece of black tulle with small gold dots on it as well as a piece of gold lame and a piece of holographic silver lame. We cut the lames into long narrow triangle "darts", strategically placed them here and there on the black-and-white background, and then carefully covered these over with the tulle. I took a smoke-clear nylon filament thread and sewed all the layers down, securing each of the shiny darts.

Next we went through my drawer of possible embellishments--films, ribbons, yarns, cording, and even some colourful raffia left over from a gift I had had wrapped in a shop a couple of years ago. (The woman in the store had pulled together a handful of various coloured raffia strings and when she had tied the knot on the top of the package, she cut off the excess and was about to throw them away. I asked her if I could have them, saying they would end up in a quilt some day. She reached into the waste basket and pulled out the ends of my package as well as the ends from several others.) Karen selected red, purple, fuschia, hot pink, and periwinkle blue raffia ribbons of various lengths and I couched these down on the top of the quilt.

Finally, we trimmed off the edges of the quilt to square it up and then cut out sections to match the sizes of the plastic pockets on the handbag. Once cut, I could then finish the edges of each mini-quilt with a simple black zig-zag stitch and Karen inserted them into the pockets. Voila!--one smart new handbag! What do you think?

Today Don played in a golf tournament at St. Fillans. It was the Crieff Probus Club golfers against the Comrie Probus Club golfers. Despite the fact that Don played pretty well today, the Crieff guys won but they all had a good time anyway.

Karen and I had a lazy morning and in the afternoon drove almost to Braco for lunch at the Rapha Centre Tea Room and a little bit of shopping in their deli. Before coming home, we stopped at the charity shop in Comrie to drop off two bags of my big old clothes and a few other items, including a table cloth I saw them put back into the case where we had bought it from 4 years ago! I picked up a nice jeans skirt and some clothes for the youngest grandchildren and Karen found a book.

We're having David Anderson over for dinner tonight while Jean is away in Spain for a couple of weeks. Don is in the kitchen now putting together our morrocan lamb tagine with apricots, prunes, raisins, and almonds. I'll make cous-cous to go with. Cooling on a rack on the kitchen counter is a Victoria Sponge (cake) made with Victoria plums on the bottom. We'll serve this as dessert with some warm fresh custard to pour over. Karen played sous chef and now is having a rest. One can't tax oneself too much when on holiday, you know.