We have a long weekend here in South Australia, for the Queen's birthday, and it's lovely to have extra time off.  I really enjoy the first and second day of a long weekend, knowing there's more leisure time to come.  And I've been using all that time constructively.

DD Seonaid came to stay during the week, and we cut and sewed madly to produce a flannel and chenille quilt top.  She did all the sewing herself, except for a couple of the final seams, which I finished yesterday.  Now all I have to do is find a purple flannel back and get it quilted.  I'm thinking I might be able to find flannelette sheets to use as the backing, I have to go shopping and see what I can find.

Well done Seonaid! 
 I've been having a bit of trouble with RSI lately, so I've had to be careful of the way  I use my hands.  The cold weather doesn't help.  I can sew, but I have to iron the pieces a few at a time so my hands don't seize up :(

I am determined to get rid of all the precut 2.5" HSTs that have been around for ages.  I'm so sick of the same old fabrics, and some of them are so inaccurate; I'm used to the die-cut ones now, I love their accuracy as compared to my more slapdash cutting.

I want a little pieced border for my current scrap quilt, which needed 140 HSTs, so I laid out a heap of pairs and chained them all together. 

To make it easy to keep track of how many I'd made, I cut them apart in lots of 10.  Once I had 14 of these strings of triangles, I knew I had the right number for the border.

All the blocks are made, I hope to get them into one piece by the end of today.

It's freezing just lately, and my house is like an icebox.  The high ceilings make it hard to heat (it was lovely and cool in summer, which was welcome then, not so much now).  Instead of sitting in the loungeroom with a heater on at night, I just get into bed with my computer and work in comfort.  It's very green of me,  doesn't use up all that electricity and Dolly gets to be under the blankets with me, which is her favourite place to be.  Thank God for laptops is all I can say.

Incidentally, the heater that I use in my sewing room was bought by Mum when we were 7 years old. (You can just see it above the rotary cutter in one of the photos)  I even have the cardboard box it came in, because Mum carefully packed it away after each winter.  It's 46 years old, and still going strong.  What a change from electrical stuff made these days.  I hope I get many more years out of the dear old thing.