Windmills and Things

What a week.  No school for Little Bun as her school flooded.  The snow melted and the ditch at the back burst through. On Monday I'd agreed to take Mr Bun's classes so he could do a presentation to Headteachers. With a 7am phone call to say no school I had Little Bun running around cheering and I was frantically thinking what to do. Torn between a promise and wanting to look after my girlie on what was really my day off work. Grandma came to the rescue and took her to work with her. An office with my mum and her mate was much better than learning a range of new shiny words from 16-18 year olds. We juggled and changed plans until Thursday when the older children could go back into their mobile class in the playground. Little Bun found it really sad seeing her school wrecked.

Feeling exhausted and with lots of plans for making things in mind I was thrilled to see Friday on the horizon. A day off all to myself, not having to talk to anyone - yay. Not so though as two girlies went to bed poorly on Thursday night and woke with burning temperatures on Friday morning.

Plan one had been to see if I had enough of this delicious 1940's French fabric to make a summer tea dress from. I couldn't resist when I was having a look over at Donna's sumptious emporium. Plan two had been to make a few more shoppers to re-stock my etsy shop. Back-up plan became realise you can never ever make plans when you are a parent.

Other exciting Friday news that I can now share is that my man's project Blue Cat Initiative won the Big Society Award. It was released by No 10 yesterday with DC tweeting how much he likes the project. In fact he's so impressed that the press office at No 10 have been in touch to see if they can film the work that goes on. What better support can we ask for. Getting the accolades is fabulous, but the real point of it all is to ensure Blue Cat gets known for being a learning provider of excellence. Then getting the funding to help more disadvantaged teens and adults will be made easier.

Back to the sickness of the day. As much as I hate seeing my girls poorly I'm no nurse. I feed, give medicine, make sofa beds, say oh poor you and wipe the odd brow, but after that I'm done. I'm not a fusser. I took off to have a look at the new library books and start cutting a few squares for the Springtime Florals quilt I want to make. I reckoned this would be more do-able as every few minutes I got a "mummy, I want you" shout and had to keep dropping what I was doing.

This morning I got chopping. I've been braving the world of the rotary cutter which I'm slowly getting to grips with. Last week I hacked the end of my finger with it so I was in a mood with the darned thing for a while. I want to get more adventurous with my quilting patterns so I thought I'd try moving into the world of triangles. A rotary cutter would make this all a lot quicker. 

With triangles there's just so many patterns to choose from. Could be too many choices, but I'm feeling most drawn to the windmill shape, especially the pink red and white one.

Now making the triangles is the bit I've been itching to try out. I thought I'd better share it with you in case you don't know about this technique. In a nutshell it's a stitching and cutting method that saves you making lots of triangles and then trying to stitch them together. All you have to do is cut out squares. Actually there are two ways of doing this. The first one I got from a book and the second one from a friend of mine.

I cut 13cm squares, which with a rotary cutter had straight sides for the first time ever - hooray. To make two large matching triangles you need to lay the squares right sides together. Then simply mark a line from corner to corner.

Stitch down both sides 5mm from the line, don't cut the thread just lift the foot and turn to stitch from one side to the other. Once stitched cut along the line to make two sets of triangle shaped squares.

These are them before pressing and trimming. I made an extra square up so I could see what a windmill pattern would look like. All I need to do is sew the squares together which will be so much easier than the flags I made last time.

The other way of doing this and getting four triangle shapes is super easy too. First lay your squares right sides together again and then stitch all the way around the edges.

With your rotary cutter (I'm getting quite brave about using this thing now) cut across the square from corner to corner both ways to make four triangles.

Open them out and there you have more triangles made in super quick time. I really like this way of doing things. There'll definately be a few windmills being made this weekend.