what a blogging small world!

Back in November I was pleased to find out that I had won a fellow bloggers give away. 

The occasion was to celebrate the 50th post that Mags (from Mags Creative Meanderings) had made, and when getting in touch with her we realised that we actually lived reasonably close to each other so I suggested it might be nice to meet up. With the run up to Christmas and with me hurting my back, and then the snow, we only managed to get together this last weekend.

We decided to meet at Farfield Mill as the Mill is hosting a Quilt Festival from now until April 7th. (more about this in a later post as I forgot to use my camera) It was the first time Mags had visited the Mill, and with the quilt festival running it gave us a common interest - however as we went around the exhibits chatting away we slowly realised that we had a lot more in common. We had actually met before .... in fact we had worked together in the past when we were both much younger!

It was just so strange, we had not recognised each other and I guess had not been looking for connections at all - apart from our crafting interests, but once we realised we had a common past things just fell into place.  Also, I guess we had both changed a little over the years :-) and at that time Mags hadn't shortened her name, and I use my middle name on my blog.  So over a pot of tea - and huge piece of cake - we chatted away about people we had both known and generally bought each other up to date about of lives.

Mags thinks she may have a photo of us at her leaving do when she moved to a new job away from the area - that will be interesting if she can find it!

I would also like to thanks Mags for her very generous give away gifts - it was just like Christmas opening the package and I now have a beautiful shawl and loads of lovely goodies to play with.

On the crafting front - I have now made all my blocks (all 36) for the scrappy round the world quilt. The tutorial I have been using is here and I also picked up some good tips from here. I have been laying the blocks out and moving them around to get the scrappy look!

 I now need to sew all the blocks together. I have the backing and the wadding ready, so it it may actually be finished quite soon now.

I've also finished my screen printed Tea Towel experiment - it has been a good learning curve, and I will now be moving on and starting a new project.

While I still had the screen available I printed an elephant onto one of the dip dyed bags I made earlier. I rather like this, I may make a few more as the screen has not been cleaned yet!

and my Amaryllis is now flowering! Beautiful.