The kindness of strangers ...

It has been a little while since I told you about my All Heart Appeal to raise money for Cancer Research and I thought I would do an update.

First of all I want to thank each and every one of you kind hearted people out there who have donated a heart or hearts for my appeal. I really do appreciate it and love the thought you have all put into making each and every heart. Some have involved some interesting techniques that I would never of thought of. You are all so generous.

At the moment they are all laid out on my design wall and I can't help looking at them and reconfiguring them to try and get the balance right.

After much thought I decided that having an all white/cream background might not allow the hearts to shine through enough so I decided to branch out and ask for pink or red backgrounds.

This has helped greatly and the layout now seems more harmonious with some colour popping out. I am in the process of making a few more pink or red blocks to fit into the bottom left corner to balance it out.

I now have about 50 blocks and would like about 64 to complete the quilt. Hopefully it will be completed by the end of September.

Again, thank you so much for your generosity. Anyone else wanting to donate a block is very welcome - just e-mail me and I will send you my address via e-mail (please make sure you send me an e-mail address if a no-reply blogger).

Cheery Giant Spools

I am a bad blogger indeed and promise to post more pictures soon.

I seem to have about a zillion things to do before september and the start of various classes that I'm going to be teaching, plus some trading events and charity events. So what do I do??

Crack the whip and start ticking the long list of jobs to do??

No - instead I 'play' around with yet more scraps and do some more of my giant spools blocks - these were inspired by Jacqui from Tallgrass Prairie Quilts - I loved her selvedge spools - but I just don't have nice selvedges so I dug deep into my scraps for these.

They look so much better in person!!

This has been good therapy, this week we found out that my husband can have a bit of a reprieve from the endless radiotherapy sessions on his leg. He's by no means 'better', apparently the nerve tissue is so inflamed that the results can't be distinguished. For now though, he gets 6 months off from the endless driving, back and forth to Oxford and can hopefully start getting over the pain.

Thank you for all the wonderful heart blocks I've received recently - I promise to take pictures today and post some soon.

Enjoy the rest of your weekend.

Caroline xxxx