Retail Therapy

The retail therapy was good yesterday! Here's my haul:

Two very long, lovely stripey 100% wool scarves. I've hidden these away before Venetia sees them, she loves scarves, but she has too many already and these are going to be chopped up for patchwork sometime. I think scarves as a source of wool are often over looked - people generally talk about repurposing jumpers, sometimes skirts and blankets too. But you actually get quite a lot of workable fabric from a scarf because there are no seams etc to break it up, and they're usually very cheap and often lovely colours.

Two double, flat vintage sheets and two pillowcases, I think these will be destined for patchwork too.

Some pretty curtains. These have almost a linen feel to them, they're in really good condition and I think they'll make an excellent quilt back, with plenty enough for a quilt bag to match.

A red tartan wool blanket. I'll have to see how this one washes, it's slightly on the elderly looking side, no holes or stains just quite bobbly. But it's surprising what a 90 degree wash does to something like this - it can go 2 ways, and at only 50p I decided it was worth a try!

And this is my favourite find. It's a knitted, patchwork blanket. It had one tiny, little hole (mended very quickly last night before it went in the wash!) but otherwise was in great condition and was another bargain (it was in with the 'dog blankets' - often a good place to look for wool blankets I find!).

Someone obviously put a lot of work into making this.

And it had a slightly bizarre bonus too. Very strangely (or so it seems to me anyway) someone had very roughly handstitched an old chenille bed spread on the back.

The blanket really doesn't need any backing, least of all this particular chenille backing, so I unpicked it (very easily) and now the chenille part is sitting in another little collection of mine - of vintage chenille bedspreads!

I picked up a couple cheaply ages ago, and originally my thought had been that they would work as quilt backs. But the more I looked at them, the more I thought it would be interesting to try and combine the different colours and patterns and textures in patchwork. I've found several more since then and when I tried a search for 'chenille patchwork' on Pinterest to see if anyone else had done this, sure enough they have:

http://www.pinterest.com/pin/65654107040857810/

Sometimes it's so hard to have an original thought! But a lovely quilt all the same, and I think I have enough chenille to give something similar a go - when I get round to it! Turns out there's quite a lot of chenille patchwork out there - try here if you're interested, chenille patchwork search.

My only problem is that my basket for covers is no longer quite big enough!

Not too much of a problem now we seem to be leaving Summer behind though, since they're out in use so much.

Photo bombed by the cat!

Maria (and I!) made it through 3 full days of school, but last night she seemed to spend the whole night coughing and snuffling and woke up full of cold and a bit sorry for herself, so it was definitely time for a day at home. I think I can cope with that! We're off to do a bit of cooking together now. We're going to try out this very delicious looking bread for our lunch - I'll let you know how it goes:

From my Food Board on Pinterest - follow it back to find the recipe, only 2 ingredients for the dough!

Back tomorrow with a photo, Sally.