Update

Once again I ended up spending far too much time at work, when I could have been at home, playing with fabric and ignoring the housework.

At the start of May my sister and her family came to visist, and as the weather was so glorious, we travelled to Castleton:

This is Winnats Pass.

Of course, when you go out with two lively children into the hills, it's compulsory to try to climb up as high as you can.  I'm not as fit as I was, or even as I should be, so only went a short way, but had a lovely view of the pass itself:

That teeny tiny dot is a car making its way along.  There were also a number of (very) keen cyclists out and about, huffing and puffing their way along.

As far as sewing goes, there's not been a great deal going on.  I went on a course to learn about freemotion quilting, and this is my attempt:

To be perfectly honest, I had no idea what to do with it once completed - there's a couple of glaring errors in it, and I'm not too keen on the colour  - it seemed a shame to use some of my favourite fabrics to practice on - so I bound it and have given it to the 5 year old daughter of a colleague to use with her dolls.

I attended a workshop run by Ineke Berlyn, making a bag out of a pair of jeans:

I didn't have enough material to make the bag the correct size, so had to scale it down a bit, but it's still ENORMOUS.  It was designed to be big enough to put a sewing machine in to take to classes (though I'm not too sure that I trust my sewing skills to carry that much weight!!).

I managed to get to Malvern quilt show, and saw this:

I bought the kit to make this two years ago at the NEC - but have never got round to doing it.  Seeing it 'in the flesh' has given me a kick to get on with it now.  I still love the colours, but I'm not sure about the appliqué - this one has been needle turned, and more of a Bond-a-Web kind of person. 

It had been long arm quilted in the USA, and I know that there's no way that I will be able to manage anything similar: