Stained glass quilt top & some blog changes

This morning when I held this half-finished quilt top up to carry it across the room, I happened to pass by the window and was delighted by how the light shone through and made the tiny fabric pieces look like glassy boiled sweets. I pinned the quilt top to the curtain so that I could admire the effect from a distance. I love how the central medallion looks like a stained glass church window.

It seems pressing open the seams and lining up the points for the outer segments is more time-hungry than I'd anticipated and each quarter seems to take me a whole day to complete (perhaps because I allow myself to go on flights of fancy about church windows...). I have three outer segments done and just one to go.

Last week I was something of a night owl. My husband and I had been discussing at what time of day we are most productive and I said that unfortunately I felt for me this was the middle of the night. Serendipitously, only a few nights later I found myself awake in the early hours of the morning and so took it as an opportunity to do a few blog-maintenance things that I'd been meaning to do for the last year, firstly adding to the pages which you can see listed across the top of my blog, beneath the header bar. I created a gallery page of my dressmaking exploits, where you can click on any picture and be taken straight to the relevant post, as well as a quilt making gallery. Neither is complete, but they both hold a substantial chunk of my work. Although many of the things which I've made don't fall into the dress or quilt making categories, scrolling through all my blog posts made me realise how much I talk around the things which I make - there were so many posts of works in progress, discussions about technique or pattern drafting, book reviews and excitement over new fabric lines or patterns.

The other thing that I'd been meaning to do was split my list of blogs that I read into categories as I'm aware that most seamstresses tend to either quilt, dress-make or focus on more general sewing and that there are relatively few who spread themselves over all three, so it may be nicer to be able to click straight through to the types of blog you'd be interested in reading. So, I now have four new categories, which you can find in my sidebar if you scroll quite a way down and keep your eyes on the left (the fourth, is for blogs I like that aren't necessarily concerned with sewing...because occasionally it's good to think about other things too). As has happened to me before, in the process of updating this list, I deleted the entire thing first, so there are, as well as many old favourites which I was able to recall, plenty of new ones which have been added to that, especially in the quilty department where my sewing enthusiasm currently seems to lie. There are actually a great many more blogs than this in my Google Reader, but unfortunately to list them all may create a page of eye-bogglingly scary length. Each category only shows the five most recently updated blogs, but you can see all the ones on my lists by clicking on the tiny 'show all' buttons. Do go and take a look - there are some goodies in there!

If you have any recommendations of blogs you think I may love I'd love to hear of them.

Florence x