Tour de force...

There has been an absence from this blog space for some time now and that's because we've been traveling for the past month, spending time in the UK, France, Brussels and Holland. I wouldn't have called it a holiday as these kinds of trips tend to be exhausting with all the sightseeing and jammed packed adventure that gets crammed into virtually every waking moment so as not to miss out one single thing. Coupled with the fact that for Australian's to visit these countries we have to travel to the other side of the world making regular visiting difficult and seeing as it's been a long time between our last trip and this one, we're probably not going to get back again for some time to come, so we were certainly making the most of it.
We've been back a week now and I'm still digesting most of it but there were many highlights and a few dramas that I still shake my head over and wonder how we got through it. One of the things I came to realise is how resilient our kids are and how well they coped with what was being thrown at us.
I spent much of the trip instagraming and sending daily updates on Facebook, so in order to write a recap here, I'll have to review those posts to refresh my memory. However, the clearest was being able to catch up with dear friends. I took three quilts which would become a welcome, a thank you and hello again gifts. (This was also my method of overloading my suitcase to make room for purchases!)
I have previously blogged about my Happy Trails quilt which was a welcome gift for baby E who is now 6 months old, and my low volume quilt was a thank you present to E & P for putting us up for 10 days in London. It was lovely to see it instantly put to use in E's lounge room and I'm thrilled it co-ordinated so well with her decor.
The third quilt was gifted to our dear friends who have been in the UK for two years now. They headed over to run a country pub. The process of getting the pub into shape nearly killed them and they eventually sold and are now based close to M's family and working in London. Luckily, L was between jobs and M took a few days off and they were able to spend time with us and act as tour guides whilst we were there.

Their quilt is my 'This way and That way' quilt. I haven't shared it before but I did post a snippet on instagram which went off for 'likes' and even had a request for a tutorial. (!) It's made from the triangles that are created when making pennants for bunting. There's always one (or two if fabric is doubled) at the beginning of the strip and one at the end and given that I was making bunting out of some of my most precious fabrics there was no way I was going to chuck them so they were filed into a ziplock for safe keeping. I realised that I had quite a few, so I set them into white vertical rectangles a'la Gwen Marston style. The block is actually known as a dog-tooth block. I managed three rows of dog-teeth, and laid them in alternate directions floating in the bottom third of the front.

The back is the red floral from Denyse Schmidt's Picnics & Fairgrounds range which I've used over and over....and never tire! Binding is a black and white stripe which I picked up from Fabric Shack for a song. (I've become quite partial to exploring their 'sale' page and seeing how much I'm not spending! You can get a lot of fabric for not much in that section!)

Needless to say, M & L loved their quilt and started to use it straight away. I hope they think of us whenever they do and when we'll next see them home because whilst it was the best thing ever to say hello again, saying goodbye is too, too hard.