Sewing Class - continued

Well, look at these! Jasmine managed the first 7 lines of quilting on the machine (the horizontal lines, from the bottom of the sea upwards) - and then decided, like a lot of more experienced quilters, that her time would be more enjoyably spent in design and execution of the tops only and that she could contract out the quilting and binding to Auntie Janice. And as she told me, she is only five! So her quilt is now finished but she did spend quite some time deciding on the colour of the binding.

James did almost all of his quilting himself - all of the sea and most of the wiggly seaweed lines. He managed the sewing machine very well, learning to control the speed and to wiggle the fabric to make the straight stitch sew the curves of the seaweed. He chose the binding and I sewed that on with the machine. He is persevering in the hand sewing of the binding on the back of the quilt, so his is not quite finished yet. But he'll get there, I'm sure.

After a couple of hours in the sewing room yesterday afternoon they both decided that the day was beautiful and sunny and they hadn't explored the swing or the tree house or the fort since last time they were here and they had better go and check them out. I could hear where they were and continued on with the binding of their quilts. After a while I realised I hadn't heard much for about the last five minutes so went to investigate. They had been searching "the forest" (our patch of bush which stretches down a fairly steep slope on the side of our house paddock) for the fort and wandered too far down the slope and Jasmine couldn't find her way back up. I had to find a good way down and show her a good way back up, through the bracken and broken branches. A few months ago it would have been a lot harder for me to do than I found it to be yesterday. Yayy for weight loss!