Not Another Hobbby!

             
          
No that isn't a bag I've made (it's the teacher's) but it's like one I've started to make. 

Oh yes, I've taken up quilting, well learning to quilt anyway. It's not exactly a new hobby as I've sewn for as long as I can remember, my Nanna & my Mam taught me when I was little so it's just another branch of that really. However it does need more stuff. Lots more stuff like cutting mats, rotary cutter, plastic rulers & shapes galore!

I found a really great quilting group at Beamish Museum and I joined before Christmas. I was very wary as sometimes you join these groups and the people are not always very welcoming. You feel a bit of an outsider but this group of women were lovely. I went along with a friend just before Christmas and we had a great time chatting, learning to cut fabric with a rotary cutter and making a nine patch square. We saw the great quilted bags most of the group had made to carry all their sewing things to the class. The photo above is of the one belonging to the teacher.

Oh yes we did a lot of eating too as it was their Christmas meeting so there was a lot of chatting & laughing. 

I was really looking forward to our next meeting which was yesterday and it was another successful day. We start at 10am break at about 12.30 for lunch & we all gather around a big table to chat then we work until 4pm. It's a great day with no interruptions to make meals, answer the phone or the door. Bliss!

Here's another lovely bright bag I liked. Pink's not my colour but the red & green really lifted it.

I'll let you know how mine turns out!

X

Joe The Quilter

Joe the Quilter's Cottage, Beamish

Quilting has long been a traditional craft in the North East of England with the famous Durham or North Country Quilting.

I have a Durham quilt which I inherited from my mother in law after she died. Sadly I know nothing about who made it or when as she never showed it to me. I'll do a post about it once I manage to take some decent photographs of it. It's so large I haven't found a way to take them.

Beamish Museum has a lot of quilts and recently a new cottage has been built or rather re created honouring Joe the Quilter, a famous quilter in the North who was murdered in 1826.

Joe the Quilter's cottage was in Warden near Hexham in Northumberland and the team from Beamish researched the site and recreated the cottage in Beamish. 

I had a half an hour to spare last week when we were doing our quilting at Beamish so dashed across to take a look at the cottage. Apologies for the quality of the photographs. I hadn't realised that we would be visiting the cottage so didn't take my camera. I must get to grips with the camera on my phone one of these days. 

Musicians playing outside the cottage. Note the little puppet the fiddler was keeping going while he played. Multi tasking!

The interior was bigger than I expected but just a single room for living in!

Behind that wattle & daub wall was where Joe kept his chickens! 

Wonder where Joe kept his quilting frame as it would have been pretty big.

There was a small sample of Durham quilting in the window area. Main problem was getting a photo with all the other people doing the same thing. Tourists!

Outside the cottage was a notice letting people know they could take part in an investigation into the murder!

We took a quick look into the church (another building taken down & built up in Beamish). There were some quilts and some boards showing activities relating to the cottage & quilting.

Small pieces of blue & white pottery were found when the archaeological dig was done and they were copied here by a local textile designer and artist.

She then designed a lovely cotton fabric using her water colour print.

Also in the church was a locally created new quilt. Couldn't get the whole thing into a single photo.

 I particularly like this square of the little town of Alnmouth.

This isn't a very comprehensive representation of what it's really like at the cottage as I only had about 30 minutes to see it. 

There's a lovely video telling the whole story of Joe the Quilter's cottage here.

Beamish - A Taste of the Past

Beamish Museum

I've been reading Joey's Blog about retro things. I have to say I love them!

This summer I took a trip down memory lane (to be truthful I took a few) and visited Beamish Open Air Museum which is very close to where we live. I'm ashamed to say I hadn't been there for over twenty years. I'm just not really a tourist in this country.

Well it has been such a fantastic summer that I went with my daughter & granddaughter in June & then went back a couple more times. My granddaughter Lauren is obsessed with this place and loves talking about "the olden days".

It's a living museum which reflects how people lived and worked in the Georgian, Edwardian and Victorian times in the North East of England. There's a town, a colliery, a pit village, a farm, a railway station and an old hall. So much to see that it's hard to get around in a single day. 

So we started our visit on the tram which runs from the entrance down into the town. There's a few different ones but we just get on the first one that arrives!

I think this red & cream tram was the one that was going out to California after the summer.

There are buses too and specially adapted accessible ones.

All the drivers and conductors are volunteers. In fact there are very few paid staff there.

Here we are down in the town and at the band stand. You might recognise this from the telly as some programmes have been filmed here. The one I remember was First of the Summer Wine which ran for a couple of seasons.

The little park area is a good place to picnic.



The sweet shop always has to be the first stop for Lauren. 

We try to get there early as the queues soon form!

At the back of the shop they make a lot of old fashioned sweets and Lauren loves to watch them. Her favourite choice is the raspberry drops. However she's not averse to a bit of cinder toffee! 

They have regular demonstrations of the sweet making. 

Here they are making the raspberry drops

 and there are plenty of free samples to be had!

After that she likes to go into the old houses. They have been rebuilt and the rooms have the original furniture.

They are quite posh, you can tell by the quality of the furniture and the carpets and would have been occupied by middle class folk like doctors, dentists, teachers etc. This one has a nursery!

This one has a bathroom with an inside loo. Really posh!

One of the houses is a dental surgery.  Yuck!

One of the days we were there a young man was playing the part of the dentist and telling us all about what his work involved. He explained how young ladies of wealthy families were brought to him to have all their teeth removed for their 21st birthdays. This meant they had lovely pearly white teeth so that their future husbands wouldn't have any expensive dental treatment to pay for. One young lad said "What if they didn't want their teeth out"? The dentist said "Tough, they do as they're told". The young lad's expression was a picture. 

Here's the display cabinet wiith sets of pearly white teeth and skulls!

My favourite is the Co-op shop, I love it. It brings back lots of memories of my sister and I doing the shopping for my Mam on Saturday mornings. 

Inside was exactly like this just bigger. All the stuff like butter, sugar, currants, sultanas etc were sold loose & weighed. 

 The Drapery Section

Here we are at Barclays Bank

I love the interior

And here's the Masonic Hall taken from Sunderland & completely rebuilt here.

Apologies for this photo, it's not too clear.

Here's the new bakery.

There wasn't much to buy but what there was tasted very nice!

Well I'll finish now. We still have the pit village, railway station & farm to visit but they can wait for another day!