My first quilt finished!! :-)

I am very happy - I finally finished hand-stitching the binding onto my quilt this afternoon...so now I have completed my first quilt! It is far from flawless but I really love it, and feel quite proud of it as it is by far the largest and most complex sewing project I have undertaken to date. It was just starting to get dark when I finished it and rushed outside to take a few photos. Puss n Boots love it too, I'm sure they think I made it especially for them, they jump on it and settle down for a snooze whenever they spot it on my craft table and now they can lie on it without pins sticking out everywhere.

Trip to the Grampians

No craft updates this week as J and I escaped away to the Grampians National Park for a little getaway! We stayed in a little (very basic) cabin in Halls Gap, right near Lake Bellfield for 4 nights and had a lovely time. It was very cold and quite rainy, but we had fun exploring various walking trails, including the 'Balconies', the 'Grand Canyon', Clematis Falls, Turret Falls, Lakeview Loop, and Sundial Peak. A lot of the other famous walking trails and some roads easily accessible from Halls Gap have been washed out in the floods in January, but as we had already visited some of these areas on a trip in 2010, we just used it as an excuse to explore a few unfamiliar trails. We also drove around the nearby areas a bit, visiting Lake Wartook and Lake Fyans (we unsuccessfully went fishing for trout at Lake Fyans), Ararat and Stawell (on the Gold fields route). There was plenty of wildlife about in the Grampians in general and also around our cabins in the evenings; kangaroos, wallabies, emu, cockatoos and heaps of little parrots and rosellas. Also although winter is nearly here there were still a few pretty native flowers sprinkled in the bush on the various trails we walked along. It was a lovely holiday and a much needed chance to relax together without the usual accompanying V8 motorsport events!