The &Stitches Picnic

I had a lovely Nice Day Out this weekend - stitching, and chatting about making and blogging and lots of other stuff at the &Stitches Picnic in Kensington Gardens.

The first picnic in July was cancelled because of bad weather (boo), and I sadly missed the second one as I wasn't feeling well (ugh) so I was extra pleased to make it along to this month's picnic (yay).

When I got to Paddington the Tube was delayed so I walked to (and then through) the park instead. This is never a hardship, especially when your route takes you past an old-fashioned carousel.

The &Stitches ladies would have been easy to spot even if I'd not met them before, as they were picnicking on some lovely handmade quilts!

The picnic was great fun. Sitting under a huge tree in a lovely park, doing some sewing, chatting to some lovely crafty ladies and eating tasty biscuits is an excellent way to spend a summer afternoon. It is great connecting with other bloggers through Twitter, etc, but there's nothing quite like being able to sit down and have a proper natter in person.

My knitted picnic blanket is still very much a work in progress so I picnicked on a snazzy beach towel instead :)

 

My sewing project for the afternoon was the final pattern from the trio of vintage floral transfers I started stitching back in June. I actually started these when I needed some sewing to take to the first (cancelled) &Stitches Picnic. The set is made up of a rose, a waterlily and my current project: some pansies. The pansies proved to be a perfect simple project to sit and work on while chatting.

Here's what everyone else was stitching...

Jo was working on a cute cross stitch project:

Julie was making a teeny patchwork quilt:

(She assured us that this was much easier than it looked but we didn't really believe her!)

And Carina was stitching up a fun new design that'll be coming to her embroidery pattern shop sometime soon:

After the picnic finished I went to the always awesome V&A for a cuppa and a wander round my favourite bit of the museum - the ceramics galleries - before the museum closed for the day.

 

Then I popped over the road to the Science Museum, which (rather wonderfully) is open until 7pm during the school holidays. I'd not been to the Science Museum in years, so another visit was long overdue. My last visit was just a short one way back in my teens when you had to pay to get in but could get in free for the last hour or so of the day... so some friends and I did just that after visiting an art nouveau exhibition at the V&A.

This visit wasn't much longer - I just had time to explore part of the Science and Art of Medicine gallery before the galleries started closing and it was time to head home - but it definitely whet my appetite for more science-y goodness. It will be hard to resist just automatically going to the V&A every time I'm in Kensington (like I normally do), but I will try :)