And the winner of the Tufted Tweets scraps is...

...Caroline from Tofflecraft. Can you send me an email with your snail mail address and then I can pop it into the post to you.

I went and looked at the blogs of everyone that commented and decided on Caroline because she is a student and it looks like she has just started out blogging/crafting. When I was a student I was flat broke (we couldn't even afford to put the central heating on in the winter) so I am hoping Caroline is suffering similarly (!) and that some Tufted Tweets will put a smile on her face. I also remember that when I was a student we had loads of free time to 'do research' so that means Caroline should be able to whip up a quilt with the scraps in no time at all ;-)

Thank you to everyone who came up with book recommendations for me. I have a lot of reading to do. The books raved about were:

• The Art of Racing in the Rain - Garth Stein
• Night -  Elie Weisel
• Affinity - Sarah Waters
• The Amazing Adventures of Cavalier and Clay - Michael Chabon
• The Book of Negroes/Someone Knows my Name - Lawrence Hill
• Girl with the Dragon Tattoo books
• The Hunger Games trilogy - Suzanne Collins
• Eat Pray Love 
• Talk Before Sleep - Elizabeth Berg
• The Queen's Fool - Philippa Gregory
• The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
• Rebecca - Daphne de Maurier
• To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee 
• The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenberger. 

The books that I would like to recommend to you are:

• Rowing Without Oars - Ula-Carin Lindquist - what do you do when you are a mother of four, Swedish news reader who finds out you are going to die very soon? I still think about this book now and it has been about five or six years since I read it. I've also had that 'sitting in the doctor's room being told something you don't want to be told' moment and immediately thinking you have let your children down because this is not how you had planned things. I have been more fortunate though. It is a very humbling book to read
• A Short History of Tractors in Ukranian - I loved this book. Equal measures of humour and poignancy and I just soooo think it has to be made into a film as the characters are so well developed
• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night - narrated by a 15 year old boy with a form of autism, it makes you question what 'normal' really means
• Cause Celeb -This was the debut novel of Helen Fielding who then went on to write the massive Bridget Jones' Diary. I actually think this was even better and is an ironic, sideways swipe at the (sometimes, oh OK, most of the time) shallow world of celebritism.

And there are lots of others books I've enjoyed too but I'm sure they are familiar to you: The Bookseller of Kabul, The Lovely Bones (better, in my opinion than the film), A Thousand Splendid Suns etc etc.

Anyway, this is supposed to be a blog about quilting so to end this post off and in keeping with my Tufted Tweets winner just starting out on her quilty road, I thought I would post an image of my first ever quilt made a gazillion years ago. All done by hand. Minimal quilting because I couldn't be bothered after all that hand piecing.

And check out how I did the binding...or didn't as the case may be:

I decided that 'binding' meant you over cut the backing, which you then folded over to the front. And no mitred corners for me either. If I could get closer in and show you the over-zealous top-stitching on the ends I would.

But it is still loved, still used and is chock full of happy memories, which to me, is what quilting is all about.