Lynley quilts

I hate farmers' markets

2012-02-12T14:35:00.005+11:00

Going to the local farmers' markets really gives me the shits. I love the concept of course. Locally grown seasonal fruit and veg direct from the producers. Who can argue with that? I also enjoy eating it - the quality is definitely better - and cooking seasonally. It takes some of the decision-making anguish away (always the most tedious part of cooking).

But the actual experience of shopping at the damn place? Drives me bonkers. Crowded with people moving very slowly and dragging enormous roller shopping trolleys, or dogs, or kids, or mountain bikes. Or all four. Fossicking through marginal stone fruit to put in one of those grotty baskets so you can carefully squash it into your earth-friendly calico bag. None of the scales they use to weigh it lets you see what the weight is, and every price is a suspiciously round figure. Do they round up or down? Who would know.

I'm only going because my husband's not driving yet and he LOVES it. He chats about tomato growing techniques with elderly nonnas who probably learned it on Umbrian slopes under the fascists. He remembers when the avocado people have driven down, if the nectarine man has started his picking, which grower has the best cherries. I cannot even begin to imagine how he finds this stuff out.

So this morning he's patting the dogs and chatting to the neighbours and sipping his freshly squeezed watermelon juice ... I drop the bags, stand on the plums, fall over the dog leads and say terrible things like "two dollars EACH?" and "why are these lemons covered in brown spots?". Over twenty years we have developed an excellent balance of who does what and who should avoid certain activities, and now I remember why.

Trimming the flies

2012-02-08T21:20:00.004+11:00

I've finished my 100 scrappy shoo fly blocks, and trimmed them all up to a [roughly] equivalent size. This was made much easier by my excellent christmas present from my dad - a rotating cutting board! How cool is this? I'd wanted one for ages for exactly this type of trimming, and it's brilliant. Yay.

I've cut the setting quarter square triangles - ten different fabrics to make the zigzags. I'm just making it up as I go along, but I think I've got it right, and it should look sort of old and scrappy-ish. The maths are slightly doing my head in, but I'm used to that.

Looking forward to the weekend! This drop-off kids / work / pick-up kids / cook / clean / go to bed business really eats into your sewing time ... back to sad reality for me.

Not nearly enough sewing

2012-02-06T13:48:00.003+11:00

I can hear the siren call of the sewing room as I walk past it, with arms full of laundry, or filing, or stagger my way exhausted to bed ... I'm exaggerating terribly of course - it's just the last few days of holiday and there seem to be a million things to do and it's SO hard to get back up to speed! The boys are back at school tomorrow which everyone is really looking forward to. They went and saw the class lists this morning, and they have almost all their friends in the same classes with them, which is lovely.

The one-armed man is managing to beat me at table tennis, even with the injury. How humiliating! This is at our friends' house, but we're thinking this might be a very good idea for us. We can park the cars on the street .... Yesterday was a lovely warm day for a change so we went over for lunch and a swim. And what's good to do after a dip in the pool ... chasing chickens!!!! They were very docile little chooks and the kids completely fell in love.

But we're not getting any - one morning this week my husband opened the curtains downstairs and startled a fox on the pathway with a very dead chicken in its mouth. We haven't asked the neighbours, but the foxes rarely stop at one, so I think someone had a sad morning in the suburbs. And here's a good photo to post on the last day of the holidays!!!

Dyeing quietly

2012-02-03T18:42:00.002+11:00

I've been working my way through the white homespun I bought a while back - it's taking a dye really well. I find the fabric I buy wildly variable, even when it is labelled the same and costs the same from the same place. I haven't had any real failures - but some seem to take the colour with more intensity, and there is definitely a big difference when you go to sew them! But the variety is part of the fun I think.

When I folded my dyed fabric I realised that what I used most of are the saturated colours. I thought I might find a preference for yellow, or blue, but it seems that I have equivalent amounts of pale and muddy in every shade. So I'm trying to rebuild the dense colours with oodles of dye and letting it go down the drain (gasp!) rather than keeping on making paler colours. Sometimes I can't help myself though.

An oldie

2012-01-31T20:36:00.003+11:00

Unsurprisingly, I haven't been doing a lot of sewing since we got back from the beach! Between looking after the boys, and the house, and hospital visits, and making a cameo appearance at the office, my time has been well and truly taken up. The good news is that my husband had his surgery on Monday and they put him back together (with eleven pins in his arm, gulp).

And now he's back home; a bit sore but given everything he's gone through he's surprisingly alert and managing the pain well. We grumbled a bit about him being bumped off the surgery list on Sunday by some emergencies, but given that it was all done in the public system (i.e completely free) and he was looked after so well the whole time, we feel pretty happy with his treatment and very lucky about where we live.

I took this quilt over to NZ in the suitcase of quilts that I left with the whanau - I blogged about the piecing but never showed a picture of the finished product. So here it is! I followed the circles with big stitch and it's a very soft finish. So now it's sitting in Dad's cupboard rather than mine. Is this progress?

The wonderfully good and the awfully bad

2012-01-29T16:46:00.004+11:00

The good was a wonderful weekend at the beach - relaxed and fun! Lots of waves, not too hot (even a bit cloudy some days), friends coming down to join us and plenty of beer, bubbly and burning marshmallows! Lovely. Not too much high fashion or gorgeous bodies though, obviously.

The bad was my husband pitching down the stairs while he was unpacking the car and landing with his full weight on his arm. Broke his two forearm bones very comprehensively yesterday and is still in hospital waiting for surgery, he'll need pins and plates - hopefully they'll be able to do it tomorrow. Just one orthopaedic theatre open on the weekend apparently, and he's not urgent enough to make the cut! My poor wounded bear ... doesn't this picture just make you wince?

Snoozies

2012-01-19T10:07:00.004+11:00

Oh boy have we all got the summer snoozies today. It was a hot day yesterday, and a warm night last night, and the cockies woke us up before 7 with their ridiculous screeching ... right now the air is still and fresh and clear, and it's shaping up to be a scorcher. And it is so very very difficult to do anything but sit and read a book. The boys had watermelon for breakfast, and that's all they need.

A good-looking bird but the noise they make is unbelievable. This is on our bird-feeder, maybe we shouldn't encourage them...

Here is my Florabunda Jacobs Ladder - now re-named Tahitian Women after this picture - the one on the right (when Wikipedia stops protesting, which I support fully) where the girl is wearing the pink dress. If your computer monitor is anything like mine it won't be at all true to colour - this picture was in the Musee d'Orsay exhibition I saw twice at the NGA in 2010 and the colours are breathtakingly beautiful.

It's a clear warm yellow and perfect rose pink ... apparently you're meant to think about the nature of colonialism and change when you see this picture - I thought "pretty!! such pretty colours!!!" and it's been at the back of my mind ever since. So this quilt is now "Tahitian Women". I went with six-inch squares for a border in the end - pieced, but not too much. I'm hand quilting it in big stitch with perle thread because the Cheese on Toast was so much fun to do and I liked the result.

Design wall Monday

2012-01-17T10:13:00.005+11:00

Yes, I know it's Tuesday here, but if I put it up on Monday it's too early! And much as I love both blogging and quilting, I'm not getting up at 3 am to do them. Today on the design wall (floor) we have the latest large scrap quilt I have launched myself into - shoo fly blocks!!! I am completely loving Bonnie's strip scrap system. I just picked up my little bag of light 2 1/2" strips, my little bag of dark 2 1/2" strips and my companion angle ruler and off I go! The squares can be cut from the same strips as the triangle halves and they all go together beautifully. I have done 53 and I will do about 100 for this quilt.

I was inspired by the process of creating this lovely quilt, which was in turn inspired by an antique quilt in a book ... I thought two things "that's such a nice quilt" and "I have that book!". So I dug it up and went back through it - it is a treasure trove of pictures of old quilts. I found it cheap in a remaindered bookshop, and it has been worth every cent. My inspiration for my shoo fly quilt is this one.

Isn't that a terrible photo? Perhaps this is better. It's a nine patch and the one above is a churn dash, but the idea is the zig zag setting - I stared at that pink nine patch quilt for AGES trying to figure out how it was set. It doesn't go together on point in any direction. Then, finally, when I saw the churn dash in the book it clicked in that they used setting quarter-square triangles. Which opens up all sorts of possibilities! I think I'm going to set this shoo flies with a different fabric for each zig zag. More scrappy that way....

More than a little jealous

2012-01-15T14:16:00.004+11:00

We had a farewell bbq for friends last night who are off on posting - taking up her first head of mission position as Australia's high commissioner to another country. And I have to admit, I am more than a little bit jealous!! To have an adventure, going somewhere you've never been before, to do something you've never done before; and to be scared and excited and proud ... it's a feeling that I have not felt for ages.

It was like that we all finished secondary school and left our small town to go to university. And then again at the end of university as most people left to travel or work or study overseas. (New Zealanders leave New Zealand in their 20s in mass hordes. Mostly they come back again.) It's an unmixed excitement - not that we didn't worry about the hurdles, or obsess on the logistics, because we did - but there was a sense of taking on the unknown and of endless possibilities! Anything might happen.

It's not the same excitement that you get when you buy a house, or get married, or pregnant. Sure, there is pleasure, and congratulations, and friendship, but it's not unmixed. Those milestones add weight to your life, as well as possibilities. First postings are exciting, but not so much subsequently, as your friends take themselves away for years! Take away tiny babies and bring back walking talking kids, or (gasp) teenagers.

But there is something about wearing that ambassador label, for some reason, that sparks it up again. The first time we waved one off was in 2005 and it took me a while to identify why it felt like being in my early 20s again ... and why I felt so envious when I know full well that a career in foreign affairs would see me hurl myself off the R. G. Casey Building within about a week. I was hankering after the possibilities.

I'm sure having had the most boring and depressing 2011 in the history of the world isn't helping either ... I was interested to read Posie's post on re-uniting and reconnecting at this time of year. Public service postings don't have quite the regularity of Army, but this is still a popular time of year to move to minimise disruption to schooling - and we will be reconnecting with friends moving back this week. Which will be lovely, and remind me why I like living here, and remind me that friends are friends and years apart seem like days when we're back together.

Florabunda blocks

2012-01-12T13:11:00.005+11:00

I've finished all my pink and yellow Jacob's Ladder blocks - I shouldn't keep calling it Florabunda because it has no florals, but I can't think of another name yet. I laid them out on the bed for placement then sewed them together. I am very pleased with how they turned out - I was a bit worried because I had selected the scraps based on colour rather than value. So the pinks were sometimes light and sometimes dark and the diagonals were receding and advancing all over the place! I've decided to call this "optical interest".

The cats weren't super impressed that I was putting the blocks on top of them, although I did leave them airholes.

And my third "helper" was number one (idiot) son ... still in his pyjamas at lunchtime! We are having a lovely holiday so far. I have a list of leaving-the-house activities, things I know they would enjoy, but it's hard to get excited about going anywhere when they are incredibly content just to hang at home. Yesterday they wanted to fly a kite, and today they're going to make a tent out of sheets in the back yard ... it's just too wholesome for words. If it carries on like this they'll stop swearing and thumping each other soon (no chance, I'm dreaming....) Although I've stopped counting Monopoly as a wholesome activity when I realised they were playing it as a contact sport. In my day when you landed on Free Parking you just got some money...

I was a strange child

2012-01-09T20:55:00.004+11:00

Here's another treasure that was unearthed at Dad's. A doily set that I embroidered sometime between my tenth and twelth birthdays. What kind of kiddy does this - especially in the early 1980s? Even then these things no longer existed in everyday use; or certainly not in anyone under the age of 70. I think my grandma kept her hairbrushes on a set on top of her dresser but nobody else did.

There's a main one, and two smaller ones, for scent bottles perhaps. A hairbrush, a comb, and a hand mirror. On the top of the chest of drawers. What universe is this that has such strange things in it?

I didn't do such a bad job considering my age ... and my chronic lack of attention to detail in any aspect of hand work. Sometimes my mother would made me unpick things, but I think I was ignoring her, even that early (ignoring didn't really kick in until I was about 14 :). My grandma did wonderful crochet, so I'm fairly sure she did the edging. I never learnt to crochet, which is a bit disappointing in hindsight! I might put it on the list of things to teach myself; along with drawing and self-control.

Back with my family [sewing machine]

2012-01-07T14:12:00.005+11:00

It is lovely to be home again - even just after an excellent six day adventure - back in the sunshine! and heat! I came home Thursday evening and had to work on Friday - but that was OK because I have the next three weeks off to look after the boys and hang out at home. My husband has already done ALL the cool things to do with kids in Canberra, so they could be in for a very boring time with boring mum. My aim is to get them so bored that they are begging to go back to school! Optimistic?

I leapt straight back into my Florabunda ... well, it's not actually Florabunda, but based on the same principle of Bonnie's cheddar and floral Jacob's Ladder. I'm using pink instead of yellow, and mostly yellow prints in place of florals. I have pre-cut the strips for each block and then I use my nifty little angle ruler to cut the triangles as I go. It's very more-ish - you can't just stop at one - so I've spent most of today happily back in the sewing room.

And look what else I'm doing - spinning my seams!!! I never do things properly, but for some reason I gave this a go, and it's very easy and makes the seams lie beautifully flat. I really should listen when people say things are a good idea, because quite often they are right.

I also nipped out to Spotlight and bought another dozen metres of white fabric for dyeing. Number two son came too - unexpectedly! I usually can't pay them to go to Spotlight - but he bought some beads and has made a bracelet, it's very cute. He's very cute too. For some reason I'm still on NZ time and have woken up at 6 am for the last two mornings. It gives you so much more day!

Travelling

2012-01-05T12:38:00.002+11:00

I'm in Auckland airport at the moment waiting for my flight. Good wireless and a nice coffee... but I'd rather be on the plane and moving!! Then another two and a half hours in Sydney waiting for the little plane down to Canberra. Despite offloading all my quilts in Tauranga I managed to be five kilos over my 32 kg weight limit! So I gave Dad a pile of letters and papers to take back with him ... they will have to wait till next time.

Something old and something new

2012-01-01T11:41:00.003+11:00

I'm over in New Zealand visiting my Dad for a few days - after the travelling to PNG and back was so easy I felt healthy enough to take a short trip over the Tasman and catch up with the family. The boys were completely outraged that I wasn't taking them ... but from all accounts they are having a lovely time at home doing boy things (lots of lamb chops and computer games I think. And ten pin bowling).

This is the something new of my title - my Christmas present of a set of Aurifil threads. I sent my husband the link ages ago and suggested it would make a good present - he dutifully ordered it but was a bit bemused ..."I thought it would be something more exciting than just threads". Poor man doesn't get it it all!!! Beautiful Aurifil threads in all these colours - how could anything be more exciting? (I've already started using the pink).

And a new ruler. I've been using this on the new scrap quilt I shouldn't have started before I finished Roll Roll Cotton Boll ... but I did, and it's fun.

There have been lots of somethings old too - Dad helpfully dragged out at least five boxes of my stuff from the top of the cupboard in the spare room .... and gently suggested I sort and/or throwaway. Most of it is old school notes and uni notes - it's scary how much stuff I have completely forgotten - and I'm chucking all that out. The rest are old letters from friends and family - the ancient age of post! And some truly excruciating teenage diaries and some even more mindblowingly appalling teenage poetry. If I ever get brave [drunk] enough I will put some examples here for your literary pleasure.

Dad also has a couple of suitcases that used to live under his mother's bed - old linens, laces and clothes. My aunt has labelled some bits but some are complete mysteries, and I don't know enough to tell Victorian handmade from sixties machine nylon. I think both are in there :)

This is, according to my aunt's label, "bodice from great-grandmother's going away dress - 1850?". It is a plaid silk in shades of brown and gold with tan-coloured fringing. Hand stitched and boned to fit a tiny frame!! Amazing.

A lovely quiet christmas

2011-12-27T16:43:00.002+11:00

We had a lovely Christmas - just the four of us, eating the food we like to eat and playing with our wonderful presents. Family rang or skyped, so we didn't feel entirely alone, but other than that it was just us at our most peaceful and relaxed! It doesn't happen very often, but sometimes we can chill successfully. We made gingerbread cookies, but ate them all before they could be iced.

It helped that the boys got a Wii, my husband got an ipad and I got some quilting rulers! Yes, I did sneak off and sew on Christmas Day. In this house every day is a quilting day, and my husband cooked all the meals (to the extent that prawns and salad require cooking) so I wasn't needed. The boys and I painted our menu on butchers paper and put it on the fridge. I'm not sure why.

Summer spread

2011-12-23T15:35:00.003+11:00

No, that's not a description of my waistline, although if this socialising doesn't ease up soon it could well be. I decided to make the Not Quite Lego into a summer spread - no batting and minimal quilting. I've wanted to do that for ages, but it really needed a top I didn't care too much about, in case it didn't work out ... and this is it!

Not a very good photo because of the unwilling helpers. In fairness, they don't quite have the reach to hold a quilt up (yet! it's the only reason I keep feeding them, so they can be used for quilt display). The next photo might be a bit more useful in showing the spread as it was intended to be used. There are actually two boys in there somewhere.

I was told about this wonderful site a week or two ago - it is baking heaven!!! The boys and I had a wonderful trawl around and ordered a very restrained selection of candy cane sprinkles, christmas tree sprinkles and gold dust. They arrived in a couple of days and are absolutely awesome!!! We used all three on this chocolate slice. The gold dust was a bit disappointing, it might need a white background to show up a bit more. I'm going to be ordering way more from them in the future.

Cheese on Toast

2011-12-19T17:06:00.003+11:00

Finally here's a photo of the finished product - on the clothesline which is empty because it's raining, but if I waited for the skies to clear I'd never get it done! What is with this weather - it's been such a cool and damp start to summer. The lovely neighbour invited the boys over for a swim about three weeks ago and we haven't been able to get a decent day for it ... although we went round to friends for a drink last night and the sub-arctic temperatures and drizzle didn't stop the boys leaping in the pool there.

And here's a close up of the clamshell quilting. Not very exciting, but included for thoroughness.

I'm home again from PNG which is nice, although I had a great trip. It was wonderful to be back up there where I spent some very happy years - it's changed, but not in most things. I managed the travel just fine, and didn't get too tired. There are so many things about air travel that completely suck; but it's still nice to have a chance to sit and read a book, or watch a movie, without having to do anything or be anywhere. And someone brings you food! Or they would, if I'd pre-ordered any. Curse you budget airlines. Because of the complex interaction of public service entitlements, value for money principles, and logistics company regulations, most trips are a bizarre mix of bottom of the barrel budget airlines and fancy business class luxury. We relish one, and suffer the other.

Constitutional crisis

2011-12-15T18:44:00.002+11:00

Nothing quilty to report on because I am up in Papua New Guinea this week - doing something completely unrelated to its current constitutional crisis - but it's interesting to be here. PNG currently has two prime ministers, two governors general, two completely different cabinets and two Police Commissioners. It's like a giant game of chicken where both sides are racing towards each other daring each other to back down ... and in this town that could go for quite some time!!

Meanwhile several million citizens are quietly going about their own business. Good.

Rain of terror

2011-12-12T13:31:00.003+11:00

I haven't been doing a lot of sewing lately - a combination of Christmas festivities, work and a good book means I've had better things to do than go into the sewing room. I did tidy my dyed fabric though. And took a picture of the shelves.

We had an absolute downpour last night - torrentially heavy rain that the stormwater drain at the top of our driveway completely failed to cope with. So we had to stand and mop and form a little barrier of towels to stop it cascading into our front door - which worked - but then the groundswell came up and into the laundry, hallway and fifteen feet of carpet in the loungeroom. The carpet already needs replacing but it's very damp and dismal and smelly today! I'm doing dozens of loads of towels, with all the heaters and fans on. Sigh.

Chain sewing

2011-12-09T09:31:00.004+11:00

I finished the pineapple blossom - renamed "Cheese on Toast" - no pictures yet, because it's slightly too big for someone to hold comfortably, and the clothesline is always full of clothes, so I can't drape it over. But I will take some, and post them, because I really like it!

So I'm looking for another scrappy project, and I was thinking about doing Bonnie's new mystery quilt, when I stopped myself because THE LAST MYSTERY QUILT IS STILL SITTING IN A BOX UNFINISHED. Yes, I am shouting, because I was shouting at myself just the same. And I looked at the unfinished quilt and realised I'd done all the hard work - I'd made 600 half square triangles for god's sake - so I should just keep on going with it.

So I've been sewing all those half square triangles together into groups of five ... it is taking FOREVER and I still have heaps of little fiddly sewing to go. But I'm going to do it, honestly.

I'm just not that into it

2011-12-05T15:44:00.004+11:00

I made a seminole chevron border for the santa fe triangles - and it's one of those odd things. I like the centre, I like the border, but I really don't like them together. It's just not working for me, and I'm not entirely sure why.

Is it because the triangles are too bitsy and the chevrons are too solid? Does it need something lighter on the border, or more square? Am I overthinking this?

End result of all this agonising? It has gone into a plastic bag to have a long hard think about what it's done, and we will renegotiate its future existence, if any, next year. Or the year after, possibly. I'm not doing much sewing at the moment as my time is being sucked up with festive socialising and shopping. My husband's work has a tradition of a children's party in the grounds of the Lodge, which is the Prime Minister's house. They wouldn't let us into the house itself - probably very wise - but I managed to have a good nosey around the garden. I drive past twice a day on my way to work and back so it was fascinating to see on the other side of the fence. There was tobogganing down the lawn.

The PM wasn't at home when we were there ... probably a sound decision. Nothing like a hundred screaming children and a bouncy castle to make you find another pressing engagement.

Oh for crying out loud

2011-12-03T14:00:00.004+11:00

The Labor party's annual conference has been agonisingly hand wringing about gay marriage, so I thought I would share this, which I quite like. I don't know who did it - but I figure they wouldn't mind me reproducing it. Honestly, the things people choose to make a fuss over - who gives a rats whether anyone is married or not any more, in any circumstances? I think cancer has made me less tolerant (at which point everyone who reads this and is related to me gives a snort of disbelief because I was pretty damn intolerant to start with) and much less inclined to put up with bollocks.

On a more chirpy note, I did the quilting on the little baby quilt. I didn't get to the baby shower in the end - my stamina took a while to pick back up after the surgery - so I will have to go and visit the expectant mother sometime in the next month or so and hand it over in person ... or I could wait until after the baby's born? or both?

I went with flowers because they're easy to do and aren't too heavily quilted. I should have taken a photo of the fabric on the back - it's Paddington Bear which I've had for years and never used, but it was the perfect blue to blend it with the front.

We're off and running for the start of the Christmas drinks fiesta this afternoon - two lots on the opposite side of town from each other - but that's OK, it's only Canberra!! Doesn't take too long to get anywhere!!

Sixteen patch finished

2011-11-29T17:48:00.003+11:00

I made all the flying geese for the borders ... and then decided not to use them. I don't know why, I might have been feeling lazy? Or was it an artistic decision? Or perhaps I thought a smaller quilt would be more useful? The first is the most likely. Or perhaps I just wanted to get it finished.

It's machine quilted in long gently curving lines. Just enough to hold the layers together, and no more. The binding is nice and stripey. It does feel good to make something completely out of scraps! A brief sense of achievement, and then I fold it up and put it in the cupboard. I think I need to buy a holiday house so I'll have more beds to cover in quilts. I'm assuming when the boys leave home they'll take a dozen each, but that's years off.

My first quilt

2011-11-27T11:16:00.004+11:00

I'm joining in with Bonnie's "my first quilt" event - although I should put a warning up that mine is at the severely bodgy end of the first quilt spectrum. None of this classes/kits/instructions/patterns nonsense for me!!! The sensitive should look away now ...

Let me set the scene. My first quilt was made in the summer of 1988/89. I was eighteen, and had just finished my first year away from home at university, in a hostel (dorm equivalent I think). I was back home for the summer to save money, work on my tan, and slowly destroy my soul for $4.60 an hour at Cherrywood Gifts and Video. I was also my missing my boyfriend, appalled by the narrow provincialism of my home town and disturbed by the eight kilos I'd put on after a year of cafeteria food. This all adds up to bored and needing a hobby.

The boyfriend was actually the reason I thought of doing a quilt - his mother made beautiful quilts, and I'd never seen anything like them before. They were lovely, traditional and hand quilted, in the calico and country style popular at the time. I thought - that's only squares and triangles! I can do that! - so just started into it with a pencil, a ruler, a pair of blunt scissors and a sewing machine.

It took absolutely forever, and nothing came out straight, and nothing ended up the same size, and the colour scheme was truly appalling!!! Such 80s pastels. After I finally put the top together I couldn't believe that I still had to do more work - the quilting - so I didn't. This little number is completely unquilted (so I suppose technically, not my first quilt at all).

Like most first-timers I found the fluffiest polyester batting in the shop and bound it by bringing the backing round to the front. I had no idea how to do corners, so just muddled it through. It is so difficult to imagine how we did anything without the internet! Every technique or tip that you can think of is reachable in 0.27 seconds of google time.

This quilt has not really been used - it's too small for a bed. A fair number of the seams have split, and I think with any real use it would fall to bits completely. But I've kept it, all these years ...

Such pretty colours

2011-11-25T16:29:00.001+11:00

This is a unplanned work in progress. I liked the way all these colours went together - are they santa fe? turquoise and red dirt? I made strip sets, cut and re-sewed. It turned out quite surprisingly long and skinny, so there might be some borders on the top and bottom but not the sides to get it back into something approaching square.

Felt pretty rough yesterday after the surgery but it's all getting much better now. General anaesthetics suck, even when you're not under for very long. On the plus side, today has been drizzly rain all day long - nearly unheard of in Canberra! A good day to loll around in bed, and very welcome for the garden.

Spray basting?

2011-11-23T18:52:00.003+11:00

This is my first adventure into spray basting. Well, not entirely the absolute first, just the first time I've used the quilt basting spray for its intended purpose, and not just for random glueing. There are a few tutorials and blog chatter out there about using a wall for spray basting - here is an example - and I thought it was completely worth a crack! I couldn't be bothered putting any newspaper on an inside wall so I just used masking tape to hold the backing up, against an outside wall of my house. Then spray and add the batting, and spray and add the top! I didn't think that it could hold through the quilting but I'm half way through now and it is doing admirably! Anything higher than me (178cm) might be a bit difficult, but for little quilts it is very quick and easy.

This is a for a baby shower I'm supposed to be going to on Sunday - I have said I'll go but I'm back in for day surgery tomorrow (just taking the portacath out, nothing dramatic) and there's a chance I won't feel up to it on Sunday. But if I do, I'll have a quilt! She knows she's having a boy, which is why the blue.

Shore scene

2011-11-20T10:14:00.005+11:00

The next painting in the watercolour book is this shoreline scene. Certainly not like anything I've seen in real life - oceans are far too wild to leave boats lying around the edges of, and harbours have mudflats. But I'm in the hands of the book and its author, whoever he is, and so we painted some boats and sky and sea. I nearly skipped this one because it was really complicated to sketch, but I'm glad I stuck with it because it wasn't that difficult at all when you broke it down! Learning, learning, slowly but surely. So this was the book...

And this was me...

The other new thing with this picture was using masking fluid to paint out the seagull / small boat before you started. The fluid dries and forms a barrier that you can then paint over, then rub off when the paint is dry, so that it's still white underneath. That's pretty cool, but even better was that I had to go into an art supplies store to buy it ... and I just love those places when I actually have something to buy. I find them a bit depressing otherwise - all those wonderful looking tools I can't use - but if I have a specific errand then it's wonderful!

Oh dear, I've just realised that emotional response means I am allowing my sense of lack of legitimacy to undermine my enjoyment of the art store. I didn't realise my psyche could affect my shopping. Is nothing sacred?

Not quite lego

2011-11-18T17:14:00.003+11:00

I got inspired by Tonya's lego quilt - what is not to love about that fiesta of scrappy strippiness? So I cut an awful lot of strips and bricks one and half inches wide from the scrap bin and pieced them together. I had my own rules - I wasn't going to cut any strips to make them shorter. So if it was more than ten and a half inches long (the size of my finished blocks) it went over two blocks. The other thing I did was cut a lot of strips from dark red yardage to give the blocks a more unified look. Then I bordered it in blue (with red dots) and a piano key border from the leftover strips.

I like it - but it doesn't have the charm of the original lego quilt. The strips are bigger, and most of them are one fabric across the width of the block, so it's not nearly as intricate. It's still warm and friendly though, with all the red. And big enough for a queen size bed too. I would like to hand quilt it for the look - maybe big stitch like the pineapple blossom - but has my enthusiasm for that run out? Can I quilt another one or will I get too too terribly bored?

Christmas, whatever

2011-11-16T12:58:00.003+11:00

Here is my little Christmas wall hanging all quilted and finished. There are loops in the circles that might possibly be leaves or pine needles, if you squint. And stars in the background, and straight lines on the edge.

I took it to Quilters' meeting today - where I failed to understand the voting system again -but I am quite confident that I didn't win. I did win the lucky door prize though, for the first time in ever, which was a nice fat quarter and some stranded cotton. It will be put to good use.

I don't know about going to these meetings. The only thing I have in common with anybody there is quilting, and nobody really talks about it that much. Oh, and cancer, EVERYBODY has cancer. But I don't much want to talk about that either.

...that rise from the lake to the trees

2011-11-14T16:52:00.004+11:00

We went away for the weekend! After many long and boring months in Canberra we packed our little bags and drove two hours south to Jindabyne. Not exactly circumnavigating the globe, but it felt really good to go and see something different. We hadn't been down that way since well before children - Jindabyne is the main town for the ski areas, but still a tiny place, and very quiet in November. The original town was flooded for the hydro scheme, so now they have a new town, and a lovely lake. This is the view from the apartment balcony where we stayed - absolutely gorgeous.

On Saturday we went to Thredbo - a tiny village in the National Park at the bottom of some ski runs - and took the chairlift up to the top. It was high and I was scared and also kind of horrified at the fact that my seven year old was sitting next to me on a glorified park bench at least 100 feet above very hard looking rocks with absolutely no safety straps or anything ... of course he LOVED it. Here we are at the top - after having conquered the big scary chair lift.

Everyone else on the chairlift was doing the walk to the top of Mt Kosciusko - Australia's highest mountain. I'm from a country where if you want to stand on its highest point you really need to wear, at minimum, closed-in shoes. You wouldn't take your toddler and a picnic hamper. Apparently the only reason you can no longer drive to Australia's highest point is because people were trying to do it in their sedans and getting bogged. It's no wonder no-one takes the country seriously.

Having said that, even that stroll would have been too much for me this time, so we just chairlifted up and walked down. The boys got to see some snow! Much excitement. And then we saw some trees, and some nature, which is pretty damn boring. So we didn't quite do the full 5km walk and took a short cut down the ski slopes to the village ... we were hungry.

Did you know it is impossible to get down a ski slope in summer without (a) falling over and (b) breaking into something from The Sound of Music.

Greens and galahs

2011-11-09T15:31:00.004+11:00

Here are the greens - very pretty. There are some more being rinsed at the moment, where I used the same blues but a different yellow (the yellow ochre). These are done with the sunshine yellow, which makes for a nice clear green.

And here are the galahs. Galahs are terribly stupid - they are always the ones that get run over, or eaten by dogs - but so pretty in pink and grey. And they have a lovely bell-like warble, not the raucous screech of most of the other parrots. We get eight or nine different types of parrots at our bird feeder and there is a definite pecking order. The galahs are, unsurprisingly, close to the bottom.

I took this photo because I thought the birds matched the flowers! If only my interior design skills extended to the inside of the house, it would all be perfect...

Pottering about

2011-11-07T19:05:00.004+11:00

My husband and I love pottering. We say things like "I might just have a potter-y sort of day" and smile. I think we are already mentally retired (yes, in our 40s) and love to poke at the plants in the garden, gently think about cooking lunch, and put a hat on to slowly drive to the shops for some milk. In our little fantasy world, the children have already left home, so we do get a bit surprised when we stumble over them, or they ask for food.

My point? I've been pottering about with quilting. Meanderingly hand quilting the big pineapple blossom. It's not too slow because it's big stitch, but any hand quilting is a contemplative, rather than a results-oriented, activity.

I've been making a few words too, for an idea I briefly had about our challenge quilt for next year's exhibition. The theme is "red plus one" which is in some ways a moronic theme, but in other ways quite brilliant. It certainly leaves it very open, which is the best thing in a theme. On the other hand, they had to explain that the "plus one" means another colour (rather than bringing a date for example) and if you have to explain a theme then maybe you haven't properly thought it through.

I like my words but I don't know if I'll keep going with it. The letters are a bit irritating to make because they're so small - our challenge quilt has to be 50cm x 70 cm - and I was getting jack of it. But it was nice to potter.

Starting to look a lot like Christmas

2011-11-05T17:17:00.004+11:00

The quilters guild Wednesday meeting is having a little christmas challenge for our November meeting - make something vaguely christmas-like and we vote. With coins, and the coins go to the refuge. And the quilts too, I think. There seemed to be a strong suggestion we make a patchwork elephant. Anyway, I couldn't quite understand the ins and outs (and I wasn't really listening) but I got two main messages; bring something yummy for morning tea, and make a christmas-themed thingy. Tick, and tick.

Here is my wallhanging pinned and about to be quilted - in twenty three years of quilting I have never made a christmas anything! This is a cut down version of this quilt which I found aimlessly googling "christmas quilts". It's such a great idea, I love it. My quilting isn't going to be quite so gorgeous, but it definitely looks like christmas! yay!

2011-11-03T19:33:00.002+11:00

I regularly read maxabella loves - it's a delightful blog about kids and life and things like that. She is doing a series at the moment on planning a kid's party and it sounds all wonderful ... in a how-is-life-on-your-planet kind of way. I love what she's done and the suggestions but oh my goodness it would not be me in a million billion years.

I should admit, for my oldest's first birthday I did match the cupcakes to the tablecloths and it was great! Champagne cocktails, my friends because he didn't have any yet, and colour co-ordinated balloons and napkins. But that was pretty much the end of my enthusiasm for party planning. I'm quite happy to have parties, as long as I'm not asked to do terribly much. If the kids don't do it themselves, it doesn't happen. So, when number two son had his 7th party on the weekend, they did the lolly bags themselves.

They completely did the decorating.

Made their own pinata.

My role was cooking the sausage rolls and telling various kids to use their inside voice, put that stick down, stop eating like a pig that's disgusting, do you need to go to the toilet? well stop clutching yourself then and counting down the minutes until they left. As a party I think it was quite successful - everyone seemed to have a good time - games were played and food was eaten. Most importantly, the birthday boy was happy! I can't decide if I'm being neglectful or encouraging creativity and resilience...

I've got the blues

2011-11-01T17:56:00.003+11:00

But luckily only the literal, rather than the figurative ones. Does that make sense? Am I using the right words? My kids explained the difference between simile and metaphor to me several times this year, and I still don't think it's sunk in. Luckily they are receiving the benefit of an Australian public education and will be stuffed full of useful information by the time they are 18 and set loose on the world. Adverbs, protons, fractions, everything.

I made up some new dye and some new soda ash solution and got going with the blues. I seem to have a mountain of yellows and purples and browns at the moment. I'm not sure if that reflects my dyeing or my sewing preferences. But now I have to make some blues and greens. These all turned out quite turquoise, although they are varying combinations of turquoise and blue.

I have been sewing a little bit, although most of the weekend was taken up with a birthday party for the just-turned-seven year old. I may post about that, if I can recover my mental and physical fortitude. It was fairly horrific. The birthday boy enjoyed himself.

Bad dyer

2011-10-27T19:23:00.003+11:00

In January this year, before I was overtaken by Events (they should have a capital E, all things considered) I put in four lengths of calico to soak in soda ash solution. Last week - they were still there.

The bucket's been outside for ten months. It was only half full when I put them in, and it was full when I opened it, so it must have let the rain in. And some leaves and dirt too, by the looks of this.

In January, I made up some dyes, used most of them and put the leftovers in the fridge. They were still there too - doesn't it look grotty? It's a spare fridge, but we do still keep food in it. Not if we can help it though - it freezes salads.

So, last week I put on my sexy and fashionable dyeing clothes for the first time since January.

And I used all the leftovers. You certainly won't see that recommended in a dyeing book but it all turned out fine.

Landscapes

2011-10-24T16:07:00.004+11:00

I'm painting again. Number two son had his birthday last week and we gave him a decent set of paints / brushes / paper for his own, seeing that he was so interested in mine. So he painted, and I painted, and number one son painted, and we made a mess all together.

I'm going back to the watercolour instruction book after getting the humph with it. I wasn't too sure about the landscapes, but let's face it, the flowers weren't so crash hot either. So the book and I worked step by step through a mountain cabin. The book did this:

I did this:

Number one son did this:

Number two son did this:

Then we gave up and put a DVD on.

Cupcakes - real ones this time

2011-10-22T12:56:00.003+11:00

Food colouring is the boys favourite ingredient. Green pikelets, blue icing, orange pancakes... and pink cupcakes. I was quite surprised just how pink they turned out to be.

And bright blue icing covered in sprinkles (the boys call them) and hundreds and thousands (I call them). We have a few Australia / NZ dialect differences, my children and I. Sometimes I win - they say the letter H as 'aitch' and not 'haitch', and the queen lives in a 'cahstle' not 'cassell'. Sometimes the Aussie wins and the boys definitely go to the swimming 'poowill' not 'pull'. And sometimes there is just a yawning vocabulary chasm when I ask them about jandals or sticking plasters.

Baseball started again this morning which introduces another layer of weird linguistic diversity. Batterup!

Pinned up pineapple blossom

2011-10-19T13:26:00.004+11:00

I'm able to stretch and bend and pin quilts up now - yay - so there is a backlog waiting my attention. First up is the pineapple blossom. I went with two different red borders with the offcut triangles in between. I like the red because it's warm and happy like the rest of the quilt.

This is being held up by two helpers who weren't really in the mood for it. I just took the photo as quick as I could! I've started hand quilting it in big-stitch clamshells with a dark cream perle cotton. Anything more subtle would just get lost I think. I took it to quilters' daytime meeting today and happily sewed away. I hadn't been for months and it was lovely.

A good week ... with dessert

2011-10-16T17:40:00.003+11:00

The boys have been up at the beach all week with their grandparents - having a wonderful time swimming, canoeing, bike riding and walking by the sounds of it ... and falling asleep at the dinner table every night! Well planned, Nan and Poppy. It was the longest we have ever been without them and their first plane flight on their own - and it all went just fine. Of course.

Despite missing them a teeny little bit, we had the most wonderful week - even both being busy at work was a treat - we could stay late and fuss about our own little corners of the working world without also having to wrangle the boys. We went out to several lovely dinners - including one at the Argentinian Ambassador's residence - Hola Argentina! and did the fancy four-course at a restaurant in town. I made my husband take a photo of the dessert which was crepes suzette flaming beautifully - except the flames don't show in the photo. But you can see the mandarin sorbet and various foams (of course! bloody foams) and it was absolutely delicious.

But, to be honest, not as delicious as the poached pears in saffron with golden syrup ice cream that a friend made for us for lunch the next day. That was just amazing. She didn't mind I took a photo either.

There was also heaps of time for sewing. I quilted the little cot quilt - straight lines in the middle and feathers in the border.

I did just one long feather and I'm not sure if there's enough variety to look super good, but geez it was easy.

Putting the pineapple blossom blocks together

2011-10-13T19:15:00.003+11:00

Just a bit of boring sewing here - putting together the pineapple blossom blocks. It is a little bit exciting because they form a nice secondary pattern. And there are lots of little offcut blocks to trim too, I'll sew those together for the border.

I think I might hand quilt this - big stitch with maybe perle cotton. It will give it a nice rumply feel, to go with the warm colours.

Art ... and not art

2011-10-10T14:10:00.004+11:00

My husband and I just went to see the Fred Williams exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia - it's a public holiday here in Canberra for reasons unknown (we seem to have a special day all of our own). I didn't really know anything about Fred Williams but went along to be companionable. It was fantastic - his paintings are extraordinary and show a clear evolution through his life but at the same time staying constant to themes and ideas and interest.

It's the first time I've seen the new entrance to the NGA - much lighter and nicer than it used to be. I'd like to start doing some of the guided tours to introduce myself to the whole place. It's bit intimidating just to rock in and start wandering round! I need a guide.

Every time I see something good like the Fred Williams exhibition it makes me happy ... until I line it up against my own ordinariness. Oh well. I draw things because it makes me happy and stops me watching endless crap on Lifestyle Channel. (Although maybe I could combine my two hobbies and do a portrait of Phil Spencer!!! Nude!!! Mwhahahaha). Here are my hibiscus.

They turned out OK - at least they are recognisably hibiscus flowers.

I am not so pleased with my lemons and oranges.

More work needed.

Gulping

2011-10-08T15:51:00.003+11:00

I'm gulping at the moment - having a sewing frenzy when I just keep going and going and finishing things and starting new things and it's all fun and all going well!!! It won't last of course but it's just like the feeling when you're hot and drinking something cold and you just keep drinking it all down. Gulping it down.

Some of the nine-patches I made for no apparent reason from the leftover two-inch strips were cream and green; they looked so pretty and fresh that I made them into a little cot quilt top straight away. More green and some yellow - about forty inches square. Hopefully gender-neutral (despite the flowers) for a pregnant tummy or two of my acquaintance. These people who won't find out if they're having a girl or a boy! Or (even worse) won't tell you!

An old quilt, showing some signs of use

2011-10-06T13:58:00.003+11:00

Because number-two son claimed the stripey quilt for his bed, he had to remove one of the ones already on there. Most beds in this house have a few quilts of different shapes, sizes and thicknesses. So do the sofas, and the cupboards. Actually most rooms look like a rag bag exploded in them. I say they should be happy I'm spending their inheritance on fabric and not gin and lottery tickets. They don't answer me back because they're muffled by layers of quilts.

The quilt that was removed (demoted really) was this one I made in 2000. Dodgy looking dress scraps (this was before I realised that quilting fabric was actually quite good for quilting) and hand quilted during the long winter nights I watched TV while my husband was Pretending to be Very Important at Parliament House and didn't get home till midnight. I didn't mind - this was before children so I worked all day - and the first winter back from Papua New Guinea so I had thin blood. The cats and I would watch Sex and the City and I would quilt.

This quilt definitely qualifies as well-loved. And my favourite bit of the whole thing? When I was basting it I realised I'd cut the back a bit small, and I couldn't be bothered sewing another bit on, so I just left it with the batting showing. And this quilt has been on the bed for ten years, machine washed and dried a couple of dozen times, vomited on at least twice and used as a floor rug for about six months. The lesson? Quality craftsmanship is not only overrated, but unnecessary.

Thirteen happy years

2011-10-04T17:03:00.002+11:00

I was 28 - hardly a teenage bride - but we seem like such babies!

Pros and cons

2011-10-03T12:12:00.003+11:00

I finished the radiotherapy last week, which is good. I am now burnt, flaking, itchy, raw and tired, which is bad. I can't do anything that requires stretching or extending my left arm, which is bad. I can't hang out washing, load and unload the dishwasher or lift pots and pans, which is good. But I can't pin quilts or sew any seam of more than about a metre, which is bad.

So I'm sewing small things and waiting until I heal to pin up and do the big stuff. I've put my scrap 16-patches together and made 96 flying geese for the border, but can't do any more for the moment. I'm going to do the flying geese border in a quilt as you go variant - where you pre-quilt the middle then sew the borders (unquilted) directly to the middle then quilt. I think it makes perfect sense :). I made four different sorts of flying geese, one for each side.

I've turned the leftover two-inch strips from the pineapple blossom into some nine-patches. I don't know what they'll be for but it was fun to do.

And I've watched a lot of footy of various codes. A brilliant AFL Grand Final, an excellent NRL Grand Final, an OK showing by the Wallabies although they are NOT looking like tournament winners I have to say. I think they'll get knocked off by South Africa next week and not even make the semis (oh the horror! the national shame!). Then I can cheer for Ireland because they have the cutest accents.

An unexpected finish

2011-10-01T11:12:00.005+10:00

This is one of my many ongoing never-ending medallion quilts. I do like making them because you can try out different things as you go. Medallions can have an unexpected vibrancy that block quilts don't always - perhaps because block quilts are generally planned out from the start. The only downside of medallion quilts is that you have to do more and more sewing for each border as you go out ... which is generally the point that my enthusiasm is drifting away.

So, with this quilt I did it a bit differently. I made a couple of dozen Ohio star blocks before starting the big blue centre square, so that when I reached the outer border it would already be done. And, naturally, when I went to put the star blocks on they looked terrible. Just completely wrong. So I made them up into a quilt on their own - queen-size once I'd done the sashing - hand-quilted it, and gave it to my husband's aunt and uncle for christmas. I wish I had a photo, but no.

This quilt languished for a couple of months, then I put the little star blocks around it. Which are cute. Then it languished for a year or two more, when I did the wavy bias strip border. And then I agonised over what to do next for a few more months before it was all "bugger this, just finish the thing". So I did - it's 60" square about, which isn't big enough for a double bed but excellent for a boy bed. Lightly machine quilted - the dark blue has big pebbles (more like stones really) and the rest is straight lines or ditch or echo, depending on mood.

My Dad is holding this up - it's a rare treat to have a nice tall man in the house during daylight hours. Not only is he doing wonders in the garden, but is handy for quilt photography! It's raining buckets today (first day of school holidays of course) so gardening isn't an option. Before photographing though he had to wrestle the boy out from under it. Could be a LONG two weeks.

More scraps

2011-09-25T20:36:00.003+10:00

I must be feeling better - the work team is off to Tonga tomorrow and I'm jealous! For the last few months the thought of hopping in a plane to somewhere hot has made me shudder, but I'm beginning to think that I might be able to cope with it again some day soon! Bring it on. But in the meantime, I'm in the sewing room and strangely drawn to the scraps bins ... not stopping at just the 16-patches. In a fit of something unknown I trimmed out a pile of 2" strips from the teeny tiny scraps bin then went looking for something to do with them.

Not that I had to look very far; just over to Bonnie and see what magical things she suggests for 2" scraps. I didn't want to do anything too fancy so went with this block below, Pineapple Blossom. I like the setting she shows with 2" squares and sashing, so will put it together like that when I get them done ... assuming enthusiasm still lasts. But it's a lovely block to put together and looks far more complex than it is.

I like the yellow, it gives it a bit of zing. This is one of my hand-dyes. I think this shows another Bonnie influence - cheddar! Or at least she calls it cheddar. It's a bit like the colour mushroom, I've never actually seen a mushroom that colour. Or peach, come to think of it. In the interests of science (I say that quite a lot, considering how unscientific I am) I took a photo of both the fabric, and some actual cheddar. Quite different.

Stripey quilt finished!

2011-09-22T16:19:00.002+10:00

All done and quilted and bound - although I skimped a bit on the quilting! This one is headed for a boy's bed (in fact it's there already) so I didn't do very dense quilting. In my experience it makes them a bit stiff and not snuggly enough. Maybe I'm using the wrong batting? I stitched in the ditch of most of the borders, and that will just have to hold it together as best it can.

I washed and dried it too, so it's looking loved and lived-in already. I have a stack of stripey blocks left over - perhaps a baby quilt? For a particularly groovy baby? Here's a slightly more straight-on shot. My Dad is staying at the moment, and he says it looks dainty and light with the dot borders. That's probably better than eyeball-burning, which was how it looked without the dot.

Number two son had to write a character description of someone at school - he chose Grandad (my Dad) - and described him as a "tall eager person". Isn't that classic? (He also did one of his father which said "My Dad spends a lot of time in his room making model airplanes. The rest of the time he plays on his iphone". Father of the Year Award? Maybe not.)

In the interests of science I machine sewed the binding ... experimentation and all that. I don't mind the look of it but the corners are very very bodgy. When I hand sew the front corners are lovely and I don't care what goes on at the back; and after doing that for twenty years when I try and reverse the process (i.e. sewing the binding to the back then folding it over to the front) I end up with beautiful corners on the back and a dog's breakfast on the front. I had to put a few stitches in one of the corners by hand to keep it from unravelling ... which I didn't see in ANY of the on-line machine binding tutorials. Shall I persevere with it to the point where it becomes adequate? Who can say.

Design floor Monday

2011-09-19T16:19:00.003+10:00

I'm laying things out on the "design floor" again ... this is the result of me having slightly pointless fun with scraps again - 16 patch blocks for no apparent reason. I think this was triggered because I was having to jam the scraps bin back into the bookcase, and rather than keep shoving I thought it would be more useful to get sewing!

I sewed until I got bored, and there are 49 blocks, which works out rather nicely if I do a 7 x 7 setting. I must finish off a few tops first though, before I get distracted again. Laying them out was fun; putting the same fabrics next to each other so they blend in a little bit, in a scrappy way. Still plenty of blocks to try and place.

Still painting

2011-09-17T17:52:00.003+10:00

I've had it with the watercolour book - it wanted to move on to landscapes, and composition, and framing. The next exercise in burnt umber was this depressing, and slightly creepy, scene.

I really don't want to paint pictures ... which of course begs the question what on earth do I want to do with my nice blank white paper? I thought about it for a bit but really, deep down, I want to be Alisa Burke. Except for being eight months pregnant, that would suck, but the whole painting with watercolours and design and printmaking and fabric decorating thing. So I started by shamelessly copying her cupcakes.

Then moved into a dahlia of my own design.

I can't get over a nagging feeling that doing the delineation and much of the shading with a black pen is somehow cheating, but I like the look, so bugger it. I'm going to copy her hibiscus next ... Number two son took on the challenge of the umber landscape though. Genius.

Bye bye birdie

2011-09-15T16:20:00.004+10:00

My demented bird from the wool felt cushion was driving me mad - no matter how you squinted, the beak just looked wrong. So I unpicked my birdie and threw it away (could be a country song, right there) and kept doing flowers over the spot.

Should get in a bit more stitching as the rugby world cup goes along. I'm halfway through the radiotherapy now and I'm starting to go pink and burnt - I told the twelve-year-old Registrar today that I was beginning to burn and she peered at it and said "mmm, mild redness" ... mild! my bollocks. And feeling tired too - I left work early this afternoon and came home and slept for two hours. So now I feel groggy, tired and mildly red. Humph.

Stripes

2011-09-13T11:38:00.003+10:00

I've started putting all my stripey blocks together. I did trim the dog ears in the end - it was getting too wild and woolly even for me - and now I'm sewing them together medallion-style. I was originally going to use a stripe for the borders between the blocks but it was so busy it made my eyes bleed. Wildly headache-inducing, which is not what you want for a quilt. Then I tried some solids, but it looked a bit boring. So I have ended up with a black and white dot - patterned but not too much so, and hopefully a nice relief from the mismatched stripes.

I'm at home with a snotty-nosed child today; he kept coughing pathetically (and did look like a bag of shit to be honest) so he's been lying in the sun reading all day. And instead of going into work I'm paying the bills and getting the paperwork under control. I think I'd rather be at work ... at least there I get to spend someone else's money.

Kiwi heritage

2011-09-11T17:22:00.003+10:00

I've been channelling my New Zealand upbringing in a big way this weekend - mostly by watching four rugby games in the last 48 hours (and there's another one tonight). All good games too - except for the Wallabies first half against Italy - and there's another six weeks before the Rugby World Cup ends!!! So much fun ... I don't watch much sport on television normally but this has completely sucked me in ALREADY.

We've paid for the extra sports channels from Foxtel specially for this and it's already been worth the money. Watch my butt spread over the sofa (although I might get the wool felt cushion cover finished, which would be great, because it has been taking far too long already and I'm getting bored with it).

The other Kiwi-ness I've been displaying was some serious baking. Here's the orange cake (after cutting, but it was no oil painting before cutting - how does the mixture get under the lining paper? Messy).

Chocolate brownie (couldn't get it before cutting either, but that was because it was too delicious to wait).

And scones. They were even ...wait for it ... Jo Seagar's Country Scones. They practically leapt off the plate saying "go the Allblucks, eh".

Not helping at all

2011-09-07T17:21:00.004+10:00

Is that a giant seal pup asleep on the sewing table? It's fat and it's furry. It would probably make quite a nice coat for the cooler months.

It can sleep through a sewing machine racketing in its ear, and through having stripey squares being dragged over its furry butt. It's a miracle of nature.

Who can I go and help next?

Could've, should've

2011-09-05T16:46:00.002+10:00

I'm sewing my stripey blocks together, and it struck me that I could have colour-coordinated my fabrics, and not just used everything in the room that was remotely striped.

I could have lined up my stripes.

And not just let them fall wherever they wanted.

I could have trimmed my dog ears too.

Forgot to show you the back

2011-08-31T16:01:00.003+10:00

I also took a photo of the back of the big quilt - but forgot to put it in the blog post. So here it is! I used lots of different bits and I love the look; I can probably use the quilt either side up.

I meant to do heaps of sewing today - now I've finally tidied up the sewing room from the scrap quilt chaos - but ended up spending two and a half hours in radiation oncology (it's meant to take about fifteen minutes). They got halfway through the zapping then realised something was stuffed up and they needed to check it, so sent me back out to the waiting room for the duration. In my gown, with the entire over-65 population of Canberra for company. And they're not interested in old copies of Marie Claire ... they would much prefer to chat. To me. Four treatments down, twenty-one to go.

Monster quilt is done!

2011-08-29T16:51:00.002+10:00

Yay! As anticipated, the last couple of seams were a bit of a wrestle ... getting a lot of fabric through my bottom-of-the-range Janome needed some muscle power. It also involved everything in a metre radius of my sewing table getting swept onto the floor, as great waves of multi-coloured quilt passed by.

But compared to machine quilting it was an absolute doddle, and I'm really pleased with the result. It's wonderfully scrappy and bright. You can see which are the connecting strips. When I connected the smaller pieces I tried to make the connecting strips of varying widths and use the same spacing as I had for the quilting, to make them blend in more. But by the time I got to the long joins, practicality dictated a very narrow strip with no additional batting. So they're quite noticeable.

I always have a problem trying to photograph my quilts - especially the big ones. One day I'll look into decent lighting and a hanging system ... it's on the list. But whacking it over the clothesline gives a good enough idea of how it turned out.

Nine-year old boy included for scale.

The enormous quilt is taking shape

2011-08-22T17:31:00.004+10:00

As I went along with my quilt-as-you-go mini pieces I coloured in a square in the appropriate size on a bit of paper. A low-tech solution to keeping track of what I'd done, and an attempt to get the colour balance right. So eventually I ended up with 100 inches of pre-quilted pieces.

And I could cut them up in lots of pieces to re-arrange into something that might work.

Then draw another plan of where everything went.

I thought it might take a bit of thought and arrangement - but there was actually only one or two ways that it would go together without further chopping and re-piecing. So my options were limited. This arrangement has one or two colours the same next to each other, but I'm not going to freak out about it. This was in some ways a test piece made entirely of scraps and destined for regular use (and machine washing). I'm not sure what idiocy decided it would be so freaking enormous ... but small things aren't practical. There are only so many snuggle quilts you can put in the car before you start looking homeless.

Burnt umber begone

2011-08-18T15:44:00.004+10:00

My watercolour instruction book let me move onto colours! I did a colour wheel, although none of the colours of my paints matched the colours he said to use in the book. "To make purple, add Prussian Blue to Alizarin". Or alternatively, add that bluey colour at the bottom with that red colour in the middle row, because you know, it has to make some kind of purple. But as an exercise it served its purpose, in keeping on managing that pesky runaway watery paint.

Number two son decided to join in and painted his own colour wheel beside me, which was lovely company, if not particularly helpful. He was getting cross because his didn't look as neat and pretty as mine ... at exactly the same time I was getting cross because mine didn't look as professional and immaculate as the one in the book. We suffered our artistic deficiencies together.

Still going with the wool felt

2011-08-16T12:52:00.004+10:00

I haven't forgotten my adventure into wool felt - I've been picking away at it in random moments in front of the TV. It requires slightly more concentration than I normally have available while TV watching - hand quilting is much more brainless - so I don't always do it. But when watching something that only uses a tiny part of your brain (i.e. Midsomer Murders, which is getting more barking mad by the week) I applique merrily.

But not always with such good results. This is a bird with an experiment-gone-wrong beak transplant.

This is meant to be a sun. It looks like wrestling jellyfish.

Flowers not known to nature.

I've been writing off my design failures as "primitive" and bugger me, it really does look quite good in bulk! The flowers are jumbling up nicely - I just have to think of some little friends for the mutant bird and it will be a perfectly respectable cushion cover, if no-one looks too closely at any individual item.

Craft Fair and Quilt Show

2011-08-13T13:48:00.004+10:00

The Canberra Quilters Annual Show was on this week and I trotted along on Thursday. As usual, it's held in conjunction with the Craft Fair - the big travelling market thing with lots of traders and classes; about half quilting and half other crafts. No photos for this post - I took a few but I haven't asked any of the quilters for permission to show their stuff on-line.

I didn't enter anything in the show this year because it was all a bit difficult to plan in advance when I didn't know how I'd be feeling. So I feel a bit mean saying that I thought the show was flat - normally there's a really interesting mix of traditional and modern; beginners and advanced; bright and subdued; big and small. It just didn't seem that varied and interesting this year, but maybe it was my mood. I was tired and the show was crowded.

The very talented Helen Godden won overall with her lovely gang-gang quilt (second photo on the page I've linked to). It's a wonderful quilt in person - more colourful and balanced than in the photo, but you get the idea. There were a few very good quilts in the exhibition, but not many I wanted to look at for longer than a second or two.

And, to be extra cranky, I don't know why I bother going into the traders' hall at all - there's some good stuff in there but why jostle fifteen middle-aged women to get attention for something that is more expensive than you can buy online - often from the same shop. The only thing I really wanted was a thread stall (I've discovered the joys of thread that's not from the dollar shop! finally) and there wasn't one. Nothing except racks of metallic stuff for embroidery because it's not proper craft unless you pile shiny shit ALL OVER IT.

Maybe next year I'll have a nap before I go.

Watercolours

2011-08-10T10:29:00.004+10:00

I like to muck about with watercolours. Sometimes sewing is impractical - when you're travelling say - but the urge is still there to mix some colours together and (hopefully) do something pretty. BUT I'm really crap at painting. I never quite conquered the watercolours thing (and buying the equipment at K-Mart probably didn't help). So, for Christmas, my lovely husband got me some nice paints, decent brushes, proper paper and an instruction book. The year being the disaster that it's been, I hadn't done anything with them until now; but now I've cracked open the instruction book and I'm very uncharacteristically doing what it says.

So we have the Dreaded Exercises in Burnt Umber. Look familiar to anyone? Gradations, washes, value, shade. Already I've learnt something about how you get watercolour to behave.

One of my aims is to be able to work with fabric paint, which behaves in a similar way to watercolours (i.e. bleeding and making a splotchy mess, in my experience). I want to be able to play around with surface design - rather than landscapes, which is where my instruction book is heading. I think there are enough bad watercolour landscapes in the world (and not nearly enough badly decorated pieces of fabric, mwhahahaha).

Cake not sewing

2011-08-08T11:42:00.002+10:00

Because it was my birthday, so we went out for brunch, and had cake, and presents. Nothing too terribly exciting but just right for me!

Can you tell the cake was made by me and the boys, and not a cake-making professional? Number one son and I made the meringues (we took turns at the piping, with mixed results), the whole family made the cake, and number two son was in charge of the icing, with help from me. I thought chocolate icing would be better on a chocolate cake, but he was insistent that pink would work better with the colour scheme we already had going with the meringues. He may be right.

The ribbon was entirely my idea.

More scrap quilt-as-you-go pieces

2011-08-06T08:55:00.005+10:00

I'm getting back into the swing of doing these pieces - and I still think they're fun! I made two blue ones, and finished off a yellow one. Which I'm also using as my new header.

The blue one was a chance to finally use a really unattractive dyeing disaster fabric (see arrow) that I've had for years. It was my first experience of how black dye can completely take over everything else! Beware the dark side of the force people, it will swallow you up. I did manage to find a bit that didn't look like it had crawled out of a coal bag and coughed, but it was a struggle. And I have finally figured out how to add text and arrows and shapes to a photo on the mac. Expect a lot of these in the future because I am quite impressed with myself.

We're having the "fake warm" here at the moment - that week towards the end of winter where the temperatures suddenly go up and there's a smell of spring in the air. It never lasts of course, it just teases you with an idea that winter might be ending; after the fake warm there is another good three weeks of cold and wet before the weather really starts changing at the end of August. Canberra has a very predictable climate, and I know after seventeen years here (god! that long!) that winter doesn't end until you are really really really sick of it.

Easing back into it

2011-08-04T19:17:00.003+10:00

I started slow with a couple of mitred stripe blocks - I like both the box and the cross formation, so will probably use both when I make a quilt. Which I'm NOT starting now, I have plenty of half-finished things to work on!

Yes, my ironing board stays "steaming hot" upside down. Big W didn't have much of a selection when I went there on an emergency ironing board cover mission ... actually there was this one and a pink one that was raising funds for breast cancer. I bought this one even though it was more expensive and not one cent went to charity ... I go to enormous lengths to avoid pink shit about cancer. I did however google how to make a big ironing table - I think it would be really handy. According to the YouTube gods, it's really easy to make! A lady did it in five minutes!

I ordered some more striped fabric to go with my small pile that I already have - it isn't much but I think it will be enough. I'm not planning another monster quilt, not for a while.

Empty chair for now

2011-07-31T12:21:00.002+10:00

Yep, just like they tell you, the last chemo is a doozy and I am flattened. The chair is empty, but the brain is very full. My brain should be saying: "when I am healthy I am going to be charitable, focus on self-improvement and helping others". Actually it says "when I am healthy I'm going to make a mitred stripe quilt with stippling".

So much FUN

2011-07-26T15:13:00.003+10:00

I've been reading Melody's adventures in her modified quilt-as-you-go with scraps and adding borders with connector strips. Melody linked to excellent tutorials from Marianne on how to do it. I thought - that looked fun and easy and would use up the pile of hand-dyed scraps which are BREEDING in my cupboard I swear - so I made some. I made a scrappy yellow/green square, a pinky/orange one, and a green one. I quilted them and joined them together and it was awesomely easy, and satisfying, and looks really cool.

So I made a purple one.

And a green one. There is also a brown one, that I didn't photograph, a pink one being quilted and a yellow one being pinned. This is addictive!!!

I'm going to make an enormous quilt - 100 x 100 - for our enormous bed so I'm trying to make every piece a multiple of ten (the purple is 30 x 30, the green is 20 x 50) and hope they will all fit together at the end. The glory is, if they don't fit, I can cut them in half, or any multiple of 10. I'm even using scraps of batting and ugly bits for backing. The piecing is random and depends on the size of the scraps in the cupboard ...

... or the pile ....

This is a lot of fun.

Moshling bag

2011-07-24T19:50:00.003+10:00

The moshlings have jumped up and bit me again - I was coerced by baby bambi-eyes into making a bag to hold his moshling figures in. He was extremely specific about the details; went through the plain colours to find the right purple, drew me a picture of the shape, picked out the lining material and measured the length of the strap using a tape measure on his arm. He insisted on round, which is damned difficult to get looking good, but he doesn't seem to mind that the seams are a bit puckered. And that the lining is slightly bigger than the outside :)

The most time-consuming bit was appliqueing Iggy on the bottom of the bag. Those eyes have five different pieces!!! It's raw-edge, so a bit rough, but it does look recognisably like the moshling Iggy, if I do say so myself. Iggy is Ultra-Rare. Wow. By the way, I have no idea why this paragraph is underlined, and I can't seem to remove it.

Now I have to decide if I let him take the bag, with figures, to school. I know it will end in disaster, but can I resist the bambi-eyes?

Sunshine quilt finished

2011-07-21T15:49:00.002+10:00

My little cot quilt is quilted and bound, and none of the piecing flaws seem quite so problematic any more. I enjoyed machine quilting this - the flowers are done in parallel lines and the inner orange/yellow border is my first attempt at free-hand feathers. And they're great! not my particular ones of course, but the general concept. I'll use them again - and practice will make them better.

I was a bit worried that the second border of diagonal parallel lines would become uneven, so decided to do it continuously; that is, to go across the bottom of the border and then come back up, then back down again. The picture of the bottom of the quilt might show it more clearly.

Surprisingly, this made the border lie flatter (which is good) and seem more even! Yay. The flying geese border is a large meander.

I washed and dried this when it was done, as recommended by several bloggers who thinks it makes it more snuggly and lived-in. I think it makes it looks rumpled and used .... but these are the bloggers who use "thrift" as a verb and get excited about vintage pillowcases. Maybe not the best source of advice.

Yay for scraps

2011-07-18T19:07:00.003+10:00

I just luuuuurv scraps. I love hauling them out of the bins, sewing with them, and I love the quilts that they make. I love that the fabrics don't match - that they are barely organised into the broadest of groups. After a few too many visits to blogs that are co-ordinated and beautiful and use the word "yummy" I need some grubby mismatched scraps to get my quilting self down from the sugar high. I spent yesterday with the small scraps bin -

and the large scraps bin -

to make myself twenty five five-patch blocks in lights and darks. At the start of the sewing process I had an idea of what I wanted to do with them, but it melted away. And now I have no further interest in them. But that's OK - sometime in the future I will be making a scrap quilt and they will be perfect.

Simple things make me happy

2011-07-16T21:34:00.005+10:00

Don't you just love it when you read or see something that you have never thought of, and would probably never think of, but is a deeply simple and practical solution? Introducing the scraps of binding ball!!!

I saw completely cauchy's frankenbinding and a light went on! Up until now I've put my leftover binding in my scrap bin, but I never use it for string piecing or scrap piecing because the fold is ironed in and impossible to get out. And when I do want to do a scrap binding I have to dig through the scraps until I find it, and it's a pain. But now I have my very own ball of scrap binding ... simple things.

Raising artistic geniuses

2011-07-15T10:53:00.003+10:00

It's school holiday time, and the distraction activities are up and running! The boys had a couple of days in a school holiday program, which they quite enjoyed (even though they moan a bit about it before they go). The rest of this week we're all at home together which is quiet but enjoyable - I feel a twinge of guilt about them not having the most exciting holidays in the world - but hey, life's not always a barrel of laughs when mum's having cancer treatment, and they understand that. Number one son decorated his t-shirt...

And number two son did a pillowcase with his latest interest / craze / obsession - Moshlings!!!

Moshlings are running my life at the moment - number two son is completely engrossed with playing them on-line, buying them on e-bay, drawing them and comparing them and marking them off on his chart. He has a collectors personality; we went through all this with thomas the tank engine, and dr who, and now it's .... Moshlings!!!!

Quick and sunshiney

2011-07-10T13:43:00.003+10:00

This circle and flower print with the aqua background has been staring at me for a while now. It was on top of the latest Hancock's pile, and made me think good bright happy thoughts. I didn't want to chop it up, so thought it would be good as a medallion, then used in subsequent borders. Good idea, but the lines of flower circles bore no relation to the grain line. Really, I shouldn't have expected them to.

So the middle area looks quite respectable. But the borders get more dodgy as you go out. I did enjoy making the flying geese (I seem to be on a flying geese roll) but had to just chop one end off to get it to even sit remotely flat. And there was no way the circles were going to sit neatly into the border! Here is my quilting shame in multi-colour close-up.

But it will be just fine for a baby quilt. A happy sunshiney baby.

Design wall ... bed

2011-07-05T15:55:00.005+10:00

My alternative design wall, for projects too big for the sewing room floor, is the spare bed. It works well for spreading everything out and looking at it, except when there are visitors in it. Most houseguests don't take kindly to having bits of fabric strewn around their room. But we are visitor free at the moment, so today on the design bed I am auditioning the next border on my broderie perse medallion.

I decided to do a flying geese border after the red and yellow. It pained me, but I stuck to one fabric for the geese. I couldn't bring myself to do it for the cream backgrounds though! I have a very very strong scrappy instinct, that makes me want to use fifty fabrics instead of one.

I think the next border will be another plain one - a red narrow border and then another patterned fabric inside it. It will have to be a different red because I've used up the other one, but that's OK. At the moment the frontrunner for selection is the mid-blue with the pinky red paisley pattern on the far left.

I was thinking of using some more creams or golds - which is why the pile to the right below - but it made it too light in combination with the cream centre and the eye skipped over it. I like making medallion quilts because you get different decisions at each point so you have to stop and think about it ... but the risk is that stopping and thinking turns into just stopping.

We are having bleak and grey and windy weather at the moment - snow on the hills and two cats that have to be huddled together in a tight circle 24/7. For more design walls (including some real ones! not beds or floors!) see Judy's wonderful blog.

UFO sighting

2011-07-03T16:31:00.003+10:00

I'm not very disciplined when it comes to finishing off quilts. If something has lost my attention then it tends to lose it forever. Luckily, most of the time my enthusiasm carries me through to the end without too many problems; although my concentration span is short enough that I normally have about half a dozen projects on the go at once. So I have a few UFOs, but not an embarrassing number.

In August last year I spent a few weeks doing a broderie perse centre for what was to be a medallion quilt. Fun, but then when it came time to decide on the borders I lost patience and wandered off to the next thing, and the vase of flowers went onto the High Shelf (not as bad as the Bottom of the Cupboard, where all hope is lost).

For some reason I picked it up again and put these borders on it. Red and yellow. Great ... but now what?

Another floor cushion is born

2011-06-30T21:02:00.004+10:00

And a damn sight easier than a real baby, let me tell you. The string-x blocks went together quite well for the number of bias edges involved.

I learned from my previous wobbly double tracks on the first cushion, and tried to avoid straight lines on any points where there were multiple seams. So the more detailed quilting is on the nice flat plain green bits. The string bits just a get a token quilting line a half-inch in from the seam - trying to avoid the bumps! Not 100% successful, but lots of fun.

Here's the back. Despite my best efforts it really isn't any more invisible than the earlier zipper - but the big print does quite a good job disguising it!

Something to sit on in the sun in the family room. These winter days the sun patch can be the only warm spot in the house. It's on a north wall, same as the little upstairs balcony, so the whole room gets lovely sun in winter. The boys gravitate towards the balcony - mostly for chucking off experimental tissue parachutes - but this string arrangement is new. Apparently it's a warning system and defence mechanism in case the neighbours attack us. (The neighbours are a delightful retired couple who have shown no invasion tendencies to date. But perhaps it's best to be prepared).

Floor cushion #2

2011-06-28T16:11:00.003+10:00

I enjoyed making the floor cushion cover so much that I'm going to do another one - same colours and theme but a slightly different arrangement. I'll still use scrap strings, only this time over paper. The pieces are 3 1/2" by 8", and at this stage I will put them together into Bonnie's string-x block pattern here. Except a different size, and just using the hand-dyed solids in green and blue.

I haven't done a great deal of paper piecing, but when I do I use the pattern sheets from inside the quilting magazines as foundations. I've never followed a pattern in my life - so the pattern sheets are useless to me. And they make good paper piecing foundations! Win win.

Little felty flowers

2011-06-26T09:31:00.002+10:00

My first little woolly things are flowers! It seems appropriate. This is great fun - I sort of think of a shape, then cut it out from a piece of felt, and sew it on. Colours are whatever I think is pretty, and threads are whatever I think might look good, and then I stick it on whatever bit of the grey stuff is closest.

I'm sure this would work out much better in the end if I had a design, and a plan, and a pattern, and put a bit of effort and thought into shapes or placement ... but I just can't bring myself to.

Next I'm going to do a little sun. I'm getting inspiration from the very clever people here - aren't these cute? They have pdf patterns but I don't use them, I just look at the picture and wing it. If I wanted to print off the pattern I'd have to walk ten metres to the other computer, and that's not going to happen. Not while Toddlers and Tiaras is on. There seems to be a lot of geographical overlap between mad-keen quilters and mad-keen pageant families. Coincidence?

Floor cushion

2011-06-23T10:19:00.004+10:00

I made the blue strips mini quilt into a floor cushion in the end. I had the cushion (naked) in my sewing room for ages waiting for a cover, but it seemed like the boring old mending end of sewing so never got done! I hadn't thought of quilted cushion covers until I saw some beautiful appliqued and stitched floral numbers like this.

Clearly that floral concept I linked to is far too girly (and white!) for the boys to lie on grubbily in front of the heater, but I liked the idea of a quilted cover. It still looks a bit crumpled and wobbly, but in a cushion that's a good thing. I like the green fabric on the back too - this is my first go at putting in an invisible zipper. It's not particularly invisible, but I've learned how to do it now and will try better next time. It's very straightforward, easier than attaching velcro strips - my favourite method up to now - and much neater.

It looks like it's smirking at me for not being invisible. Maybe it is...

Haven't forgotten the wool felt

2011-06-21T21:49:00.001+10:00

I hadn't forgotten about the bundle of wool blend felt I ordered a couple of months ago ... in fact I've been picking it up and patting the layers now and again. I just thought that really I should finish the current hand sewing project (hexagons) before starting anything new. Which is sensible.

But then I had a little brain moment and remembered that somewhere, in a bag, in a cupboard, in a room, there were some dark grey bits of woollen fabric. My mother-in-law gave me some material years ago from her cupboard. There were all sorts in there but I was sure it included a few sizeable pieces of men's suiting.

So I made my poor long-suffering husband drag out bags from dark corners and sure enough; past the winter jackets, behind the bag of bras that don't fit, even past the wedding dress ... a whole big stripey bag of fabric scraps, including the dark grey wool. I could be completely wrong, but I have a feeling they're leftovers from suits or trousers that my father-in-law had made when they lived in Hong Kong.

All three feel like wool to me, but I thought I'd do the burn test just to make sure! I've always wanted to do this, it seems very scientific. Synthetics melt, cotton flames, wool smells like burnt feathers ... which all sounds very simple but my results were inconclusive. It burned rather than melted, and smelt like burnt hair, but there was a powdery residue that felt like melted plastic. So I'm scientifically saying it's a wool blend. That gives me a bet both way, and I'm going to use the lovely soft herringbone (in the middle) as a background for my wool felt embroidery thingy.

Fooling around

2011-06-20T13:59:00.000+10:00

I've just been mucking about with hand-dyed bits and chinese coins. Or possibly strings, or even strata. Whatever you call them, it's dead simple - bits sewn together and into long bits sewn together. How was that for a fabulous explanation of my technique - do you see why I don't have any tutorials here?

Just in blues, with a bit of yellow for lift. And then machine-quilted in those parallel lines. A bit lumpy at the moment as you can see. I'd like to blame the non-flash camera phone but it's not its fault at all ... it's the sewing. I like the double tracks though. This was a lot of fun to put together and will make a nice something. Mini quilt?

Chemo week here so more reading blogs than sewing. And throwing out the occasional comment, it's quite tempting to let loose the sound of your own voice. Fingers. Keyboard. When real life gets back on track the internet may well weaken its pull.

Bowtie completed

2011-06-14T20:55:00.000+10:00

I'm really pleased with how this turned out ... but not so pleased with the photography!! Still using the phone as a camera and it's not quite the same. For the quilting motif in the white squares I used Star Flower from the free motion quilting project. I just did three outlines and not the filler, but I think it looks lovely!!

The pink is an allover meander and parallel lines in the border. No great desire to keep going with the white - now I've conquered it :) - but I'm quite taken with straight line machine-quilting and working on something else now. I'll photograph it when the sun shines!! If only my phone had a flash.

And Sunday was just as nice as Saturday - farmers' markets in the morning, cold but a nice hot chocolate sorted that out.

Long weekend

2011-06-12T10:44:00.001+10:00

It's a long weekend here in Canberra and there has been a fair amount of sewing activity to match. First though, a big thick book wrapped in shiny plastic was delivered. I am very much looking forward to delving into this one .... but I haven't taken the plastic off yet. I'm savouring it. Excuse the quality of the photos - our camera is on the blink so this is from the phone.

I'm also enjoying quilting the bowtie quilt. I'm doing parallel lines in the border area - I always thought they would be a pain to do, because of having to mark them. I know from experience that if parallel straight lines aren't parallel (or straight, or lines) they look terrible. BUT then I realised what that strange bit of metal in the bits and bobs drawer was for! It attaches to my walking foot and lines up with the line you just did! What a wonderful invention, I can't believe I didn't cotton on to this before. I'm going to be doing way more parallel lines now.

Sometimes I wish I was the kind of mother that uses the long weekend to take their children on long bushwalks with organic wholemeal snacks and educational flower-spotting. But I'm not. Saturday afternoon we all went to the mall, bought some lego and had afternoon tea at donut king. It was great.

Fighting the white fright

2011-06-02T12:39:00.000+10:00

I really love the modern quilts with clear prints and lots of white. I think they look fresh and pretty and lovely. But every time I sit down to make one, I veer away. For some reason I have difficulty in using great chunks of white or cream. I think it's because I started quilting in the 1980s, and there was really only one choice - a selection of matching pastel or country prints together with a "background" fabric. Acres of quilters muslin or unbleached calico to be hand-quilted with a feathered wreath.

But it's time I got over it. So I chose a nice simple block that I hadn't made before (Bowtie), some plain white and a selection of pretty prints in pink(ish) and yellow(ish). The photos show a bit more yellow than the reality. The blocks went together wonderfully easily, and this is the layout of the blocks. The quilt will probably finish about 55", so toddler-sized. I'll do a white border too just to make perfectly sure my phobia is cured! Is this aversion therapy?

The next question is the quilting - I like the closely-spaced horizontal lines that people do. But I also like the ornate swirls, and all that white might call for something a bit fancy. More thinking needed.

In which I show another character flaw

2011-05-29T16:13:00.000+10:00

I think this guilty pleasure shows that I am not a good person, although I'm not entirely sure how. I am sure several of the deadly sins are involved, but which ones? This is what I do. When I'm reading my way through the quilting blog world (and it's been a chemo week, so I've been doing much more reading than sewing) I stop when they mention a town. Perhaps where they live, or where they shop, or work, or someone is visiting from there.

And then I go to www.realtor.com, and see what I could buy if I sold up and chose to move there. Now this is only fun if you currently live in an area of unrealistically overpriced real estate, like me, and you can imaginary-shop for all these amazing mansions on vast tracts of land with bathrooms for everyone in the house including the cats. Is this stupid? Yes. Do I have a job in rural Iowa? No. Would I want to live there anyway? No. But if I did.... I could buy a big damned house. And when it comes to big houses, domestic comfort and some seriously swagged interior curtaining, there is nothing like the US of A.

I don't normally make this shit

2011-05-24T20:42:00.000+10:00

I am not one for making pincushions, mug rugs, placemats or really any small decorative items. I can admire them, but I know what they would end up as in my house - bits of crap clogging up the sewing room. Which is clogged enough, trust me. I did make some Christmas napkins in 2009, and there was the great craft-stall-fail bag fiesta. I still have all those bags in the wardrobe in the guest room. I'd like to think my houseguests have been quietly making off with them, but I'd be kidding myself. They are not desirable items.

But, on Saturday, I tidied the sewing table. It was an inch thick with dust, and small sewing items, and papers, and threads all tangled up, and pens that don't work. And just MASSES of needles. Sometimes in pincushions, and sometimes into random scraps of fabric, and sometimes just lying there. So I decided to make a needlebook!!! Like some 19th-century miss with too much time on her hands, although I had the massive advantage of being able to google "needle case pattern" and take it from there.

I never follow patterns, so I read over a few of the instructions, closed the computer and did it My Way. I couldn't be bothered doing anything very fancy, although I also couldn't be bothered changing to a walking foot, which in hindsight was a bit foolish as the quilting went quite puckered. I also decided this would be a good time to machine-stitch binding, for the first time ever. It doesn't look too bad, I might use it in a quilt one day. The worst corner is the one above, honestly. The others you can't see are much better.

Mission accomplished, I now have something bright and easy to find with all my needles altogether. I can now avoid all small sewn items for another year.

Wonky owls finished

2011-05-20T16:34:00.000+10:00

Here are my wonky owls, all bordered and bound. After a bit of trial and error I went with a plain grey border - I had originally planned to put the owl print as a nice wide feature border, but it was just too busy! And on this quilt, too busy is busy indeed.

I went to quilters' day time meeting on Wednesday for the first time for ages. It was lovely just to sit quietly and sew on my hexagons! I still don't really know anyone there, but everyone's very kind. So I sit and sew and listen to the stories of grandchildren and house moves and all sorts of quilts. I was completely exhausted by the end though, but worth it.

But how do they all go together?

2011-05-15T15:00:00.000+10:00

I've been happy sewing up my hexagons the last couple of weeks - but now I'm thinking I should have put some thought into the bits I was sewing! I'm not entirely sure how they go together, although it shouldn't be too hard to work out. I have a map, after all.

I am quite sure that I didn't do it the most efficient way though … there are going to be some wobbly seams and fabric wrenching to get through to fit them all together. I am not sure how I'm going to finish it - the age old problem of the hexagon quilt. I don't fancy the thought of a bound hexagon edge; I mean, I like the look of them but not the reality of all those corners in and out. The same goes for a hexagon facing - a very clever finish but might be a bit fiddly. At the moment I'm leaning towards appliqueing it onto a square border, which will give me a much easier top to work with.

Here is a bracelet made by my very clever nine-year old in after-school care! Isn't it pretty?

Felt!

2011-05-03T13:50:00.000+10:00

I've long admired the folk art applique of Sue Spargo and those like her - it is colourful and free and interesting to look at. But I was intimidated ... I'm not an embroider and I don't know any fancy stitches or embellishment techniques. And some of the really cool stuff looks fearsomely complicated. But a few weeks ago I thought - bugger it, why don't I just try something simple and if it doesn't turn out it doesn't matter. So I ordered in some pieces of wool-blend felt.

25 colours from Feltorama. The wool blend isn't as nice as the pure wool, or the felted woven wool, but it's a fraction of the cost. If I get really into this I'll get some of the nice stuff.

I also bought some background - it looks quite grey in both the photo and real life but it's actually a khaki weft with white warp. I wanted something neutral and neither light nor dark. I'm going to make a 60 x 60 cm cushion cover with maybe flowers and stuff on it! At this stage I think I'll be sticking to blanket and running stitch but if I'm feeling adventurous I might branch out into feather stitch or something. I don't know how to do that but, frankly, how hard can be when I have the whole internet to teach me. The real question is - do I start now when I really want to, or do I be a good girl and finish the hexies first.

Curse you, world

2011-05-01T15:38:00.001+10:00

Here is some depressingly useful sewing - headwraps! The chemo has kicked in and I am now an unappealingly hairless mixture of stubble and mange. In my pre-chemo buying frenzy (because EVERY human activity is tolerable if you've shopped for the right clothes) I bought a lovely knit headwrap - but there were only a couple of prints and I wanted more! One for every outfit! So Easter Saturday I bought some stuff at Spotlight and made some more. They don't look very exciting on the ground.

Much better on my head.

I also bought some squares of lawn/voile and hemmed them; for when I want the cleaning-lady look. I also have fancy scarves, and hats, and I will get a wig too - although I'm not too thrilled with the wig concept. But sometime in the next six months I might want to go out without being quite unmistakably a cancer patient. The pale blue voile is a beautiful print, just slightly too light for quilting I think.

Although I am very impressed at my cleverness, I can't help feeling that the world is not right, and I am one of nature's donors of half-arsed charity craft items for the infirm... not a recipient.

Why do I blog?

2011-04-29T10:26:00.001+10:00

I've been reading a few posts on blogging, trying to make money from craft and design, the pros and cons of advertising and charging for tutorials. There have been some wonderfully honest and thought-provoking reads out there (looking at you www.craftypod.com) and it's made me think - why do I blog? And this is what I came up with.

For me. So I don't forget what I've done. I know this is the universal cry of people who have NO readers - but it's true for me. Without a record I forget my quilts, especially the quick ones that I do for presents.

And, equally importantly, what are not my reasons for blogging?

I will never make money out of this. I have a well-paid government job that I enjoy. Even if quilting could bring in an equivalent amount of dosh (and it couldn't) I like going into an office and using my non-creative-brain-side and my qualifications.
I'm not contributing a single waft of inspiration to the crafting community. Everything I do has been done by someone else already - and I don't have techniques or tutorials that would add anything to the world.

So there you go. For now, the blogging world and me are in a happy balance of mutual low expectations.

Owls in a wonky nest

2011-04-26T14:01:00.000+10:00

My husband's cousin and his wife are expecting their third child in the middle of the year, so I'm getting started on a baby quilt. I don't know if it's a boy or a girl so I thought I would go with universally acceptable orange ... well, it's universally acceptable to me - I love orange, and yellow, especially for little ones. I went with liberated log cabins - easy and cheerful.

It will be nine squares (they finish at 13 1/2") plus a border, so about 50 inches finished. The real inspiration was this excellent owl fabric - in both orange and grey. I think maybe it was Halloween fabric? Or possibly not. If I cared, I would google and tell you. But I don't.

The next photo probably shows the colours better without the flash. Some of the blocks are perhaps a little too liberated to lie perfectly flat ... I'm hoping it will quilt out! A vain hope, but after a few baby barfs and washes it will all be lovely and crumpled anyway.

Buying me some background

2011-04-21T17:11:00.000+10:00

I didn't have nearly enough pale neutrals for the background of my hexagons, so I bought some more. Just the usual six-yard collection from www.thousandsofbolts.com - that's the amount they can fit in a priority envelope.

Amazingly, the Aussie dollar is worth more than the US dollar at the moment, so the madness of $5 or $6 a yard fabric from the US is made even more irresistible. The local quilt shop here is still stocking it all at $24/metre for basic prints, and more for designers or anything new.

I'm going to enjoy this pale creamy goodness I think.

Hexagons again

2011-04-18T16:46:00.001+10:00

I'm happily hexagonning away at the moment. I'm glad I started with something quite small though - I think there are about 400 hexagons in my plan and I've done around 150. Which makes me feel comfortable with it. If I had planned to do a 10 000 hexagon monster I would probably be throwing it all in the bottom of the Cupboard of Doom about now. I'll post a photo of the bottom of the cupboard one day, it's a sad little pile of failures.

Red, then gold, then blue. There'll be one other main fabric in the quilt, plus neutral backgrounds, but I haven't picked it yet. I think probably another warmish gold or maybe brown, or perhaps red. Plenty on the shelves to choose from.

Because I'm not feeling well, I'm spending a lot more time reading about quilts than doing them! I haven't sat at my machine for weeks, although I probably could. Reading blogs is fun, although like everything, if you do too much of it, it starts to all look the same. The very few genuinely creative people stand out a mile.

Orange peel progress

2011-04-12T15:02:00.000+10:00

These are never going to win an award for quilt photography, but at least they show progress. I've pinned up the orange peel and have started hand quilting it. I'm going with simple outline in matching thread.

It could take a long time because it's competing with the hexies for handsewing time. But there's a bigger problem - I may have made terrible mistake with the backing fabric. I thought it was 100% cotton but it has a funny slippery feel when you sew it - like it's dragging on the needle. You know some fabrics are light and happy and welcome being sewn? This is the opposite of that. I seem to have bought a Grumpy Check.

I had nothing to do with this

2011-04-10T19:47:00.001+10:00

A dear friend in Brisbane sent graffiti t-shirts for the boys to do, as a craft project while I'm not well. Son number two is fond of all forms of art and craft loved the whole concept, as expected. Less expectedly, he took a while to think about what he wanted to write. He even google imaged "caution signs". Then he took the t-shirt and the markers off for a while and did his shirt, all by himself.

Isn't he clever? Although I think the true genius is on the back. I am not sure if this means I need to have a chat about religion or if my hard-line atheism is working as intended.

He wore it to a six-year-old birthday party this afternoon. I forgot to ask if there were any comments.

Trying something new

2011-04-04T16:16:00.000+10:00

Here is a hurdle that I haven't wanted to leap over in twenty years quilting ... paper piecing! I have never really liked the end results of hexagon piecing because I associate it with traditional quilts in pastels. But, of course, you can do whatever you want with them!!! And when I saw Bonnie's no fuss method over on quiltville.com, I thought I would give them a go.

Of course I do it the even-bodgier way. I just very roughly cut the hexagon shape (bigger than the template provided, I like a good solid overlap),then fold it over with my fingers and tack into place, then sew it to another one as per Bonnie's excellent instructions. I'm not sure how well they're going to hold together but looking good so far!

Isn't this pretty? This is for the next set of flowers, around a red centre.

The hexagon drafting was quite a hit in the house, both kids wanting graph paper to make pretty patterns with. And I quite liked it too! According to this plan the finished item will only be about three feet across, which isn't good for anything, but I figured it was better to start with something small. So I don't get horrified and give up.

"Limes and Grapes" finished

2011-03-30T20:48:00.001+11:00

I've decided to start naming my quilts - maybe it's a maturity thing! I feel that I can finally call something a name without feeling like a complete tosser. So this is "Limes and Grapes" for, hopefully, self-explanatory reasons.

It's pretty straightforward - big stitch quilted in embroidery floss which has been fun to do. I've been out for the last few weeks with health issues, and this has been my first finish for ages. It was very therapeutic to sew the last bit of the binding down! No, I wasn't watching the cricket while I did it. That's quite random.

An old one

2011-01-29T14:18:00.000+11:00

We've just had another week at the beach - no sewing as usual, just surfing, sitting, drinking beer and doing 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle!!! I took a photo, which is pretty sad, but it was the most I accomplished all week.

Here's an old one to show some quilting photos - I did this in 2005 I think, when I was just starting machine quilting. I wanted to do something reasonably complicated, so carefully marked in the cables and feathers with pencil and tried to stick to the lines! With limited success, I haven't done that again - now it's freehand or nothing.

It looks OK I suppose - but what on earth can you do with it? It's too white and stiff to be useful for a baby, and far too small for a bed. It has been folded up in the cupboard-where-quilts-go ever since.