Quilting Twin

2012-01-19T11:00:00.000-08:00

This quilt was a scrap monster, it ate up so many pieces from my scrap drawers.

I'm glad to be able to shut the drawers easily, glad that I have another quilt top nearly completed, but most of all I'm glad that I can clean up my sewing area and restore some order. This sort of project is so unorganised and messy, after a while it really gets to me, and all I can think of is finishing it and getting my life back. It's a strange attitude. If I didn't like these quilts I wouldn't make them, and yet they drive me nuts while they're in progress. Next project is going to consist of neat piles of carefully chosen fabric, not a sea of chaos.

It refused to become rectangular enough, so I will have to add some bits top and bottom; I'm thinking something from my drawer of 3.5" squares will do the trick. But it can wait a while, there are other things I have to work on.

I'm doing a very strange quilting project; it's for a lady whose son was part of the winning crew on a boat in the Sydney to Hobart yacht race. He gave her the flag, and she wants it turned into a quilt to snuggle in when she's feeling down. She has cancer, so this quilt will end up being like a hug from her son. The flag is polyester knit, the batting is two layers of flannel and the backing is polyester poplin; it's an awkward combination to work with. It's 105 " x 95", absolutely huge, and she wants the cords left attached, so it's going to be an odd thing to quilt. It's a worthwhile thing though, I hope it brings her a lot of comfort.

My area is all tidied up, ready for the next lot of sewing; what a lovely feeling that is! My word from last year is still a favourite. Onward!!

2012-01-15T11:53:00.000-08:00

I had a list of things to accomplish on the weekend, but I was sidetracked by my scrap projects. I just sat in the sewing room and stitched little pieces together, and it was wonderful.
This is the major project, and it's devouring scraps at a great rate.

I've used up all the tiny ends of strips that I collected, now I'm moving through all the other scrap drawers and weeding out bits to use in this. I love the effect of all those random tiny scraps, and the off-white spiral moving through them. It's so lovely to be enthusiastic about a project; I always enjoy sewing, but sometimes it doesn't take much to draw my attention elsewhere. Not with this design though, I just want to sit at the machine and feed more pieces through.

I want it to be more rectangular, so the top and bottom strips are going to be 3" finished, and the sides 2" finished. I can also see some more drastic measures will be necessary to get the proportions that I want, but I'm still planning what that will be. Maybe crumb piecing? Who knows.

I needed a lot more pieces for the scrappy cross blocks, so I pulled out the drawer of 3.5" squares.

I have way too many of them, remnants from three projects and all the scrap cutting I did last year. So I selected some that would work in both the projects on the design wall, and cut a 1.5" slice from them.

That little slice goes into the cross block pile, and the remainder goes into the scrappy spiral pile.

I'm making nine-patches from those little slices too, it's really working out nicely. I'm using up a heap of scraps, it feels like a good way to start the year.

Last week Matt took all the dogs for a walk down the Heyson Trail; this is a picture of the Staffies, all sitting still for once. Jessie was buzzing about in the long grass, a law unto herself as usual.

What is the collective noun for a group of Staffies? A scramble of Staffies? They are a rambunctious lot.

This is what they normally look like, unless ordered to sit down for their photo.

2012-01-13T20:42:00.000-08:00

A couple of other posts that resonate with me

Beth Ferrier about being brave

karendianne about creativity

Nancy about scrap piecing

As much as I want to make totally scrappy, random quilts, I just can't. I spent 15 minutes this morning unpicking a white shirting scrap in one of my projects; in my eyes it destroyed the whole look that I was aiming for. A 2" x 2.5" piece dragged me to a standstill, because I hated how it interrupted the design. This morning I whipped the piece off the design wall, replaced the offending bit, and now I'm ready to build it bigger. All the time I could hear a voice telling me to leave it be, overlook it, go with the bigger picture. One day I may be able to do that, but not this day. Today I'm just happy that scrap is gone.

This is my design wall this morning ( or part of it, there's more to the left, but I'll show that later).

Some of the cross blocks from the 3.5" scrap pile. I like these a lot, but....

I had way too many little pieces, when each block only used four of them. So I am going to make some of these blocks;

12 scraps per block, much more respectable way to whittle down the pile. And it will also help use up the drawer full of 1.5" squares, that will no longer shut because it's crammed so full.

This is a UFO that I still love, and still want to finish, but I'm just sad that I used such weird red fabric for the centre cross. It's not something I'd ever buy meterage of, so it must have been a FQ in a bundle or something. And in my Use-it-up phase I just slapped it next to those nice repros and called it done. Don't like it at all, but I need to overlook it for now. I'm going to make a shedload of these blocks and then see if the horrid red still stands out. Bet it doesn't, but we'll see.

This embroidered piece is something I made in 1982, as a gift for Mereth. I thought she could make a cushion cover or something from it, but somehow it came back into my possession. You can't really see from the photo, but it has some brown foxing marks on the calico, and I don't know whether to soak it and see if they come out, or tea-dye it to disguise them. I'll ponder that this weekend. I took the design from a McCall's book, and though I really enjoyed doing it, I've never repeated the exercise. I'll finish this, probably as a framed piece, and then see if it inspires me to do some more stitcheries.

These are some of the scrappy bits of 2.5" strips that I saved all last year. I have a couple of projects planned with them, but I quite like the look of them separated with horizontal spacer strips. It's sort of like those DNA tests, with all the little vertical lines. Simple and effective.

I've spent three hours in the garden this morning, time to get into the sewing room and make some progress. I hope to have lots more blocks finished before bedtime tonight.

2012-01-12T22:21:00.000-08:00

I never did sit down and work out any New Year's resolutions. The whole holiday season went by way too quickly for any sort of reflection or introspection, which is not a good thing. Time to think and plan is important, and I don't seem to have had any. On New Year's Eve Doug, Bev, Mereth and I were watching episodes of The Virginian and totally missed the moment when it became 2012. So we didn't even toast the New Year, which is good, because I was stopped and breathalysed on the way home, and it would have been very embarrassing to have been over the limit!

It's been interesting to read other blogger's New Year posts, and find my own thoughts echoed. I agree with a lot of what Carrie says in her Clean Slate post; it's so hard to choose a direction and then stick to it, hard to know what to choose to spend time on, and it's scary sometimes too. But without new directions and the willingness to take a risk, life just become more of the same old stuff that didn't thrill the first time around.

My word for this year is Consider. Instead of stumbling along without any real thought about what I'm doing, I want to take time to look at options, choose what I need to do, think about the consequences, plan a course of action, enjoy the rewards. I'm tired of life just swirling by in a mad rush, and grabbing at opportunites, rushing to fill obligations or regretting what I didn't get round to. And I want to be more considerate of other people too, spend more time with friends and family and have a stockpile of good times to look back on. The way life is now, I mostly just work, and that's not always fun.

I need a plan for my quilting, a list of new projects and a schedule for my UFOs. I'm certainly not disciplined enough to do one a month; if I'm in UFO mode then I want to finish three or four all at once. So I will just list what I would like finished by the end of the year, and dedicate some time to that; I'll group them by the amount of work needed to get them to a completed top, and then try to spread them out during the year, so that I do one major one and three or four smaller ones at a time.

And quite a few are going to be abandoned or repurposed. I still need runners and tablecloths and potholders, so that's where some blocks will end up. I love seeing a whole heap of things finished, I've really enjoyed the times in the past where I dedicated myself to completing stuff, so I look forward to doing it again now.

As for new projects, I want to make gorgeous quilts from my 'good' stash. I've spent years making scrap quilts, donation quilts, utility quilts, Use-it-up quilts, and now I want to make quilts that I'm proud of, ones that I would like to be associated with. Time to finish an applique quilt, instead of just starting the blocks. Time to piece something intricate and original. Maybe design a stitchery quilt, or a celtic knot. Maybe I won't get time for any of that, but it's fine to have all those new projects as goals. Aim high and far, and see where I end up.

2012-01-12T01:38:00.000-08:00

The sewing room is set up the way I want it, just have to bring my design wall down from the hall.

I love having enough space to have an ironing board set up next to the machine, and whenever space permits I like to have a U-shaped sewing area. Just knowing that I have things arranged the way I like it makes me want to get in there and sew, sew, sew. This area is an enclosed verandah at the back of the house, and it's plenty big enough for my sewing, and to have the treadmill set up. It's such a luxury having space again.

I haven't brought any of my stash to the new house, I want to work on the precut pieces I have,and sew up a kit or two. It would be counter-productive to clutter up my sewing space with fabric that I'm not actually using, and it's nice to have a lightened version of my sewing space. There's room to move, and no piles of stuff to make me guilty. I should be able to get some things finished in my streamlined setup.

I'm going to be keeping track of my stash this year, and trying to stay within the bounds of only buying as much fabric as I use up. I have a pile of tops that need backings, so they will be a priority. It's a great way to use up a heap of fabric very quickly, and it puts the figures in the black. So long as I don't use it as an excuse to splurge on new fabric....

The last time I was in Adelaide I bought some material that I needed to finish two tops, and then left the bag on the couch at John's place, so I haven't been able to complete those. How infuriating! I will pick it up next time I visit.

All last year it seemed I was working with 3.5" strips, and I had lots of scraps after I'd cut out what I needed for my projects. I cut the ends of the strips into squares, 2 or 2.5" slices, or 1.5" bits. I just stockpiled them all through the year, and now it's time to do something with them. I had these cross blocks in mind all along, though I don't have a final quilt layout planned.

2.5" x 3.5" rectangles

2" x 3.5" rectangles

1.5" x 3.5" rectangles

I just know I want lots of them, and I'll have fun coming up with an arrangement later on. First I need to cut lots of the triangle pieces and then I'll be off, sewing like a mad thing.

2012-01-09T04:14:00.000-08:00

Oh good golly gosh! I'm a tired little vegemite. We had a very busy weekend, lots of socialising and twice as much gardening, and now it's time to start work for another week. I think I'll come home after the postie run and have a nap.

We had a family barbeque on Friday night, which was lovely. It's hard to get all of us together over Christmas, with extended family committments, so Friday was the first date that suited everyone. We had a wonderful meal, sausages and steak and onions, with lots of salads and bread from the local bakery. Yum.

Our sister-in-law Susy is Italian, she was born in Italy and raised in Australia, so is bilingual. We begged her to teach us some Italian words but she wouldn't; she did thank Bev for hosting the meal. It started off 'Grazie, Beverley...' and then it was just a musical flow of sounds. I would love to learn Italian, I think that should be a resolution for the new year. Then one day, when I eat my way around Italy, I will know what to order....and how to express my appreciation.

It's been lovely and cool and rainy, good weather to sort through piles of quilts and lay them on the bed for a rest. They've been folded up for nearly a year, so it was more than time to go through them. We'll let the folds relax for another few days, then refold them onto my new shelves. I was lucky enough to find three sets of these steel shelves, and I think they will make a good home for our teetering piles of quilts.

The garden kept me busy, it was ideal weather to get things repotted and comfortable for the next hot spell. I fell in love with a hanging basket of petunias in a nursery, but balked at the $25 price tag, so I bought a heap of seedlings and hopefully mine will end up even nicer.

It's a lovely hanging basket, I've had it for a few years and wish I'd bought another two or three, as I haven't seen them again.

I'm gradually getting my sewing room set to rights, but it's a slow business. Everytime I sew something I end up with a gigantic mess. I need to find everything a home.

I put together 5 sets of metal shelves, now I just need to get everything organised. Each set has between 68 and 76 bolts, so I've tightened at least 350 this weekend. I'm a bit over the whole 'some assembly required' thing, especially as Mereth and I built a pantry cupboard for her as well. I have earnt myself some sewing time this week.

My containers full of strips and snippets and bits are overwhelming me, so I will be working hard to empty a few. A blog reader sent me this link to a project she's working on, inspired by a scrap quilt I made 3 years ago. Diane has done a wonderful job, her quilt is beautiful. It makes me want to play with my scraps again.

2011-12-31T06:51:00.000-08:00

Seonaid had a flight to Queensland on Friday, so I drove her down on Thursday. Mereth was supervising some work being done on her house, so she didn't come with us. It was so funny when we got to John's place, he hugged us both and was chatting away for quite a while before he said, 'Where's Auntie Keryn?' Seonaid and I just stared at him, and he finally twigged that I wasn't his mum. 'OMG!!!' he kept saying 'You really got me!' as if I was deliberately trying to trick him. The last time he got us mixed up he was 5 years old, and burst into tears when he realised the person he'd been talking to was not his mother after all. It's very confusing to children.....

We went shopping with John and Liz, met up with Seonaid's mate Angus and all went to Sushi Train, where we demolished about 15 plates between the five of us. I tried to master chopsticks, I really did, but I would starve if it weren't for a fork. Angus gave me a lesson in the correct way to hold them, and I brought a pair home with me to practice with; it's not important in the grand scheme of things, but it would amuse me to be able to eat a whole meal without the benefit of western cutlery.

Seonaid's flight was 6.15am, so it was an early night for me, I was paranoid about sleeping through my alarm and not getting her to the airport on time (we have been there and done that before...). All went well the next morning, and I triumphantly waved her off into the terminal in the the predawn light. I arrived back at John's for a much needed cup of coffee, only to get a text from her saying the flight was delayed for two and a half hours. For crying out loud!! At least I could crawl back into bed for a sleep, she had to sit and wait in the airport lounge, poor girl.

John and Liz took me to a wholesale food warehouse as a treat, and it was thoroughly overwhelming.

Even the carpark smelt of coffee, spices and smoked meat; inside were aisles of cooking equipment, tinned food, loose and bagged spices, imported foods, restaurant supplies, industrial cooking pans, a huge deli and freezer section, 20 kilo bags of rice and flour, supplies for brewing, bottling and preserving. It was fantastic.

There was shelf after shelf of white restaurant china, and also pretty coloured cookware, it was so tempting.

Pretty pink.......

I asked John to stand next to these stockpots, to show how huge they were. He adopted his standard photo pose, eyes shut and cheesy grin and rabbit ear fingers. That boy!

I wasn't real keen to try these sugar coated Chickpeas; I like roasted chickpeas as a savoury snack, not sweet. I think they were Turkish.

The spices were wonderful, so many different ones, I spent ages choosing what I wanted. This is not even a tenth of what was on offer, and everything came in different packages, from 100grams to a kilo bag. Wonderful stuff.

I could bottle my own beer, or press fruit with these gadgets. There were industrial tomato mills, and sausage meat grinders and pressure cookers, it ws fascinating.

We got a trolley full of things to try, including mint haloumi and chili mettwurst and different curry mixes. I really wanted this bag of rice, just for the bag; It's so pretty!

Alas, we had a lunch date elsewhere, so we couldn't stay as long as I wanted; we will go back with Mereth on our next trip. I had a great time, but after lunch I was so relieved to be on the road home. I'm not really into all the hustle and bustle of the city. Dolly was hysterically glad to see me, and I had just enough time before sunset to water my garden and set it all to rights. Hopefully life will calm down a little bit now, and I can settle into my new house.

2011-12-30T23:07:00.000-08:00

Christmas was such a whirlwind, the last two weeks are just a blur. It was a madhouse, but not solely due to the time of year. The volume of mail and parcels we helped deliver was incredible, which kept us more than busy, but added onto that was the work of moving into a lovely little house just down the street. I noticed it was vacant two Saturdays before Christmas, picked up the keys four days later and managed to have nearly everything shifted the next weekend. My brother and a mate did all the heavy lifting, which was so good of them, and now I'm settled in for at least 6 months. More about that later.

DD Seonaid showed up last Thursday, with most of her wordly goods packed into her friend's ute, and everything was unloaded into her room; she's finished her job at Parachilna, and is going to live in Adelaide for a while, with her cousin John. I really can't remember what we did next; I know there was shopping for last minute things, and dinner at the brother's place, but none of it has been written to the memory banks.

We had Christmas here, lunch with the Doug and Bev, which lasted till three o'clock, very leisurely, then it was home to pack, for a quick trip to Adelaide to spend Boxing Day with John and Liz. Liz cooked an honest-to-goodness turkey, which was quite unusual for us. We have prepared turkey breast roasts every Christmas, but we've never had a whole bird before. And I'm not sure I ever would go to the trouble myself, no matter how nice it is.

After lunch we went for a walk on Henley Beach, and had a cup of coffee right on the beach front. It was a lovely bright sunny day, but very windy, as you can tell from Seonaid's hair.

I guess the seagulls did well out of the Christmas parties on the beach. There were plenty of them around.

Back home again on Tuesday, and Seonaid proceeded to cook up a storm, making multiple batches of gingerbread cookies. These cookies are her alltime favourites; we had a huge collection of cookie cutters when she was little, and I used to make the dough and let her and her brother loose to cut out all the shapes.

This is a cookie cutter roller that Mereth found in an op-shop many years ago. It made heaps of cookies very quickly, but I think I prefer the individual cutters.

This time we decided to ice them, so I googled Royal Icing, and away we went. It was so much fun, not too much mess to clean up afterwards, thanks to a tip I read somewhere. If you pile the icing into a piece of gladwrap and roll it into a tube, the whole thing can be put in the icing bag. Pull the end of the glad wrap through the hole in the piping bag, snip off the excess and it's ready to go. If there's icing leftover, just store the gladwrap tubes in the fridge. It was so easy! We didn't even need to wash the piping bag with this method.

The camels are my favourite.

This is getting too long, and I have to get round to Doug and Bev's for New Years Eve drinkies, so I will finish this later on. I can't believe all the activity I've managed to cram into the last three weeks; small wonder I need a rest!

2011-12-15T04:13:00.000-08:00

I made a start on joining the blocks last night, but realised one thing really quickly.

This will only work with blocks that are the correct measurement! I'm a 'fudgey' sort of quilter; I aim for perfection, and when it doesn't happen I shrug and fudge the results into a passable top. The key is to aim for perfect in the first place though; if I just throw things together at every stage, it all adds up to grief in the final assembly and quilting.

The blocks I've already made are somewhat, um, individual in their measurements.

They HAVE to measure 9" from edge to edge, and 11" from corner square to corner square.

Lots of them don't.

Out of 14 there are maybe 6 that I can use with this setting method. There is just no room to manouvre with a set-in seam; there's no wiggle room left. So the blocks that just won't do will go into another project, and when I start constructing the next lot of blocks I will take a lot more care to see that they come out right.

I think I swapped sewing machines halfway through these blocks, and also changed the method of piecing them, when I realised they were going askew. As much as I liked the way I started with, sort of sewing in rows throughout the block, it just didn't stay nice and square.

Starting with a modified nine-patch and adding pieced corners results in a much more accurate finished measurement.

It's a good thing I'm in the mood to be persnickety, and take my time over these blocks; sometimes I just want to quickly arrive at the finished top, and other times I want to concentrate on enjoying every seam and patch. This is one of those quilts.

2011-12-12T11:54:00.000-08:00

So what's next on the design wall? I'm thinking I may work on these blocks, (scroll down to see them) which have been on hold for quite a while. I spent days searching through old CDs, trying to find the ancient ebay photo that was the original inspiration, but Mereth was the one who finally found it on her spare hard drive.

The setting still intrigues me, and I want to try to do it with all those set-in corners.

I think women used this setting because it gives the look of an alternating block, but uses less fabric. I'll cut 6 7/8" squares, instead of 9" ones. If I had no easy access to fabric stores, and only a limited amount of the fabric I wanted to use, then it would definitely be a factor in choosing this setting.

If I can't handle all those set in seams, I will turn the block on point and add triangles to the corners. Then set that block on point.

The alternate squares of pink would be pieced of four triangles then, which I don't want to do, but in the long run it wouldn't be all that noticeable. But I'll try the plain squares first.

This antique quilt has the same setting, but the album blocks are aligned on point.

I like this one too, there is a strong secondary pattern happening here.

You could definitely have fun colouring it creatively to get a 3D effect

I have more examples of this setting, but I'm out of time, I'll post them later. It's time to go to work at the Post Office, delivering all that Christmas cheer; I see parcels in my sleep these days, but at least eveyone is happy to see me arrive. Not long till Christmas, and I'm busy busy busy!

2011-12-10T15:58:00.000-08:00

Last Friday Mereth and I went down to Adelaide to spend the night with John and Liz. We picked up her new computer from the warehouse, and then off we went to have tea at a sushi place in the city.

Mereth is terribly picky about food, so I don't think she enjoyed it as much, but I loved it. The plates were colour coded, so you could tell how much each one cost, and there was a photo menu to consult so you had some idea of what each plate contained. The problem was, the contents of some of the plates bore no resmemblance to the photos in the menu! Mereth liked the deepfried chicken strips, but you might as well be at KFC for those.

These trout and avocado rolls were very nice, but I honestly don't know what else I ate; not a lot of it was identifiable. All nice though, and I can't wait to take DD Seonaid there.

Not touching these baby squid though.

No-one else seemed particularly keen to try them either.
Next morning we were off to an orchard, as the cherry harvest is in full swing.

I've never been a big fan of supermarket cherries, way too expensive and not much flavour. They are very different when picked straight off the tree; I'm a big fan now.

We had a very good Devonshire Tea, with scones that were almost as good as Mereth's (she makes the best scones ever!)

It was a lovely way to spend a Saturday morning, and it got even better when John obligingly detoured to Tricia's Fabrics. And Officeworks after that. We're easily thrilled.

The time is rushing by so quickly, two weeks till Christmas! I'm fussing around with decorations today, it's always nice to have Christmas things all through the house. Though I only have one room, which makes it easier!

This is Bev's Christmas Village, which she assembles every year.

She began it when her granchildren were tiny, and 20 years later she has a wonderful collection. It's lovely to study it and see all the little characters shopping, chatting, shovelling snow, sledding, welcoming guests, carolling.

With all the fuss of moving over here and renovating, there wasn't time to add anything new this year, but we have a trip planned to the Christmas Shop in Adelaide, where no doubt Mereth and I will be tempted to start our own little Christmas kingdom.

2011-12-09T18:07:00.000-08:00

It's a lovely cool, grey day today, a little bit too rainy to work in the garden, so I am sewing with a clear conscience. It would be lovely to start something new, but I need to restore some sort of order to my sewing room before I pull out new fabric and start cutting.

I want to finish this top, as Seonaid likes it and would give it a home.

The centre is in one piece, and now I need to audition a few fabrics for borders. I bought half metres of these blue/green batiks to see if any would be suitable;

when I choose what I want it will mean a trip to Adelaide to buy the meterage that I need, but that's OK. I think I can deal with another trip down to the city, even though the traffic is really hectic at this time of year.

I realised that I'm drawn to these colours so much because they are what I like to wear. In fact I seriously think I'll get enough fabric for a couple of shirts, that way I'll get to enjoy the gorgeous designs in my wardrobe as well as my quilts.

I saw such lovely batiks at Trish's Fabrics, I'm afraid I'm going to have to start acquiring them. I'll always be a repro addict, but I think there's room to sneak a few batik quilts in as well.

The photo below shows two dogs trying to eat their own weight in dry food.

We had two 8kg bags of food, one of a high-fat puppy mix which they love, and the other an older dog mix. The brand was on special, but there was none of the junior mix they usually get, so by mixing the puppy and older flavours the nutritional levels were the same. (Got to limit that fat content, they could be portly if we didn't keep an eye on what they eat.) Well!! They thought it was brilliant to have all that food in front of them, and kept snacking while I mixed it together. Note that Pippi, faced with expanses of food, is mainly interested in what Dolly is eating. It's all the same, sweetheart!

They are so funny when we feed them together. Dolly sniffs her plate, looks at me to ask 'Will I like this?', and having tasted it stops to say 'Thanks Mum, this is great!!' All the while she's doing this, Pippi sucks up her share like a vacuum cleaner, then moves across to Dolly's plate and tries to polish that off as well. And because Dolly is usually talking to me and not really paying attention, Pippi cleans up her dinner. Mereth uses the excuse that she's a growing girl, but that won't work for much longer; Pips has done her growing up, now she's just going to get wider and heavier I think.

2011-12-07T23:45:00.000-08:00

Done, done, done!!

I can't wait to put something new up on the design wall, I've been living with this quilt for months. I'm really glad to have finished it at last.

2011-12-07T12:00:00.000-08:00

I usually start off with a comment about how slack I've been not to post, how busy I've been, how I must do better. But I won't do that today. Straight into some photos.

First up, the Honeycomb quilt, two seams away from completion, pinned and waiting patiently by my sewing machine for the last two days. I will sew one of those seams before I go to work, as Dog is my witness. Must see progress......

We go round to our brother's place twice a week for a delicious meal cooked by his lovely wife, and some leisurely conversation. Not so last Tuesday; SIL Bev was worn out, and not feeling the love for her Christmas tree, so after dinner Mereth and I pitched in to help decorate. It's fun to rummage through different decorations and she has a fantastic collection of baubles.

We decided on a red/gold theme and that tree was laden in no time. It needs more work, but we will do that after dinner on Friday. I hate to say my DB sat in a chair and rolled his eyes at our efforts; Christmas Spirit, he haz none.

I will get some good pictures of Bev's Christmas village next time, it's extensive and has lights and two trains, and snow and everything; magical!

We went down to visit Mereth's firstborn son, and went to a few places, no time to tell about that now. Suffice to say there was fabric acquisition. Remember when I tried so hard not to buy blue/green/acqua fabrics to finish this quilt? I snapped, after two years I'm still harbouring a longing for these colours. I can feel a batik stash coming on.

These are my usual choices, pink and brown and shirtings, with a bit of green thrown in for luck.

Notice the dog on the floor? Faithful girl, always underfoot. I think she does it to annoy me, so that I take her to the park.

And that seam is sewn, ready to be ironed when I get back from work. I'm even closer to having a finished project!!

2011-11-22T03:49:00.000-08:00

A whole month has gone past since my last post, how slack! I do like to post interesting photos of my progress on various projects, and there just isn't any progress happening, so nothing to blog about. Except work and work and work.

DD Seonaid made a quick trip home, which was lovely, but I failed to get even a single photo while she was here. We were too busy taking the dogs for walks, shopping, visiting and watching movies late into each night. Good times anyway, even without photographic evidence.

I've also spent a lot of time in the garden, planting and repotting and making shade structures to protect the plants from the summer sun. It's hard work now, but it will pay off later when I don't have to water everything so frequently.

I made two wicking beds, which are working brilliantly, and I have plans for two more. One is full of jalpenos, and the other has dwarf beans and tomatoes, silverbeet, spring onions and peppers. I have a few more poly pipe shade structures to build, And then it will be summer and too hot to work outside so I will have to start sewing again.

Yesterday I made myself sew most of the remaining blocks of the Honeycomb quilt, and it's nearing completion.

My attention span is waning, sewing the same block 300 times. I still like it, but I'm ready to move onto something else. With any luck, there are only a few more hours of work ahead, and then I can sew all the rows together and call it done. I will have to have a major clean up of all the stacks of fabric in the sewing room, and cut all the scraps down into useable pieces. It will be therapeutic to restore order to my workspace.
What will I work on next? Something with a bit of variety, but not anything difficult. Maybe it's time to start something plaid, like JulieK; her quilt is massive, very spectacular. I think she's the Queen of Plaid. If I made something like that it would certainly whittle my plaids down to manageable proportions.

I'm wondering if I should do Bonnie's Orca Bay mystery; I might make a few units of each step, so I can have fun sewing along with everyone else, but not commit to a big quilt that I might not have time to finish.

I love these cheerful little Johnny-Jump-Ups, they have been flowering for months. They self seed, so they'll be back next year too. It's wonderful when plants come up all by themselves, and don't need to be looked after.

2011-10-21T19:22:00.000-07:00

It was my birthday yesterday, and I had a lovely day, lots of email and texts from friends and family, friends popping in and then dinner at the brother and sister-in-law's place; birthday pizza! It's Mereth's birthday today, and you can read about why we were born 36 hours apart here, and here. Happy birthday Sis!!!

I seem to have completed most of the urgent things on my work list, so it will be a weekend spent in the garden and the sewing room I hope.

This is the herb garden I planted last week, in foam boxes to help insulate the root area from our extreme temperatures. I arranged them to leave a space in the middle and filled it with earth, which made an even bigger garden bed. The ground here is century old builder's rubble, not the best growing medium.

We've had some lovely rain, which is a reprieve from the hot days during the week. I figure it's a little window of opportunity to get some of the larger plants settled into the garden before the really hot days of summer, so that's what I'll focus on first. Then I will get all the pots into positions where I can cover them with shade cloth on the worst days, and mulch all the areas that normally grow weeds with vicious seedpods that cause the dogs a lot of misery. In my spare time, I'll clean up my sewing room.

I've already cut a heap of pieces for the elongated hexagon quilt, which had stalled for lack of little triangles; there are plenty now.

I aim to sew all the blocks into sets of four, then rearrange those on the design wall.
It should make it a bit easier to manage than the individual blocks. I'm getting impatient to see it in one piece, and get all the fabrics for it put back in the drawers; I don't want to start anything new until I'm done with this quilt.

We have only 2 and a half months left in this year, and I don't think I've completed nearly enough quilts. I want to have a mad dash to the end of the year, and get some tops quilted as well as UFOs finished.

How long ago did I make these blocks? I'd completely forgotten them?

All these were on my design wall at some time, I must get back to them, especially the 16 patches. I could clean out a lot of scraps just by making that simple block.

My first list will be projects that need to be sorted and completed; after that I'll list the tops in the order that I would like them quilted. The other goal I have is to exceed my 2010 total of 57 posts for the year. That was pathetic, I know I can do better in the remainder of 2011. Onward!!

Bold Seduction blooming against

the old stone of my Hall

2011-10-16T05:07:00.000-07:00

I can't take the Shoofly quilt down from my design wall yet, I just love looking at it throughout the day. I fall asleep looking at it, full of satisfaction at the colour combination and the beautiful geometrics of the block. The border pleases me greatly too, I love the triangles marching around the centre. It's wonderful to finish a project and be thoroughly satisfied with the result. I have to thank that long ago quilter for inspiration, the vendor for selling it and Bonnie for posting that photo that sent me hurrying to make my own version.

Of course I have leftovers, but I will add them to the spare parts pile; something tells me I haven't got this colour combination out of my system yet. (Check out the cute aluminium cannisters from the second hand shop; I just love vintage aluminium.)

Friday was a mental health day. It was a stormy start, I was racing around on my bike with lightning and thunder overhead, and rain bucketing down at intervals. When I stopped to deliver things people sympathised with me for the awful conditions, but I loved it. If I was at home working I would be inside and not aware of the fantastic clouds, the alternating hot and cold air, the strange gusts of wind from the east. It was amazing, and I got paid to be out there witnessing it. Good stuff.

When I got home Mereth had been working at her machine for seeral hours, finishing a customer quilt, and was ready to run away with me to Jamestown. We dropped the dogs off at Matt's, then were off on our little adventure. We always go to the op-shop there, where I fell in love with this vase;

it's signed by Henning Rathjen (1903 - 1968), a Melbourne potter, and his work is collectible. I really like those daisies around the rim. I love being able to Google things and find out more info.

We stopped in at the patchwork shop of course, to find a few essential pieces.

Over a long period I've bought three half-metres of the bottom cream fabric,and used all of it; I decided that I need to buy the rest of the bolt, or I'd regret it ever afterwards. I feel safe now, knowing I have that in the stash.

I couldn't resist getting a half metre of this fabric, just because. It will go in with all my other Pretties, and one day I'll know what to do with it.

We went to a couple of hardware stores for plants and bits & bobs, and the supermarket, then splashed out on excellent coffee for the trip home.

On the way we got thoroughly sidetracked by the clouds and the extraordinary light on the fields. We kept exclaiming, and pointing things out to each other, and stopping the car to take photos. We pulled off the road at one spot, and saw a tiny track over the hills that we had never noticed before.

It only took a moment to decide that we didn't have to go straight home, and that we could go and get 'lost' for an hour or two.

It was a great day to be driving on country tracks, not knowing where we were exactly and not really caring.

There were lots of other roads to explore, but we had to leave them for another day.

We stopped at a farm to ask for directions back to main road, and admired this mare and foal.

The owner told us he was a pretty blue when he was born, and keeps changing colour as he gets older. He's destined for racing, and he's got the legs for it.

The clouds got darker, and the light stranger, so we hightailed it home ahead of this cloud.

It looked like something from Lord of the Rings, threatening and portenteous, and coming in fast. We outran it though, and by the time we'd picked up the dogs and arrived home there was just a few minutes of rain left in it. We had a splendid day out, very refreshing, and now I'm ready to do some hard work in the garden. Thank heavens for weekends.

2011-10-11T05:27:00.000-07:00

I had every intention of finishing the Flyfoot top yesterday, but my day was hi-jacked by Dolly. She got a grass seed in her ear around 11am, and the earliest vet appoinment I could get was 4.15. She was in a lot of discomfort, so with Mereth's help I put some olive oil in her ear, which coats the awns of the grass seed and stops it working it's way further in. But she was still a miserable puppy, and wanted to sit on my lap all the time. I was working, so she had to be on the floor, and contented herself with sitting between my feet, head on one side and looking woeful. Every time I moved she scuttled after me for reassurance, right under my feet;I felt like I was wading through a sea of dogs.

At the vets he anaethsetised her and dug the offending grass seed out, and micro-chipped her as well. If she had to have a great big needle stuck in her neck at least she didn't know anything about it. I'm glad she doesn't weigh a few kilos more, she's on the edge of what I can safely carry; I sit her up over my shoulder like a baby, but Pippi is too big for that.

Home we went with the patient, who was recovering rapidly, and spent the next few hours frantically trying to lick my face, while staggering into the furniture and losing her balance. She acts like a happy drunk, leering at me as if to say 'I LOVE you! I reeeaally do!' and bumping into everything on her wobbly legs.

So the top didn't get finished yesterday. But today I was determined to get it all in one piece. About 7 hours later, it's done.

I don't know why on earth I thought I had enough of the yellow fabric to do the whole border; it didn't come close. I had to hunt down every last scrap to make the side borders long enough, and then I needed something to fill up the corners. I had heaps of HSTs left, and the Shoofly block was the easiest way to make a block that was 6" finished to match the border. It's cute, it's done, but it took way longer than I thought it would. Will I ever learn to plan my quilts out properly?

2011-10-09T05:43:00.000-07:00

I've had a reasonably productive weekend, but it seems to have gone by far too quickly. I still haven't finished any of my projects, and that is starting to irritate me. Must Try Harder....

I cut up a pile of fabric yesterday to make this stack of pieces for the border of my Flyfoot quilt.

Today I switched on the sewing machine and iron, then put on the DVDs of the appendices of Lord of the Rings, and watched close to 9 hours of documentary footage about how they made the movies. It's all excellent stuff, but as I've seen it all before I didn't have to watch every minute. I could follow along with a glance, and stop to watch the interesting bits, and it really helped me stay at the machine longer than I normally could.

I buckled down and finished the blocks, then cut out the setting squares, and the borders, using evey last skerrick of fabric from my stash and Mereth's. It took 3 and a half metres, and all I had left afterwards was two 8.5" squares. Talk about cutting it close!

I turned the pile of pieces into 156 HST units

and pressed them neatly.

I was busy sewing them into the border strips when I thought that I should really sew the blocks together first, and complete the borders last. Fine, I switched tack and in short order I had the blocks sewn into 4 sections.

Then I decided to give one yellow square with a stubborn crease a spray from the water bottle before ironing it. For some reason the brown from my ancient ironing board cover, which has been perfectly fine for three years, instantly bled onto the block and left a big dark stain. At this stage I was getting tired of the whole process, and I decided I'd keep going, and wash the top later to get the mark out. Then, as I was ironing the last strip, the iron touched a piece of plastic shelf matting and before I knew it I'd swiped pink melted goop all over another yellow square.

So it's all been put aside for now, and tomorrow I will unpick those two blocks, and replace then with the two spare ones, the only fabric left over, and I will be ever so careful when it comes time to iron them.

It's looking good though;I just hope there are no more incidents before it becomes a finished quilt.

2011-09-28T20:41:00.000-07:00

We have a shed!

All that's left to do is a bit of finish work, ridge-capping and downpipes etc, and I have no idea when that will get done. We're having wild and windy and wet weather here, which is messing the work crew around. Never mind, the end is in sight. Next up is connecting power and water, which could take weeks, and then I will need to have the place insulated and lined. I don't think it will be done before Christmas, so it will be another exercise in patience.

I can't wait to start landscaping the rest of the block, and moving stuff into the shed, and establishing a veggie garden and water tanks and.... But there's all my regular work to deal with too, so it's going to be slow progress. It's still exciting.

Mereth is in New South Wales, visiting DD2 and family, so I have Pippi while she's away. Pips keeps looking for Mereth, it's quite touching. When we go for a walk both dogs will run up to me to tell me what they've been up to, and then Pip will look all around for her mum. When we go to Mereth's house Pip races to the door and scrabbles at it impatiently, ready to burst inside and look in every room. But still no mum.... Mereth will get such a welcome when she gets back!

Not much sewing is being done; DD Seonaid dropped in at the start of the week, on her way to a friend's wedding. I even cooked a real meal for her; I don't spend much time on cooking these days, too much else to do. We rushed around on Tuesday finding last minute things, then she was off on the bus to stay the night with cousin John, before flying to Brisbane the next day. It's been years since I travelled out of state, I'm quite envious of all these other people getting to see a bit more of the wide world. I shall have to plan something for next year I think. I'll be driving down to Adelaide to pick her up tomorrow, so there won't be any spare time for quilting for a while. I have 23 of the Flyfoot blocks done, (only need 5 more) and some of the setting squares cut out, I just need a few hours so I can make some headway.

At least with all the rain I don't need to water either of our gardens; there's always a silver lining!

2011-09-18T22:52:00.000-07:00

We have a slab!

They did indeed use a lttle front-end loader to bring in the concrete.

I'm glad I didn't have to paddle around in that stuff, I've done my share of concreting. It was such a warm day it went off really quickly, so no chance for puppy pawprints.

Now we wait for the next step, which is the shed itself. If I was the impatient sort I would be climbing the walls about now. Luckily I'm quite philosophical about the protracted waiting time. In a month's time all this waiting will be immaterial, because the shed will be there. (Please please please let the shed be up in a month's time....)

I worked diligently on my Flyfoot blocks over the weekend, and I'm up to 19 now. They are flying together, it's amazing. Cutting them with the Go cutter really helps, the pieces just seem to spring into existence with no effort on my part. It's going to look very much like the original, but I will have to combine yellow fabric, as I don't have a piece large enough to do the whole thing. I can deal with scrappy.

And there may be a pieced border in there somewhere to, haven't decided on that yet.

My garden is taking up a fair bit of time now, and the weather is heating up alarmingly. I'm watering thoroughly, and repotting and taking cuttings so that when I get garden beds established I will have enough plants to fill them. Most of my plants are cadged from friends, or dug up from the side of the road, or rescued cheaply from nurseries where they are quietly expiring. The other day I saw a simple daisy in one garden centre that had a pricetag of $21. Gak! Who could afford that. So I will con tinue asking friends for pieces from their garden, and then whenever I see that plant it reminds me of the person who gave it to me. My garden will be a collection of friends as well as plants.

2011-09-14T17:47:00.000-07:00

There are always a few ideas waiting in the wings, ready to take over from my main project at a moment's notice. Sometimes, when I keep shoving them aside and working dutifully on what I should be doing, they get more and more demanding. After a while, I can't resist any longer.
As soon as I saw the picture of this quilt on one of Bonnie's posts I wanted to make it.

Then Mereth found it on Ebay as well . I'd buy it if I had the funds.....
So once I made the decision to use my elongated hexagons as leader-enders these blocks just jumped into existence in a matter of minutes ( or it seemed that way). I tried a couple of other blocks to see if I liked them, and they will fit in, but I like the Flyfoot block so much I will make the rest of the blocks in that pattern.

I've never made a Flyfoot block, never made anything with yellow setting fabric, and I had a pile of those strange greyed out browns that I would like to use up. That's three reasons to make it, and I only need one usually...

Unfortunately, my brown fabrics aren't nearly enough to do all the blocks, so I will have to use browns that have a more yellowish cast, but I don't mind. It's an unexpected colour combination, brown and yellow, but I'm loving it so far.

On the shed front, the formwork for the slab was finished on Tuesday, and they are supposed to be here today for the pour. Given how hard it is to access my block, I think they are going to trundle the concrete in using the bucket of a front-end loader. That's going to be fun. I'll take photos.

2011-09-11T04:18:00.000-07:00

All the comments on the previous post have been helpful. I particularly like the idea of post-it notes, and multiple lists, and blackboards or whiteboards. I'm determined to build a system that works for me, and that I can stick to. The problem I've been facing lately is that I finish the things I HAVE to get done, but not the things I want to do. I need to list 7 things a week that I'd like to do, and cross off one a day, in any order.

Today I wanted to work in the garden, so I sat down with a cup of coffee and started a list. First I wrote 'Plant seedlings in bigger pots'. Then I realised that I would have to make up some potting mix first, so I wrote that above the first item. And then thought that I should mix a bucket of liquid fertiliser to soak the seedlings in too, so I had to squeeze that in as well. It struck me that I usually write one thing on my list, and that thing involves a ton of other work before I even get to it. Then when I've worked for hours I get to cross one measly item off the list, and I feel cheated. So from now on I intend to write down every step, and cross them all off at the end of the day.

Further down the list I found myself writing 'Build fence at the side of the hall' and 'Pergola'. Today? I really need to keep my to-do lists achievable, and not include things that belong on a Long Term Goals list. And if I think of a job to do, but I don't have all the equipment or tools or supplies, I need to write it on a shopping list straight away, so I don't forget. When I've assembled everything I need, then I write it on the To-Do list.

I'm pleased to report that I did four things on my list today, and I will transfer the other two things to tomorrow's list. I'll get the hang of this yet....

I am two blocks over the half way point with this quilt.

I'm a little bit weary of sewing the same thing again and again, so I'm going to move onto another quick project and use this as a leader-ender for a while. It's getting a bit too dark, so I need to cut out a lot of medium value fabrics to make sure it stays cheerful.

One thing that has become a habit is taking the dogs for a walk each night. Our reward is the scenery, fresh air, exercise and magnificent sunsets. It's such a beautiful time of year.

2011-09-09T16:29:00.000-07:00

Two quilters that I really admire are Bonnie, of Quiltville, and Judy of Patchwork Times. They are both dynamo quilters; I have no idea how they achieve so much in the same 24 hours that I get each day. They are great role models for me; neither of them think 'Oh that's too hard, I won't bother, I haven't got enough time, it'll never work...' They just get in and do stuff, and then they blog about it. I want to be like them when I grow up.

One thing that Judy does is make lists and spreadsheets, and I've never been much of a list person. If I make them, I lose them, or forget them until days later; I get distracted, tired, my life gets hijacked by some emergency. Or when I sit down to make the list, everything flies right out of my head, and I'm staring at a blank page wondering what on earth needs to be done. It's really pathetic.

Lately my life has been a shambles of one 'urgent' job after another. I barely have time to package up one thing as done and dusted before I have to get right into the next one. I hate having to work like that, it wears me out, and then I find it very hard to recover my momentum. I'm not a dynamo person. Not now.

The way I worked when I was younger was in big cycles of manic effort, weeks at a time of non-stop energy and enthusiasm, then even longer weeks of nothing much. The manic part was great! I got so much done. In one 6-week manic phase I wrote my book on QAYG, and quilted all the quilts on my Janome, at the same time as running my family and household. I probably got 5 hours sleep a night, but I felt wonderful. There was a slow period after that, while I just pootled in my cottage garden and did the necessary chores around the house, but it was a recovery time after all that effort.

I'm quite a few years older now, and I can't muster that manic energy anymore. I have to pace myself so I don't run out of energy entirely, and it's been hard learning to do that. I prefer the boom and bust cycle, oddly enough. But now life is more even, without the huge highs and, more importantly, without huge lows. I'm grateful I'm still quilting and still enthusiastic about it all.

I run a pattern club for my digital designs that comes out each month, and I design between 20 and 30 patterns for that. I also have a website for those digitised patterns that keeps me busy with orders and enquiries. I help Mereth quilt the customer quilts that are problematic, or need complicated computerised quilting that she's not confident to tackle herself. I fill wholesale orders for my printed patterns, and printed pantographs. And what I haven't told the blog is that for the last 14 months Mereth and I have also done the mail run for our little town, which takes between 20 and 25 hours each out of our week. Small wonder I have no time! and maybe that's why I have no energy .......

I've done all this extra work to help pay for my shed, which I hope is going to be the start of the next interesting period of my life. Once it's up (next Wednesday they say they'll be here, fingers crossed) all sorts of options will be possible, and I don't even know which one will be the right one. It's going to be exciting and tiring and exhilarating and exhausting all at once. I really hope I have the energy to blog about it.

Which gets me back to the original premise of this long and rambling post; I need to learn how to make lists! There has to be a way to keep all these balls and dinner plates and bowling pins juggling in the air over the next few months. I'm sure Bonnie and Judy could do it, and so can I.

2011-09-06T22:46:00.000-07:00

The last two weeks have gone by in a flash, full of work and travel and family stuff. I've hardly had time to sew more blocks, so there's not much progress to report. I have 1/4 of the blocks needed on the design wall, and I am aiming to finish 20 a day for the rest of this week. That will see me to the halfway mark, and I'll be happy with that.

This is today's 20 blocks, waiting to be completed. It's not much, but every little bit counts.

It's a great help being able to cut 216 triangles, enough for 54 blocks in about 5 minutes. That leaves more time for actual sewing.

Sometimes quilts go together so quickly that I can hardly remember making them; I don't mind this one being a leisurely affair. I find myself studying the blocks on the design wall throughout the day, remembering fabrics that I'd like to include, making decisions about what works and what doesn't. The more pieces I put up, the more enchanted I am with those tiny triangles.

The photo in the book shows that those little hourglass blocks were made of two fabrics; the maker may have made those first, and used them to join the hexagons, rather than making a rectangular block as I'm doing. It would take too much planning for me to do that, but I do like the look of it.

2011-08-29T06:07:00.000-07:00

I had a cutting marathon on Sunday, stockpiling pieces so that I will be able to sew in any spare time this week.

I cut more than 130 of the elongated hexagons, using the ruler and rotary cutter. The triangles I cut with the Go cutter, and it made life so much easier. I stood for hours, cutting the hexagons, and the triangles were done in minutes. I'm rapt!
I've cut between a third and a half of the pieces needed, and I'll sew all those into blocks before I cut any more. I will need to see how the colours look, and whether I need to add in specific colours or fabrics when I cut the rest of the blocks. They are so easy to piece, I usually do 10 at a time, and they mount up quickly. I really like the way this looks so far.

Of course I can't stop fiddling with the different dies, and whipped up these two blocks just to test how accurate they were.

I seem to have started a pink and brown set of blocks now; my subconcious is telling me to use up some of the three drawers of pink fabric. I don't have any plan for these blocks, they are just experiments. Whenever I want to try something out I'll keep using pink and brown , eventually I'll have enough blocks for a quilt.

Spring arrived last Thursday. On Wednesday I was looking at the gardens around town and thinking 'Not long till Spring gets here..." and the next day everything seemed to have happened over night; daisies blooming, roses budding, butterflies dancing. That's Spring all right. I'm not ready to say goodbye to winter, but then I never am. I just hope it's a nice mild summer like last year.

2011-08-27T13:09:00.000-07:00

The dies for the Go cutter arrived last Monday, but I had such a busy week that I couldn't even unpack them. It made me work all the harder, knowing that when I finished my projects I would be able to play with my new toys. So I hurried to fill a really big pattern order, and slaved away at a custom quilt, and by Friday afternoon I could afford some time off to unpack the box, cut up some fabric and put the cutter through it's paces.

This is the die that I really wanted.

It was an experimental die, and they took it off the website the day after I ordered it, so I was really lucky to get it. I have to say that this HST die was the reason I decided to actually buy the cutter in the first place.　I don't like the dies that cut the triangles in a long strip; there is too much waste that way. But this group of triangles is very economical because they share sides with each other. I'm really pleased with this, and it's going to be very useful. If they get enough interest in this die it will be added to their catalogue, so I will leave a message on their site telling them how much I approve of this design. If you would like to buy one too, you could go tell them so that they know people want it.

The other die that I was waiting for was this one;

again, it's economical because the triangles are grouped together to minimise waste fabric. It makes a triangle that works with the 2" finished HST die to make Flying Geese units. I've made some FG units that turned out the correct size, and some Hourglass units that worked perfectly too. I'm going to put this die to work cutting pieces for a Flying Geese scrap quilt. I'll also be able to make Sawtooth Star blocks,
either cutting the squares with a rotary cutter, or with the die that came with the Go.

Even Mereth is happily cutting pieces with the cutter and planning how she can use them. It's not as accurate as she likes, so she will only use the units for things where that doesn't matter so much. I'm not such a stickler for accuracy, I just fudge and fiddle, so I don't really mind if the odd piece is a smidgeon too small. I make inaccurate cuts with the rotary cutter too, so it's all par for the course.

I have triangles everywhere, and none of them required any thought or effort to cut. I'm really enjoying myself with my new toy.

The tree guys were having fun with their toys too, including a chainsaw on a 12' pole.

I would hate to think how much trouble I could get into with things like that. Good thing they did it all. The bobcat guy showed up on Friday to do his bit, and now I have a site prepared.

With any luck I should have my shed within a fortnight, fingers crossed.....

2011-08-20T19:26:00.000-07:00

My elongated hexagon quilt is coming along slowly. I've had a couple of major cutting sessions, so there are pieces to sew when I have time. I fine-tuned the cutting of the hexagons, so that they would all come out the same size, and I worked out the best way to press all those seam allowances. I've sewn a couple of trial rows together, to make sure that it all fitted.

Now I will have to get busy and cut up a mountain of more fabric, because I need 324 of these blocks if I want to reproduce the size of the antique one (90" x 82").

I ended up making the units 3" x 7.5" finished, so I won't need as many as the original (390 !), I would rather have the units a little larger to show off some of the prints that I'm including. The photo in the book shows a lot of plaids and homespuns and stripes, and while I'll include some of those, I don't want it to read like a farm quilt. I want mine to look a bit more like a town quilt than a country quilt.

This would be a lovely quilt to handpiece, the only thing stopping me is the thought of having to trace all those shapes onto fabric; I just don't have enough time in the day to add that little extra step. Maybe one day I will have some more free time to spend on simple little chores like that.

I spent yesterday in the garden, potting and repotting flowers that are just itching for spring to get here so they can grow out of their pots all over again. I've been longing for years to have a garden on my own land, and this year I will finally be able to do that. Last week a team of guys came and shifted the fence on the side block back to the true boundary, giving me another 4m of land that my neighbour was borrowing.

Next week a guy is coming to take out three or four trees, clearing the way for another guy to prepare the site for a shed. Then yet another set of guys will construct a 7m x 6m shed for me. Once all that is done, I can survey what's left of the block and decide where to put garden beds and replacement trees. It's all very exciting, but it doesn't seem real, especially as it's taken 8 months to get this far.

And the shed? I haven't decided what is going in there yet. I could set it up as a little flat, with a kitchen and laundry and bathroom, leaving the front room of the hall free to become a classroom and shop again. I could invest in another quilting machine, and maybe have the shop back there, but no room to teach. I may even be able to rent a house, so I could have the new machine and the classroom and shop. But it's all undecided as yet. Still, it's nice to have some options and new directions to go in.

Dolly and Pippi really love having a larger yard to explore, and more gound to dig into enormous holes and mountains. I can't wait to get all this cleaned up and sorted out. My word for this year was Onward! And that's where we're going now.

2011-08-16T22:48:00.000-07:00

It was a hectic weekend, but in a good way.

First up, DD Seonaid arrived on Wednesday for a few days off. By sheer good luck Mereth's DS1 John was in town, and we had a wonderful family get together with our brother and sister-in-law. Lots of laughter and good food.
On Saturday it was the Crystal Brook show, and we spent an enjoyable morning visiting the exhibits and the vendors.

I even went up on the Ferris wheel with Seonaid; the last time we did this she was 7 years old, and gave me a heart attack by kneeling on the seat and hanging over the edge. That was the last ride I took her on! The seats in this ferris wheel had railings, making it much safer, and she's way more sensible now.
We left at midday and drove to Adelaide, meeting up again with John and Liz, for an appointment with Harry Potter.

I really enjoyed the film, but I was sad that it was the end of the series; it felt like the end of an era. Now we will wait till the final one is released on DVD, and then we can have our own marathon of Harry Potter.

Honestly, is this year's crop of films more than usually idiotic? The trailers were just rubbish, nothing that I could even be bribed to see. Absolute bunkum.

While we were at John's place he insisted we watch an episode of Hoarders. Truly, we're not as bad as those people, we just have a lot more fabric than the average quilter. And it's all stored neatly, so what is wrong with that? Nothing, but I'm still going to get rid of a lot of my scraps and older pieces, mainly to make room for new purchases. I've fallen off the No-Buy wagon this year, so I will have to downsize to accommodate the new arrivals.

In between work projects I've been cutting and sewing HSTs made with the Go cutter.

I'm having fun with it, and the finished units are accummulating rapidly, with hardly any work on my part; got to love that!
I don't know what I'll use these for, so they will just sit in the drawer for now; when I have a good idea for a quilt that uses lots of 2" finished HSTs I'll be all set to start churning out the blocks.

2011-08-08T05:39:00.000-07:00

I said in my last post that I was a Gadgeteer, and today my biggest gadget purchase arrived.

I've wanted one of these for ages, but I couldn't really convince myself that it was necessary, or an economical way to cut shapes. Then I saw that there are new die shapes that combine the pieces with very little wastage, and that decided it for me. The die that comes with the cutter is OK, but I don't know that I'll use it much, once my other dies arrive from the US. It's very wasteful if you cut all the shapes from one big piece, and too fiddly to position individual scraps of fabric over each shape. However, it's all I've got, so I'm playing with it.

I cut enough pieces for 12 HSTs with each pass, and built up a satisfying stack of pieces in no time at all.

Now I'll sew them all, and see how accurate they are. I'm quite erratic with my rotary cutting at times, so all I'm looking for is an acceptable degree of accuray; I'm used to fudging. Mereth took a stack home to sew on her machine; if she likes them we'll have a big scrap cutting session one weekend.

A year ago I was tempted, but didn't buy the Accuquilt Go; 12 months later I'm thinking that it can save my wrists from the pain of a lot of rotary cutting, make life easier on my hands and eyes, and get me off my feet during long cutting sessions. Some days it just hurts all over to stand at the cutting table; I must be getting old.

A die cutter can't replace a rotary cutter in my sewing room, but I hope that it will be useful for all the repetitive fiddly bits that are so tiring on the hands and eyes. And I certainly hope it helps reduce the stack of scraps laying around!

I've been doing a bit of sewing, trying to find the perfect measurement for the elongated hexagon quilt.

This is close, but I'll try again with an extra 1/2" in the height; It probably won't make a lot of diference, but the proportions will be closer to the original in the book. It's lots of fun to sew, I'm looking forward to getting this underway soon.

I've decided to pack away all the distracting bits and pieces that I use as leader-enders, and just sew some 16-patches. I've always wanted to make this quilt, in a 1985 Ladies Circle Patchwork Quilts.

It's so simple to whip up the 6" blocks, I think they will work well as a secondary project.

The weather is cold and rainy again, which makes working in the garden undesirable. I limit my gardening to picking the latest flowers, including lots of daffodils and jonquils. Pulling up weeds can wait for a nice sunny day.

2011-08-01T04:28:00.000-07:00

I'm torn between finishing some longterm projects or starting something new, just for fun. My conscience is telling me to deal with an existing project, and yet I'm relentlessly drawn to working on a new pattern. It doesn't help that I've been shopping online for all sorts of things, templates and rulers and books and gadgets. I'm a Gadgeteer through and through.

I've wanted to do this quilt for years, (in Massachusetts Quilts) but I knew I couldn't face doing it with flippy corners.

The other day I came across this ruler, and I couldn't resist.

I got mine from here, but there are Aussie sellers as well.

It will make short work of cutting these blocks, and the test blocks I made were super-accurate. It's all I can do not to abandon everything else and start cutting like a mad thing. I need to fine tune the dimensions so that they are similar to the quilt in the book, skinnier and longer than the trial ones. I don't think I'll be able to relegate this to a leader-ender, it will have to be centre stage.

I have lots of other things to use as leader-enders, the problem is I keep changing them, so I don't make much progress. I need to buckle down and concentrate on one thing. Bonnie has just started a new quilt and I love the antique quilt she's reproducing. I save all my 2.5" scraplets too, and I think this would be a great way to turn them into blocks. I think I"ll be adding this to my list of ideas.

But before I do any of those things I must clean up my sewing table and cutting table; I'm overwhelmed by the mess, so I wouldn't really enjoy pulling out more fabrics with the room in it's current state. A tidy up is in order.

2011-07-18T03:36:00.000-07:00

There are Jacob's Ladder quilts all over Blogland at the moment; I originally saw Lucy's and had to make my own, then Quiltville's Bonnie put up the instructions for her Florabunda quilt, and then lots of people made one. Yankee Quilter has one, and so does Lynn, and Subee as well. This block can look so different when it's coloured in different ways, and there are even more variations when the colouring is reversed in half the blocks.

One thing that can really annoy me when putting blocks together side by side is the way the seam allowances build up. I took care to press the seams a certain way to eliminate that problem, and when the time came to put the blocks together there wasn't a single seam that didn't butt neatly together.

I had to draw a little diagram and leave it by the ironing board, because I forgot what I was doing every single day. I found the idea for this little note holder on Sew many Ways blog. She has a ton of good ideas on how to use everyday items in the sewing room or office; just click on the Tool Time button on the side.

This is a double-sided photo frame from Ikea, but it's also useful to display notes and reminders on a crowded desk. I slipped my diagram into the frame behind the photo, so whenever I needed to check what I was doing I could just swivel the frame around.

I'll have to do a series of posts on how Ikea has revolutionised my sewing room; everywhere I look I see something from that store! It's one of my favourite places to visit.

Basically what I did was press the dark chain blocks one way, and the light chain blocks the opposite way. I made sure to position all the four patches so that both seam allowances that touched the outside edge went to the dark fabric. It was no extra work to position them like this, and it certainly paid off when I put the blocks together. I just hate having to mash seam allowances flat and hope they stay that way.

Bonnie's instructions show how to fan the seam allowances so that they match up at the edge of the block; I didn't bother with that, because on this block the fourpatches can be positioned so that the seam allowances mesh together anyway.

Because I didn't add a border I ran a line of stitching around the outside of the quilt, so that all those seams would be held tight.

My tops tend to wait a while before they get quilted, and if they don't have a border and are handled too much the seams can start coming apart. It was the work of minutes to stabilise the edges, and now I don't have to worry about those seams unravelling anymore.

2011-07-14T19:46:00.000-07:00

Finally I have time to write a post, and I've finished something and I have the photos. It's so hard to get all three things lined up, that's why two weeks have gone by since the last entry. This year is going so quickly, everyone I talk to says the same thing. It will be Christmas before we know it.

The Jacob's Ladder is in one piece and I love the way it turned out. I made 63 blocks, which was quite enough. It will make a nice large single bed quilt, and I enjoyed them enough to think that I will one day make a larger quilt from these blocks. I think a blue and white one would be really stunning, so that will go into the ideas file for later.

I love all these fabrics together, I tried to use ones that I treasured and hadn't cut into before, but I also used up the very last scraps of some of my favourites. That material in the top right of the photo was bought in 1981, and I have eked it out over the last 30 years. This is it's last time in the scrap drawer, all gone now!

My garden is putting on a brave show in this cold, rainy weather. Everything is rather waterlogged, but the pansies are battling the conditions to put a little colour into my life.

I just love these antique ruffled ones, I will definitely look out for them next year. I love the plain ones, but these look to be straight off a Victorian postcard.

2011-07-01T16:00:00.000-07:00

Life has been insanely busy just lately, and this weekend will be no exception. I'm just taking a moment to post a few pictures before I go back to work. I have a monthly digital pattern club that is due out in two days time, so I have to get all those designs tidied up and ready to send. Busy busy busy.

I have done so much travelling lately, and that cuts into my time in a big way, but it's unavoidable. I've had to take both computers to the computer guy, in two separate trips, and he lives 45 minutes away. Then there have been trips to drop things off for customers, and shopping excursions for essentials. I love the scenery and and the actual driving, but it means I have to stay up late catching up on work. I'm seriously sleep deprived.

We popped into an op-shop the other day, in between other chores, and I spied a couple of handmade cushions high up on top of a set of shelves.

I had to climb up and get them, but I'm glad I did. I can't believe all the work in these, and the colours are just wonderful.

Someone took so much trouble to stitch the needlepoint, but then not so much trouble to finish them.

Very dodgy way to make a cushion cover....

But for my $2.50 I got a huge section of needlepoint, a pillow form and a metre of cream homespun that is very good quality.

Bargain. The other cushion was put together with a bit of sheeting and a commercial pillow from the '60s, that was stuffed with shredded stockings and underwear. EWWW!! That lot went in the bin quicksmart. I will block the needlepoint to square it up and get rid of those ripples, and then I think I'll have both pieces framed. I know it will be a loong, long time before I get to stitch any needlepoint pictures of my own.

2011-06-25T22:36:00.000-07:00

My girl is settled in at her new job, and my house seems very empty without her. She has started a blog, which is a great way for her to record her time up there, and to keep her friends updated as well. If I can get her blogging, I'm sure that I can get her quilting soon...

I'm busy with taxes right now, but hopefully the end is in sight, and then I'll be able to spend a lot more time sewing.

I'm up to 21 of the Jacob's Ladder blocks, with another 10 just waiting to be sewn together. I figured I'd need 63, so I'll only be halfway once all the kitted blocks are sewn up. I'll try and cut out a heap more tonight, because its such a help to have all the pieces cut and waiting.

I need to decide on borders for the plaid quilt, so I can get that quilted and into use. I think I have to start another one straight away; I opened a drawer and found 8 blocks that I'd put away for safe-keeping. The drawer was even labelled, so there is no excuse for forgetting they were there. I think I'll just kit up another set of blocks, they were brilliant leader-enders and used up so many of my scrap strips.

I really miss keeping track of my yardage in and out, so I'm going to start that again. I really have no idea what I've used this year, so I feel like I'm getting nowhere. I've bought a fair bit, but probably not as much as I think. Instead of discounting what I've used, and blowing my acquisitions out of all proportion, I'd like to know the actual figures.

It's time to choose another UFO to finish, and I think it will be my blue and green tumbler quilt.

Seonaid admired it and said she'd like it, so I have a reason to get it finished now. I love it when I can make a quilt specifically for someone, it's lovely to know that it's going to someone who wants it. It only needs another two rows and a border, so it shouldn't take long.

I know someone else who misses Seonaid;

Dolly searched for her when I came home, but there was only me. I'm better than nothing I guess, but Seonaid was the light of Dolly's world there for a while. There will be much excitement when she comes to visit..

2011-06-16T07:23:00.000-07:00

This is the hotel at Parachilna, a typical old Aussie pub.

We arrived at dusk on Saturday, and had a drink in the bar to unwind. It was a good drive, but right at the end there were a few kangaroos with no road sense. The wildlife is always a hazard on out back roads, luckily we managed to avoid them. If I lived out here I would probably drive a great big 4WD like the one in the photo.

The decorations in the bar were decidedly rural, including this magnificent skull.
Once it was dark they lit a fire out the front, and everyone stood round with their drinks, toasting themselves in the heat and admiring the night sky full of stars. Two of the guests were setting off the next morning on a 6 day bushwalk, which sounded wonderful. The scenery is magnificent, and when you cover it on foot you have time to admire it properly. There are two pilots based here who offer scenic flights, and they were interesting to talk to as well.

One of the features of this pub is the food, which features 'feral' meat; goat, camel, emu, kangaroo and rabbit. Seonaid has always been a cautious eater, so the menu was a bit daunting for her. We settled for antipasto, which was unadventurous, but delicious anyway.

In the morning I wandered around by myself while Seonaid was touring the whole place and learning more about the job.

I watched the pilots fussing over the planes before the first flight of the day; if I was brave enough I would go up in one of these tiny planes, but I'm a chicken. About 10 years ago I had a very scary flight in a little 16 seater, and once it was over I vowed I would never again fly in a plane where I could touch both sides at once.
I was reading this information poster when I noticed something interesting.

At first I only noticed the men, railway workers from 1905,

then I saw there was a child in the photo as well, and when I looked closer there is a dog curled up at one man's feet. It really brings those times to life, to think of the family life behind this image. In those days it would have been a rare privilege to have your photo taken, and some mother was probably tickled pink to have her child in the photograph.
We were on the road again by lunchtime, and had a good trip home. It's great to get away from everyday life and visit some place new.

Seonaid was impressed by the hotel and the people who run it, and decided she'd like to give it a go, so this weekend we'll be going back to get her settled in the staff quarters. I'll miss my girl dreadfully, but I'm sure she will have an amazing time working in this incredible spot. And I'll visit as often as I can.

2011-06-14T19:49:00.000-07:00

It pays to be flexible when planning long weekends. You just never know what opportunities are going to come along. Seonaid has a few job applications in the works, and was invited to visit one place to see what it was like. So that found us on the road Saturday afternoon, intead of in front of the TV or sewing machine. As much as I would have loved to spend the weekend at home, I wasn't going to pass up the chance to visit a true outback pub.

We were headed for the Prairie Hotel at Parachilna, a mere 300 kilometres away, which isn't really all that far.

What makes the trip memorable is the isolation. After Port Augusta there are only two small towns, Quorn and Hawker, and then just miles of empty landscape with the occasional sideroad leading to a homestead.
Luckily the scenery is spectacular,

and we were constantly exclaiming over the hills of the Flinders Ranges, and the ruins left behind from the 1870s.

One spot I really wanted to visit was the ruined Kanyacka homestead.

We made many trips up here when we were in high school, some with school camps but mostly with our older brother, who loves this area and has explored most of it on foot. I wanted to see how the ruins were holding up, it's been nearly 40 years since our last visit.

They have been tidied up, and for safety's sake some have been fenced off, but overall they were the same, a monument to a time when this area was a thriving sheep station and home to 70 families.

We went down to see the sheepshed, which in the 1860's was shearing 40,000 sheep; it's hard to imagine the activity this place has seen, and the number of men who must have worked here.

We had a laugh over this sign; the poor little pictogram guy was having a bad day.
Seonaid demonstrates how to fall over in style...

Have to go to work, will be back with the rest of the photos soon.

2011-06-10T19:17:00.000-07:00

It's yet another long weekend, this time for the Queen's birthday. It's not actually her birthday on Monday, but we'll have the holiday anyway. It's so nice to have that extra day off, it makes the weekend so much more enjoyable.

I finished all the Plaid blocks that I had cut out, and now I have to sew them together and decide on borders.

I don't know where this quilt will end up, it could be a donation quilt or I might just use it myself as a utility quilt. With two dogs that have free reign of the place I need to change out the quilts often, and they need vigorous washing. I'm just glad our dogs are so short-haired, I'd hate to have clumps of long fur everywhere.

I'm leaning towards a couple of simple borders just to frame these blocks, and then I move on to another project all the quicker.

I'll probably work on the Jacob's Ladder blocks that I kitted up, as I don't have a lot of space for cutting in my sewing area. My office work has taken over all available space recently, I need to sort it all out; after I play with my kitted blocks.

Seonaid is busy cleaning up the kitchen, which is so nice to listen to. The work is getting done, and I'm not doing it. That's luxurious in my opinion.

2011-06-09T19:38:00.000-07:00

On the weekend we went for a drive in the country. It was a lovely day, not like winter at all, and I decided it would be better spent out in the fresh air rather than locked inside working.

\We visited a little seaside town not far away, which has an antique place I've wanted to see for a while. It's one of those shops so full of things that it's difficult to move around in, which is just the sort of place I like. It was every bit as interesting as I thought it would be, but there was an added bonus in the quilts that were on display.

Unfortunately, there was so little room that I couldn't unfold these beauties to hav e a proper look at them.

It's so nice to see antique quilts up close, something that we don't often get to do in Australia.

I loved the fabrics in this kaleidoscope quilt,

some of them have been reprinted as reproductions and are already in my stash. I could spend all day examining this one.

This quilt was made entirely of ties, and in a strange co-incidence another quilt like this showed up on a blog I read the very next day. It's an interesting way to use the whole tie, and the quilt was very heavy and textured, it felt quite luxurious. The owner of the shop made this quilt. and she said it was very quick to do, just weaving the ties together and some straightline quilting to hold it all together. People come up with good ideas all the time.

Another strange thing in this shop was the baby grand piano, painted green with raised Oriental motifs.

The odd thing is that I have photos of it on my computer, so I recognised it straight away.

Four years ago a friend took Mereth to an old Post Office in a little ghost town not far away, to see the incredible piano that was in pieces in one of the rooms.

She sent the photos to me, and wondered how on earth such an exotic musical instrument ended up in a ruined building in an abandoned town. I was able to go home on Sunday and tell her the next chapter of that piano's story, and how it's being renovated to it's former glory.

2011-06-05T07:49:00.000-07:00

When I'm really busy it's amazing how much I can achieve by using every last scrap of time. I sewed most of these plaid blocks in my coffee breaks, or waiting on hold on the phone, or before I went to work in the mornings.

It helps that it's a simple pattern, 8 seams per block and it's done. I've really cleared out the 3.5" strips, which was my aim. The next step is to go through the stash drawers and weed out bits less than an eighth of a metre and cut them into more of these blocks. It's always therapeutic to thin out the stash drawers and make room for homeless fabric.

And I have a bit of that, after succumbing to the latest free shipping offers from Hancock's. I need to get this lot put away, but first I have to make room for it. I'm thinking of making a plaid quilt like JulieK's, and that should clear out the drawer where I keep my small stash of plaids and stripes. Well that's the plan, but I could probably make 4 or 5 quilts from that drawer before they are all used up. Anyway, it will be progress if I can fit them into a smaller drawer.

Here's a picture of Seonaid and Dolly, at the start of our walk.

The dogs have to start out on the lead, just to have a bit of discipline before they are let go; once the leads come off then they're off like the wind, racing each other over the expanses of grass. It's a pleasure to watch.

2011-06-03T15:38:00.000-07:00

My DD arrived 2 weeks ago, and there hasn't been time for any sewing or blog-related activites ever since. It's wonderful to see her, after 4 years apart, I'm so enjoying her company. Her neat freak tendencies are a blessing, she's organised my kitchen and bedroom, and is eyeing off my ofice area now. So long as she shows me where everything is I don't care what she does; I'll just go along with the new system.

My sewing area is overwhelming though, so she's not tempted to touch that; with any luck I can spend a few hours in there this weekend and sort out the stacks of fabric and things that have no home. I've been working non-stop just lately, and I need a good rummage through my things to restore my sanity.

We wondered how Dolly would react to DD Seonaid (we pronounce it Shonnad, which isn't the Gaelic pronunciation, but she's named after a friend of mine and that's how her name was pronounced). From the moment Seonaid got out of the car Dolly was in love. I'm just background noise now, it's all about sitting with Seonaid on the couch, or at her feet, or trying to get on her lap. When we go for walks Dolly trots next to Seonaid, gazing up adoringly. What makes this astonishing is that Dolly is not friendly to anyone normally; after a long acquaintance she might wag her tail for other people, but she won't let anyone touch her. She just doesn't trust other people; but Seonaid is instant family. Tha's so cute!

I was going to add a picture or two, but it will have to wait. I'd forgotten what it was like to have kids around; my internet usage tripled and used up all the monthly quota in a week, which means my service is slowed down, so it's taking forever to load an image; I give up. I've gone to a higher plan, but it will only take effect from midnight tonight. Oh well, I will spend today in the sewing room and taking photos, and tomorrow I may actually be able to load them.

2011-05-07T19:04:00.000-07:00

Isn't Mother's Day wonderful, with all the crysanthemums in the shops?

I went mad this year, and bought 6 pots of glorious colours. They are only $3.99, so why wouldn't I? I also got lots of cut flowers, locally grown, 5 huge bunches for the price of one supermarket arrangement. My table is full of vases, I admire the flowers every time I walk past.

It's been a quiet weekend, just putting things to rights and trying to make some sort of sense of the stacks of fabric in the sewing room.

After hours and hours of decisions I'm finally starting to see progress; even though you might think this is still horribly messy, at least I can see blank spaces on the table so I know I'm getting somewhere. All my trial blocks and half finished projects have been filed away in drawers, with the cutting instructions and graph paper diagrams; when I pull them out in three months time I should know exactly where to start.

I couldn't understand why I felt so driven to keep cutting projects these last few days, without stopping to sew and actually enjoy myself. Then I realised why I'm stockpiling; my DD is coming to stay for a few weeks, and my subconcious was obviously in charge, making sure that I will have a heap of piecing that I can just pick up and put down easily. I'm glad someone is on the ball around here.

Today I want to cut up all my 3.5" strips, so that I can actually get the drawer shut easily. They will make those simple plaid blocks that were on my design wall a while ago. Once I've done that, I will have completely emptied my 1.5, 2.5 and 3.5"strip drawers, cutting them into pieces for kits. Quite an achievement, I feel. As soon as I sew all those kitted projects together I'll feel even better.

On Friday Mereth and I ran away to a neighbouring town and investigated the Op-shop there. I found all this vintage ric-rac for 20 cents each, so I bought the oldest ones. I have no idea what I'll do with it, but I can feel an applique project coming on, I'll have to preshrink all this, it's pretty poor quality, but at least it's all guaranteed colour fast.

2011-05-01T05:12:00.000-07:00

My design wall is still as haphazard as ever, and I think I've started even more projects. I need to stop looking at blogs and being inspired by new ideas, and just settle down for some long sewing sessions. I just can't seem to make myself do that though.

I've been cutting out the simple diagonal blocks in spare moments, and then sewing them together in other odd moments. They go together so quickly, it takes longer to cut them than to sew them up. I have a fair idea of what I need to add to this to make it work, so I'll stockpile the pieces and start using them as leader-enders. Then I can move onto another project with a relatively clear conscience. I'd like to say I can see a dent in the drawers that all these reproduction fabrics came from, but not a chance. What I'd like is to be able to fit them all in 3 drawers instead of 4, so I intend to donate a lot to Mereth in a stunning act of goodwill. The way I see it, it's just passing the problem onto her, so it's not really fair, but she will treasure these far more than me. I have guilt over having so much, so I'm not really enjoying them as I should.

I fell in love with Lucy's quilt, and gave in to the impulse to make a couple of blocks, just to see how they look together.

Of course they look good, so now I want to abandon all the other things I'm working on, and pull fabrics for about 63 of these blocks. I'm fighting the urge to do that, but I can tell it's a losing battle.

The container of 1.5"squares and triangles was providing leader-enders, and I have a few of these little blocks put together. I have no idea where they're going, but they're cute. Some idea will come to me once I have a pile of them.

I'm getting more familiar with my big camera, and it really does a good job of capturing the amazing cloudscapes at sunset. It's a pleasure to go walking with such skies overhead.

2011-04-25T19:18:00.000-07:00

Every weekend should be five days long. I'm having a lovely time just pottering in the sewing room and the garden, it would be wonderful if life was like this all the time. But it's back to work tomorrow, and we'll be running to try and catch up. But it's totally worth it.

I've quilted all the donation tops that were given to me, just have to bind them sometime during the week.

Check out that vintage print, very nice!

It would have been nice to load one of my personal tops, but Millhouse was busy the whole time. Maybe next long weekend. I want to do one of my 'best' quilts, and really do some special quilting, but that will take a lot of time and planning. It's frustrating to have the machine and not be able to do our own quilts.

I am still working to rationalise my stash; much as I love my Judie Rothermel fabrics that came in the fabric club, I find them overwhelming as a group. I have four drawers full of them, and I never seem to use them. It's been three years since I got them, and it's time to start cutting them up. I devised a couple of projects that use massive amounts of fabric, not just a measly strip or two. I'm cutting a 5.5" and 6.5" strip from a fat quarter, and there's not much left after that, especially if it's been nibbled at already.

I intend to give Mereth the leftovers, which she will be so happy about. Then whatever is left will go into my regular stash drawers, to be used like normal fabric. No more "Too good to cut up" rubbish.

The blocks I'm making will end up 5"square, and I'll need well over 100 to make a decent size quilt, which is all good. I want to have a huge amount of blocks to diffuse the oddity of some of these reproduction prints. There's no way I would have bought them on their own, they were just part of the collection, and authenticity aside, some are downright ugly. Hopefully they will get lost amongst the crowd of other prints.

Yesterday I drove down to Adelaide to pick up Mereth from the aiport, and managed to fit in a little trip to Bunnings, our huge hardware chain. I adore that place so much, but I never have enough time to go through the whole place, I just run in and grab a few things and race off again. It's a serious limitation going alone, no-one to help load gear onto the trolley. I should have bought all the bulky stuff first, loaded it into Wilson and gone back for the fun stuff. I managed to get some wood and melamine shelving that I needed, plus some plants, so that will keep me happy for a while.

It was fun to have both dogs for the weekend, they had a ball together. Dolly is still sleeping it off, and enjoying having my undivided attention. But in about an hour I reckon she'll be up for a visit, and some more fun times.

2011-04-23T04:29:00.000-07:00

I have the Drab blocks in one piece, with the leftover strips used as piano key borders top and bottom. It doesn't look too bad, but I still think the best thing to say about it is that it won't show the dirt, being so dingy already. Hilary was right to say in the comments that it would be a good 'bloke' quilt, so I think it will get quilted and donated.

I quilted a second donation quilt today, but don't have a photo yet. A friend made three tops and we're quilting and binding them, and then we'll move on to the stack of tops we've made.

This one was done yesterday, and it too will be good for a guy. It feels great to be getting quilts done and ready to donate; we've been so busy that there just wasn't time to tackle them.

It's easier for me to stay at Mereth's place while I'm looking after both dogs, so I've taken over her sewing room.

She will have a fit at the messy photo, but I'll clean it up before she gets back. I'm cutting up the Antique Fair jellyroll, and playing about with different blocks. I think I'll have to add in fabrics from the stash, I don't like working entirely within a range; it's just too limiting. These are lovely fabrics, and I want to combine them with other favourites.

I lent Mereth my little Canon camera, which means I have to lug about my big Nikon, and try to remember how to take decent photos. It's far superior to the point-and-shoot one, so I should get serious about using it all the time. Every evening on our walks the sky and clouds are glorious, and the little camera is hopeless at capturing the display. Hopefully the big camera will do a better job, once I figure out how to work it.

2011-04-21T20:48:00.000-07:00

We're having a long, long, long weekend here in Australia, 5 days off because of Easter and Anzac day. Mereth took advantage of the time off to go to Newcastle to see her No2 son and his family. I'm sure she is cuddling little Logan right this moment, lucky thing.

We drove down to Adelaide yesterday to stay the night with No1 son, and we managed to fit in a trip to a little Indian grocery that we've been to before, where we stocked up on a few necessities, like Indian snack food, prepackaged meals, bulk spices and curry paste.

I just love wandering through the aisles looking at all the foods that are so different to ours, with strange packaging and exotic ingredients. It was a fun way to spend an hour. Then this morning I dropped Mereth at the airport at 5am and drove home through light rain and lines of holiday traffic. A lot of people were getting an early start, and I felt envious to see convoys of 4-wheel drives lined up at the side of the road, mysterious and important in the pre-dawn light, drivers congregating to chat and share coffee. It would be so fun to be setting off with a group of friends for a camping adventure, but I have duties here.

As soon as I arrived home I set Millhouse to stitching on a donation quilt, and went and picked up the dogs. I have instructions to give Pippi lots of cuddles while her Mum is away, but Dolly doesn't approve of that. Little bit of sibling rivalry happening I think.

My plans for the rest of the day are to keep working on the donation quilts in the background, while I sew my Drab blocks together.

Mereth said she was sick of them on my design wall, she lost the will to live everytime she caught sight of them. They are a bit depressing, so I'll get them in one piece pronto and move on to something more cheerful and pretty.

Right after I give Pippi a cuddle....

2011-04-15T23:45:00.000-07:00

My design wall is in utter chaos today. One minute I'm working on the last of the framed cross blocks ( must find out their real name) and the next thing I know there are four new blocks pinned up there, waiting to become new projects.

I was hoping to rationalise my sewing room, but I think I've actually tipped it over the edge into outright bedlam.

I may have to put these blocks aside until I can decide which way to set them; I like both ways, and I have enough to do either. I just can't choose right now. Hence the need for a new project.

I will have to sit down with a cup of coffee and write a list of all the new blocks, their sizes and colour schemes and what I want to do with them, or I'll forget by tomorrow. At least if I've jotted down a few notes it will jog my memory, hopefully. Future Self will be most grateful.

My idea while I was cutting these blocks was that I wanted to be able to clear out the strip drawers, starting with the 2.5" ones, seeing as there are 4 of them. One is enough, I don't know how I managed to accumulate enough strips for four. An added bonus is that I can use jellyrolls too, and I have four of them somehow. Don't know how that happened, but they need to be dealt with.

I made three cross blocks to see which proprtions I liked best; the middle size won, and the other two will go into the Orphan stash. All the cross blocks use 2.5"strips, so I can just cut a heap of the rectangles and put them aside for these blocks.

I love the stripe from the Civil War Reunion collection in this block; it's a great way to use stripes to give the effect of more complex piecing. That little idea will go into the files for later use. Ignore that tiny cross block, it was just an experiment.

These big blocks are using up a pile of terribly dull FQs that I weeded out of the stash ages ago. I was going to just make a backing, but I thought I'd see what sort of a quilt they made; if it's too ugly it will be a backing anyway. I like all these fabrics, but they are just dreary when put with anything else. They can all be dreary together here.

These little blocks form a cute plaid arrangement, and they're so simple to make. They will use up a pile of 3.5" squares that were leftover from other projects, and be a useful leader-ender. I'll be making heaps of these.

To make matters worse, there are lots of boxes of fourpatches and strip-pieced scraps, and leftovers from various charity quilts that I don't want anymore. I don't have unlimited space in my sewing room, so I need to cut down the amount of things I store in here, and only have things that are current and useful. Everything else can go into storage out the back.

I want to make a list of all the size strips and patches I consistently use, and what I use them for, and eliminate the rest that are odd sizes or that I'm not likely to use up soon. I'll cut them into other sizes, for projects that I'm working on, and get rid of them that way.

Once upon a time, when I was much younger, I could keep all the varied threads of life in my head and not get muddled, or confused, or lost, or late. But now, inside my head is like a shambolic, overcrowded, bent-out-of-shape filing cabinet. I should be able to remember where I filed important information, but I can't. Not on demand, anyway; I might come up with the goods at 2am when it's too late, but that is part of the problem, not the solution.

I know that from now on I will have to keep notes and records to trigger my memory, if I want to avoid total chaos. It's just that I like working the way I used to, and it will take a while to put the new paper-trail method of organising into practise. But the blog can be really helpful, if I can just find the time to post more often.

2011-04-09T17:34:00.000-07:00

It's a beautiful autumn day today, and all I can hear is birds singing in the early morning sunshine. Sundays are so quiet here, not like when I lived on the main street. Everyone popped into the supermarket next door, so there were traffic noises and chatter. I didn't mind, but I love the peace and bird songs here. My neighbour has lots of aviaries, and those bird voices are especially lovely.

There has been time for nothing else except work lately, and I'm so weary of it all. I would love to jump in the car and go visit friends in Sydney, but that won't happen for a while. So I'll make the most of my Sunday, and try not to do anything work related. It's so easy to just open a file to check something, and then three hours go by and I feel hard done by because it's turned into another work day. So after I hit Publish, I'm going to plant my seedlings and then make bread, and maybe have a cup of tea in the garden.

I stayed up late last night sewing, so there is a bit of progress on this set of cross blocks, but I'm not feeling drawn to finish them into a top. They aren't inspiring me yet, so I'll pack them back in the drawer and let them mature a while longer, like cheese. Then maybe that cheddar sashing will seem like a good idea...

I'm having fun with these cross in a frame blocks, cut from scraps as well as the Civil War Reunion jellyroll I bought. I have the absolute perfect setting fabric, just have to decide on a layout. Onpoint with alternate squares is looking good, but I also like it set straight with alternate blocks. I'll make the final call after I have a heap more blocks finished.

In my other house I could sew while my machines were printing orders, but the sewing room is nowhere near the office here. So while I'm babysitting the printers I practice my recorder. The acoustics in the hall are great; I can play as loud as I like and it can't be heard outside, which is reassuring when I don't quite hit the note, which is often. Poor Mereth and Dolly still hate it, but it keeps me amused. And I think it's beneficial to learn a new skill every now and then, keeps the brain cells active. Or tortured, or something.

2011-03-21T00:41:00.000-07:00

Every now and then I get the urge to make crumb blocks, and I cover every surface of the sewing room with little strings and snippets and scraps. I sew together all the little shreds that I've saved in various containers, and I'm happy, happy, happy.

Blocks start to materialise on the design wall. I love the way the tiny pieces look next to each other. I plan to make lots of crumb quilts, and to keep sewing until all the containers are empty.

Then suddenly there are no more nice pieces to sew; everything left in the boxes is dull, the wrong shape, the wrong colour, not big enough. I get grumpier and more disillusioned. I hate crumb piecing.

It's harder and harder to finish a block. I just don't have the right size or colour strips. I start putting bits in the bin, instead of trying to fit them into the jigsaw of my blocks. I HATE all the mess!!

At that point it's time to pack it all away and let it sit in the cupboard for a while. I know that I will accumulate another pile of interesting scraps, and then I'll be able to finish the blocks I started, and make a whole new stack of them. You can't rush crumb piecing, it's a progression, not a straightforward process. My quilt will be all the more interesting if I take longer to make it. It's definitely not a quilt-in-a-day.

2011-03-19T23:24:00.000-07:00

Autumn weather has arrived, for which we are very grateful. It's cool and rainy and grey today, perfect for quilting and messing about in the sewing room. Which is what I am doing.Yesterday we shifted all Mereth's potplants from our brother's place to hers, so today is a day to take it easy. Some of those potplants weigh a lot!
I hope to get some quilting done later on. The dogs like to dig around in the quilts that are protecting the lounge, and end up sitting on the lounge fabric with the quilts all rucked up beside them. I want to make a BIG cover for the lounge out of these old twill pieces, something that can be tied in place. It won't be pretty, but it should keep all the pawprints off the furniture.

That's Dolly's inscrutable camera face there; one moment she's looking at me, all eager and happy, tail thumping and ears pricked. As soon as she sees the camera she freezes and looks away; too many flash photos have made her wary. I've only ever accidentally 'flashed' her, but she doesn't forget things like that.

My Square In A Square quilt is finished. It wouldn't have a pieced border, even though I tried to give it one. I left everything pinned up on the design wall all week, and it just kept saying NO. So I went with simple, and I like it like that. The green toile is really old, a backing length from the stash,and a much prettier colour than the washed out photo. I love being able to find what I need in the stash; even when I think there's nothing that will do, I can usually dig up something.

So I get to cross another UFO off the list, and choose the next one to work on. I like seeing an empty box and a finished quilt, it inspires me to keep working on these older projects.

Have you read this post on Bonny's blog?....
I think most of us serious quilters, at some time or another, have felt overwhelmed by our fabric and books and projects and finished quilts. It can be paralysing to think 'What do I need another quilt for?', and so you don't start another project, or even finish an old one. The thing that keeps me sewing is knowing, from past experience, that I always feel better after a sewing session. It puts my world to rights, when I sit at the sewing machine and feed the little pieces through, and build them into a useful product. There is always a place for a quilt, but it may involve being selfless enough to give it away. The collection of quilts for Japan, and for the flood victims in Australia, is a wonderful way to reach out and touch people who's lives have been shaken into a new and terrible pattern. I love having spare quilts to give away at times like this; no need to start sewing from scratch, I can just pull something suitable from the shelf and it's ready to go to a person who needs it.

If I get overwhelmed by my stash I put some of it on Ebay, or give it away. When I sell the vintage fabric in my collection it's always for more than I paid, so that offsets part of the loss I make on the modern fabric. I feel better for having lightened the stash, and I get something back, even if it's not the full price. And it's a warning to me, when I want to buy more fabric online - I don't want to be selling a 'must-have' fabric for cents on the dollar in a few years time. I have had some wonderful emails from the people who buy my fabric, thanking me for making vintage fabric available to them, or for pricing new fabric so that it's affordable for them.

If buying fabric is a form of self-medication then you have to look at it like any medication. It does it's job at the time. There's no refund on a bottle of pills, no selling it on to get your money back. I think getting 'a fair price' for stash just doesn't happen. Getting the money back shouldn't be the concern; getting your life in control is more important.

My sewing stuff is my comfort, my past-time, my medicine, my connection to my ancestors and to so many other women who also love the same things I do. I could never contemplate getting rid of it all. But I've learned to stop the impulse buying, and to appreciate what I have as an asset, and that is so much better than living with guilt because I've blown the budget, again, on something I really didn't need to have.

2011-03-11T16:58:00.000-08:00

We have a 3-day weekend here in South Australia (Adelaide Cup day - who needs a holiday for a horse race???) and I intend to make the most of my time off. I want to get the UFO blocks set together, and the pieced borders done. I'm pretty sure that I have nothing suitable for a final border, so it may get put back in the cupboard until I can go shopping at a real live shop.

I found a suitable green fabric in the stash, a bit lighter and a lot brighter than the other green. In every spare moment this week I cut and sewed blue and green fabric together, and I'm now up to this stage.

I have a few more units to sew, and then I can start sewing rows. The squares in the pieced border have been my leader-enders, so I have a stockpile of those already. I'm a bit worried that I'll run out of blue fabric, but I'll deal with that problem when/if it happens. I'm all about the sewing right now.

I still haven't decided on a spacer border to separate the body of the quilt and the pieced border. Every time I walk past the design wall I hang up a different coloured strip, to see what takes my fancy. Haven't chanced upon the right one yet, but I'll keep working on that while I put all the pieces together. It makes good sense to me to let my subconcious deal with that problem while I'm feeding more pieces through the sewing machine; most times the solution will occur to me without a lot of concious effort, and that's always a bonus.

It's a lovely autumn day, a little bit cloudy and not too warm, so I hope to get into the garden later on, and take the dogs for a walk too. And make some soup, and cook a chicken curry for tonight, and sort through my knitting supplies, and tidy up the kitchen cupboards, and .......

That's a good list of things to concentrate on for today; tomorow there will be a whole new lot of priorities, and then there's still another free day after that. I love long weekends!

2011-03-07T04:16:00.000-08:00

Alas, not much sewing was achieved over the weekend but I did get other things done so I can't complain. I had a scrabble around in the UFO boxes, and pulled out these paper pieced Square in Square blocks, and decided they needed to be finished.

They are about 7 years old, and it's high time I dealt with them. I love the strange navy prints in the blocks, but I only ever had a few FQs, so it can't be a big quilt. I have 18 blocks made, and it will have to be enough. It took me two and a half hours to take all the paper out, so the idea of making any more with that method doesn't thrill me.

I had a quick play in EQ7, and I think I'll be going with this idea.

I'll make a few of the setting triangles to see if I like how they look in reality, and I'll try and find a suitable green for the sashing in the stash, but..... I don't think there's anything there. I made a trial of the triple sashing with something I thought might work, but it's too strong a colour. Need more greens! I may have to go shopping.

The other day we were driving out to visit Mereth's DS at Bowmans Park and saw this fellow walking down the road ahead.

He made a quick skedaddle up the nearest tree, and then froze, obviously thinking his camouflage was pretty good. Shame his stripes are running the wrong way while he's upright on the tree, he's designed to blend into the twigs and dappled light of the ground under the gum trees. He's a Lace Monitor, and his spots and dots and stripes are just gorgeous.

2011-03-02T17:49:00.000-08:00

I seem to have no spare time lately, so there hasn't been much sewing happening. Yesterday I was working on loading things onto my site, but the connection was so slow I gave up and sewed these UFO blocks together. It was supposed to be a single bed size, but it kept asking to be bigger, so I made another 15 blocks. It's wonderful to see something come together so quickly, and with no effort on my part. Squares and rectangles are a delight after hundreds of itty-bitty triangles.

I made these blocks from 2 very old charm packs, and used nearly all them. I had to add in some light strips from my stash, which helped the colours look a little less drab. I don't know why I ever bought these cahrm packs in such drab country colours, they are so not my usual choice. But the gold/brown setting fabric makes them look a lot better.

I'm mulling over ideas for a border; something quick, as this is supposed to be a donation quilt. I'm thinking a simple triple border would be best, but no fabrics are springing to mind. I haven't got time to rummage through the stash drawers; I'll probably grab the first red or brown print that I see and throw it together. This isn't how I like to sew, but I don't have a choice right now. I need more time in the day.

I'm already trying to decide what the next UFO project should be. I need to pull out an old project, something over the 5 year mark. That's a long time to store a pile of blocks and fabrics, and it would be great to see some of them completed at last. It's years since my last big clean out, so I'll have to get ruthless. This weekend should be a good time to give all the project boxes a good shake-up!

2011-02-19T18:43:00.000-08:00

It's finished!!! I am reeaally happy with how this turned out, it looks much better than I thought it would. It started as a project to use up material I had lying around in scrap drawers, not all of it lovely; many times as I pieced the blocks I shook my head over the fabrics and colours and thought it was dreary. But now, looking at it pinned up on my design wall in the early morning sunshine, I'm thrilled with how it turned out. It looks antique, and interesting and the triangles are soothing and rhythmic. Looks like I'm in love with the triangles again.

I've cleaned up all the fabric scraps from this quilt, and organised the remainder of the 1.5"strips that were still littering the sewing room. I have a clear space to work when I start the next project, but for now I'm off to putter around in the garden. Time for some fresh air and inspiration from my flowers.

2011-02-19T03:12:00.000-08:00

Thank heavens for DVDs is all I can say. I'm making great progress on my Lady of the Lake, but only because a dozen Seinfeld episodes have kept me entertained while I sew triangles. And more triangles. And More triangles.

This quilt is all triangles, and nothing but. I'm not tired of them yet, but they demand a bit more concentration than my normal sewing.

And then it's a bit nerve-wracking putting the blocks together and hoping that all those points match. Most of them are not too bad, but not perfect either. Perfect is over-rated. It will take another long session tonight, but I think I can get it finished before I go to bed.

I dealt with another UFO and forgot to mention it. I pieced together all the bits I had cut out for this quilt, and now it's squared up and ready to be the centre of an orphan medallion.

I don't like the hexagon shape enough to make a whole quilt from it, and I'd rather do the original pattern in my beautiful reproductions that just weren't available all those years ago. This isn't a finished UFO, but it can wait quietly in the Orphan box until I decide what to do with it.

I discovered this pile of blocks that I made from charm squares and never really felt enthusastic about. I'm going to set them with that tan fabric and donate the top. And there won't be any fancy piecing and triangles either; it's going to be a good, honest, plain quilt with big easy shapes. Maybe I am a bit scarred by all the tiny triangles after all.

2011-02-11T23:47:00.000-08:00

The promised rain arrived, to the delight of Pippi and Dolly. We had two wet and muddy dogs to deal with after they ran through the garden like mad things in the rain. We made them sit outside the front door while we armed ourselves with old towels. Then we let them in and grabbed them straight away, to be carted off to the bathroom and cleaned up. It's like having little kids again. They are so funny to watch though, it's better than TV.

I'm making a serious attempt to pare down my UFOs, and tackled the Lady of the Lake blocks today. It's pictured in this post on point, and much as I love that setting it just wasn't working with these colours. As soon as I laid the blocks out in a straight set I felt more enthusiastic about the project, which is good. I made 14 blocks today, and I think another 6 will see it finished. Then I'll have a think about the borders; I'm thinking something pieced would be fun, and I may have a play with EQ7 tonight. Or I may go lo-tech with the pencil and graph paper. It will be good to see this in one piece, and to get rid of all the various bits of material that were earmarked for it. Some leftovers will go back in to the stash drawers, but most will be cut up or gifted to the Flood Appeal. One way or another I want these fabrics dealt with.

I'm so surprised to see that I started these blocks in January last year. I thought they were from August, or maybe July. The blog is a great way to keep track of things; I often forget to update my spreadsheets with the latest projects, but so long as I blog about them there is a record to refer to.

The next UFO on the list is these scrappy blocks; they've been littering my sewing room for months on end, so it's about time I did something with them. I'm so glad there's another whole day tomorrow to work in my sewing room.

2011-02-11T01:38:00.000-08:00

Those donation blocks I showed are made entirely from 4.5 x 2.5" rectangles, and they are so simple to put together.

We made a heap of blocks from this size rectangle when we were making quilts for bushfire survivors, in 2009; if you click on the'bushfire quilts' label in the list on the right hand side of the blog you'll find a heap of posts about those quilts.

For details of this paticular block you can go to this post; I love how easy these are to sew, and there are no places where seams have to match, except the actualintersections of the blocks.

That's sort of magical in my book; it takes all the stress out of sewing the pieces together. I used to make my students sew a couple of these every lesson, and we got a few donation quilts made that way. The pattern is very forgiving, and even the absolute beginners had no trouble with it.

We're supposed to get a cool change tonight, and rain. It would be so lovely to have a break in the muggy weather, I'm sure I'd get more sewing done if the temperature was more comfortable. Maybe this weekend I'll be able to tackle some of the ancient UFOs....

However, if I keep buying new fabric, and planning new projects, how will I ever have time to finish the old ones?

I need to stop finding gorgeous fabric that I 'have' to have. (Wild Rose, by Blackbird Designs)

2011-02-09T17:25:00.000-08:00

I'm having one of those weeks where there is too much to do, not enough time, and nothing co-operates. Yesterday I was all set to do some more work on setting up my new website, only to discover that my little mobile internet stick had been left at my brother's place, and I was too peeved to get in the car and go and get it. So I finished the donation quilt on the design wall instead. It didn't take too long, and I'm very glad to have one thing crossed off the To-Do list.

I rummaged and found border materials that would work, then cut the small borders 1.5", and the large borders 5.5". By using those measurements I can use the leftovers for another quilt in this pattern; the small strip leftovers will make more sashing and four-patches, and the 5.5" leftovers will make more strip pieced squares. How's that for planning ahead?

I was too lazy to add the small borders separately, so I sewed them together and then joined them to the quilt. I don't mind the way this corner looks, but it's not what I wanted for this particular quilt. I didn't want that light fabric touching the outer border.

I decided to add a 3.5" flippy triangle corner, and that way the brown is at the outer edge all the way round. What an easy fix and it looks like it's a lot harder to do than it is. I'm all for looking clever, even when I'm just being lazy.

You can see what I've done, because of the stripes not meeting, but in a printed fabric this would be a lot less noticeable; I'm going to put this little trick in the arsenal of border treatments.

Amazingly, no one pointed out to me the mistake in my previous picture of this quilt;

look at that bottom right corner! Was everyone too nice to mention that I had a couple of strips in wrong way round? I was full of bravado about leaving it there, and then I thought that I might as well unpick it and fix it before it was too late. So in the final quilt that particular mistake is not there; if something else is wrong, bad luck. Too late now.

2011-02-07T04:01:00.000-08:00

My sewing room is still covered in 1.5" strips, sewn together in various combinations and waiting to be assembled into blocks. I'm tired of them now, but I want to deal with them once and for all. No way I want to open a drawer three months from now and see this lot waiting for me. So I'm plodding away, and hopefully tomorrow will see the last of them.

As a bit of fun I cut up some charm packs of Park Avenue that I collected when Hancocks sold them for $3 each.

I also have a jellyroll of these, so quite enough fabric to play with.

I'm making the blocks up as I go, just seeing what I like. I started off with the pale blue units, as the fabric was too lovely to cut into little pieces; these units show off the large print fabric very well.

I made the little 3" ninepatches in the middle just for fun, and framed them with .5"strips so that they'd fit as the centre of the block. I like the little touches of red, I think I want the quilt to be mainly blue and brown, with red as the accent.

I'm pretty sure I won't be able to make these blocks just from the Park Avenue range. There are so many other fabrics in my stash that would look good in these blocks, and I'll have fun combining them all.

In my fossicking I found this set of blocks, destined to be a donation top from two years ago.

I counted them up, and there's already 65 made; instead of putting them together myself I'm going to send them off to some ladies making quilts for people affected by the Victorian floods. There are a few other sets of blocks and pieces that I'll be glad to donate; the volunteers will welcome them, and I'll be clearing out my sewing room and creating more space. And ultimately somebody who deserves it will receive a quilt.

2011-01-30T23:26:00.000-08:00

We raced into town the other day to pick up a few necessities, and somehow managed to pop into the patchwork shop. Dearie me, how come this came home with me? I know I've sworn off jellyrolls forever, but I wanted some of this Civil War Reunion, and this was the quickest way to get it.

Mereth was scoffing at my weak resolve, but she was very quick to accept the gift of a couple of duplicate strips in the batch. I can see yardage of this fabric line being purchased in the not-too-distant future.

The other jellyroll is Antique Fair, and I purchased that from an Ebay seller. It will work in very well with some other precut lines that I have, so I'm hoping that now I officially have 'enough' to be able to start a project with them.

I don't know how I feel about the precuts coming out first, and the yardage later on. Seems like the impatient ones among us are being 'made' to buy the precuts, instead of yardage. I know the answer is to just wait, but it's that whole impatience thing that we can't seem to control. In my defence, I would rather buy charm packs, but they weren't available at the places I was shopping. See previous comment about impatience.....

I'm still shifting furniture around in my living quarters, trying to find the perfect setup, and it's starting to feel very cosy and homely.

My sewing space is just about done, and all I have to do now is sort out my projects and boxes and find a permanent home for it all. I like that sort of fossicking and rummaging though, so I'm looking forward to it; I imagine I'll find a lot of things I forgot I ever had once I get into it.

I'm still cleaning up strips, and making crumb blocks, but I will have to start working on a good quilt soon, just to take advantage of all the lovely fabric in the stash. I treated myself to a few books over Christmas, including Gone To Texas, by Betsy Chutchian.

It's a pattern book of new quilts, and I don't normally buy those, I like ones about quilt history and the State projects. However, the quilts in this are gorgeous, and the photos are beautiful so I don't regret it for a minute. I'm trying to decide whether I make the Baskets first,

or the Ocean Waves.

I have so many fabrics for these two, just crying out to be used. Would it be wrong to start both?

2011-01-26T11:57:00.000-08:00

A few hot days have seen me have sent me to the sewing room, escaping the heat and being productive. I'm enjoying the 1.5"strips, so much so that I relieved Mereth of her spare strips, and now have an ocean of little pieces all over the table. I've used up 3 small drawers full of scrap strips, and I refuse to cut more from the stash, so it may be time to move onto something else.

I have one top completed up to the borders, which I didn't take a photo of, so that will have to wait till later . I decided that it was too much effort to choose a single fabric for the setting triangles, so I strip pieced those as well. It took a bit of time, but it was very easy and I like the look of it.

I have lots of these 5.5" pieced squares left over, so they are the beginnings of another quilt. I love the simplicity of them, both in the making and the final effect. I haven't decided if I will set these in a simple basketweave like this, or maybe use them as units of a bigger block. There's plenty of time to choose.

For months I've been wanting a labeller, and boring Mereth with stroies of how my life would be different if only I could label everything. Lo and behold, for Christmas this showed up under the tree. What a great gift, and one I truly wanted.

I'm enjoying getting more organised, and I'm sure that once everything is sporting it's own little tag then life will suddenly become much easier. Is that an unreasonable expectation?

2011-01-17T16:32:00.000-08:00

This is the current state of my strippy blocks, and I think I'll make another 20 or so , to make a large single bed size.

It will be a donation quilt, to go the Queensland flood appeal. Lots of groups are making raffle quilts to raise money, so that might be where this one goes, or I might donate it to someone who needs it. My daughter lives in Emerald; it wasn't that long ago that they were in severe drought, and the dam was empty. Now they are recovering from a flood where 80% of the town went under water. Talk about a land of extremes. She's still a bit shocked that her house was one of the few that didn't get flooded, luckily.

I've been involved with a little fundraiser of my own, with the computerised quilting lists that I'm on, and we have raised nearly $3000, which is absolutely fabulous. It's good to be able to make a contribution, no matter how small. I 'd like to echo Bonnie's sentiments in this post, about how you can give to the Premier's Appeal. A lot of the places under flood are places I've lived, including the Lockyer valley where I went to Agricultural College. It hurts to see such devestation wreaked on an area of beautiful, productive farmland.

I haven't had a lot of free time, so not much more sewing has taken place, but for my own sanilty I need to get back to my machine. Dolly and Pippi know the antidote for stress; a comfy bed in a patch of sunlight, and a quilt to snuggle on.

2011-01-08T14:14:00.000-08:00

I've done a little bit of sewing in amongst other chores, but not as much as I could have.

These scrap blocks are fun and easy, but the seam allowances of adjoining blocks were clashing, and I was too lazy or distracted to work out how to press them to avoid that. And that was stopping me from sewing more of them. The best to do was to take photos for a tutorial, so that I can refer back to the blogpost whenever my fickle memory forgets exactly what I did.

I could always refer back to the correctly pressed blocks, or I could do what I did in the past and copy the pressing of an incorrect block too many times to count and have a dreadful mess to deal with later. The blogpost is the sensible option.

There are two blocks with the values in opposite places, what Mereth and I refer to as Counterchange blocks. Both are laid out a little differently, and pressed differently. But they all start out with these basic units.

I sew most of my longer 1.5" light medium strips into pairs, and then sew those pairs together to make a pieced strip 4.5" wide. I cut those into 5.5" slices, and add a fifth strip, 1.5" x 5.5". That allows me to use up all shorter lengths of strips. I do the same with all the dark medium strips. It doesn't matter what way the seams are pressed in these units. The aim is to have a 5.5" pieced square.

The dark and light strips are sewn into pairs, seam pressed to the dark fabric; then they are cut into 5.5" slices. At then end of the strip, when there isn't enough room for another slice I cut 1.5" pieces, and these are paired together to make fourpatches. The fourpatches are pressed like this.

Because there are two different blocks to make I can't just sew all these units together any old way. I need all the blocks oriented the same way for the pressing system to work (I sound as bad as Mereth now, who has confessed to not making blocks she likes because she can't get the seams to nest nicely!)

I lay out the light blocks like this, and sew the fourpatch to the light/dark rectangle, seam pressed away from the fourpatch. A light/dark rectangle is added to the side of the strip-pieced square, seam pressed to the dark. See how the strips in the square are aligned vertically?

Sew that final seam through the block, and press it towards the dark strip. It will want to do that anyway, because all those seam intersections don't want to press back on themselves.

Lay out the the dark square as shown; the strips in the pieced square are horizontal.

Sew the units together as in the other block, seam pressed away from the fourpatch, and away from the pieced centre square. Sew the joining seam, and press it down towards the pieced square.

If all the blocks are made and pressed like this, they fit together without a hitch, all the seams nested together. That makes me a lot more enthusiastic about getting on with the project.

The photos are crappy, taken late in the afternoon with bad lighting, but they will have to do. I'd rather spend today sewing than taking decent photos.

Oh and it's going to be on point now, because everything looks better on point.

Now that I look at it, some of those strip squares are oriented in the wrong direction. It doesn't matter a bit, except that those blocks won't play nicely with their neighbours when it comes time to join them. I don't mind mashing a few bulky seams flat, but a whole quilt like that is daunting. I'd rather take the time to work out a system and stick to it, even if I have to do a tutorial to remember.

Now if I could just remember where I put my Ott Light, and my hand-piecing supplies. and my Etui sewing box, and my other box of 1.5"strips. I thought we were being so careful when we moved here, but that last flurry of packing the presious stuff was done in an unsound state of mind. I have no idea where some things were stowed, and it will be a voyage of discovery to track them down.

2010-12-28T18:21:00.000-08:00

It didn't feel like Christmas this year for some reason, and now I can't quite believe that we've nearly finished with 2010. The year is galloping to a close, and I feel totally left behind. I'm not ready to start writing 2011 as the date.

We did have a lovely get together with Mereth's boys and their partners, plus Curtis the WonderDog and new baby Logan.

It was great to see them all again, and Logan was welcomed with delight. He hardly had a chance to sleep in his bed, there was always someone waiting for a turn to hold him. He was placid and good-natured and utterly adorable.

Dolly and Curtis got on like a house on fire, but Curtis just couldn't work out what Pippi was. She was too small, and too quick, and she kept chewing on him with needle-sharp puppy teeth. He was reduced to begging his mum to protect him.

We went to Adelaide on Boxing day for a quick visit; this photo is of the salt lakes at Lake View. They were a vivid fuchsia pink, completely unreal. We took lots of photos, but the colour doesn't come out true to life. It's particularly pink this year, it looks like it's been Photoshopped.

I thought that it would have been a terrible Christmas break if there was no sewing accomplished, so I sewed a few more of the Road to Oklahoma blocks, but my heart isn't really in it. Then I decided I was thoroughly sick of my overflowing drawers of strips. I usually do Bonnie's mystery quilts, and that helps clean out the strip drawers, but I didn't have time for that this year.

The first drawer I tackled was the 1.5" one. I had no idea what I wanted to do with them, so I just started sewing them into pairs, which I've done two or three times before.

The sewing time lets me decide what I'll do next. Last time I did this I made hundreds of four-patches and it took ages before they were all used up. This time I wasn't particularly keen on the four-patch idea, and I'd been thinking how much I like the way Bonnie makes new fabric by string piecing all the little bits together. So as well as sewing pairs of light and dark strips, I also sewed similar coloured strips together so I could cut a larger square out of them.

The light/dark pairs will form a sashing around the strip pieced squares, the small bits will make the four-patches and hopefully every last little scrap will find a place in this design.

What amazes me is that if I've regularly cleared out this size of strip drawer; why then are there such old and unlovely bits still there?? Where are they coming from? Will I never be rid of them?

Once all these bits are used up I'll make crumb blocks as the large square, and just keep going until I've used up all the stray bits cluttering my workroom. And I'm going to get rid of anything that makes me think twice about including it. If I don't love it, it's going to be thrown out or given away. I'm going to start 2011 with the scraps thinned out and the drawers a lot emptier.

2010-12-19T00:01:00.000-08:00

It's a working weekend for me, I'm trying to get all the quilts with Christmas deadlines finished. We've already done 5 quilts this week, but there's no time to waste if these quilts are to get back to their owners in time.

The cross-hatching on this embroidery quilt is nearly finished, then it's a matter of filling the 13" wide borders. At least there's lots of room for quilting. And the owner of the quilt is going to finish off all those thread ends, which is one less job for me to do.

I can't believe it's nearly Christmas, it just doesn't feel like it at all this year. Maybe one evening we'll go driving and look at all the lights and decorated yards, that always helps set the mood. The weather is really strange too, it's positively cold at times, and that is so unusual for our summers. Last year there was a record-breaking heatwave, this year is the coolest, wettest summer for decades. I'm loving it though, certainly not complaining.

I even did a little bit of sewing, trying out another idea for using the Easy Angle ruler.

I've always loved this shape, but it's not the easiest thing to rotary cut with an ordinary ruler. This is how I did it with the Easy Angle;

start off with a 4.5" square. Place the 2.5" line on the edge of the square, with the other edges of the ruler lined up with the edges of the square, and trim off the corner.

Flip the square over and trim off the other corner. You can flip the ruler if you prefer, but I like doing it this way as the markings are easier to read. You now have an irregular pentagon shape.

Cut two 2.5" triangles with the Easy Angle. Place one on the pentagon, and sew with a .25"seam.

Press seam towards the light fabric, and add the other triangle.

TaDa!! I love these little units, they're like houses.

I can see me making a lot more in my spare time, there are so many nice blocks that can be made with them. In fact, I've already whipped one up.

Mereth came round this afternoon to do some work, and I showed her the evidence of what her puppy has been up to.

Apparently Pippi has a taste for literature! We'll have to stop her chewing precious things like books, she can have bannister brushes and tennis balls and wooden spoons, but stay away from the bookshelves.

It's hard to be cross with this face though.

And this is my pup, in her guise of Hypno-Dog, trying to hypnotise me into taking her for a walk on this windy afternooon. Looks like it worked, we're off to the golf course.

2010-12-10T18:33:00.000-08:00

I received a nice little surprise in the post last week, a copy of the latest Homespun Magazine.

This edition of the magazine is well worth buying; there's a project in there from Kellie over at Don't Look Now; I'm a huge fan of her designs, so clean and fresh. I just may be tempted to try her methods on a little wall-hanging.

On the cover is a Storm At Sea quilt that I made, and as usual they did a wonderful job on the article.

When I was asked to make this quilt for the Summertime Issue I wasn't immediately overjoyed; this block has always been on my Must-make list, as well as my Too-much-trouble list. But I saw it as a challenge, to make the quilt with the easiest most accurate methods, and maybe help someone else conquer this pattern.

I made it using Freezer Paper templates for foundation piecing, which worked a treat. Once I had the instructions for the templates and method worked out I gave them to Mereth and asked her to trial them. That was actually my sneaky way of making her do some of the blocks for me; I'd better credit her with 5 finished blocks.

I had a pile of blue pieces ear-marked for removal from the stash, and this pattern is great for stash reduction. There are so many different size pieces, it utilised every big and little scrap in the pile.

I first saw this pattern in the first quilt book I ever bought, The Standard Book Of Quiltmaking by Marguerite Ickis.

I bought it Wodonga, in 1977; I was a measly 18 years old, and I was travelling from the Airforce base at Laverton in Victoria, to Wagga, NSW to continue my training.

Check out that price tag! It was all so long ago....

The instructions are pretty woeful, and the diagrams are basic, but it shows genuine antique quilts and it has a naive air that takes me straight back to my early, enthusiastic days of discovering quilting. If I sometimes wonder why I'm doing this thing called Quilting, a quick trip through this book and down memory lane puts my world to rights again.

2010-12-04T15:38:00.000-08:00

Tutorial as promised. A bit late, but I've had a very busy week.

I've always loved this block, Road To Oklahoma, but the construction didn't appeal to me. I didn't want to sew it with HSTs and have extra seams in the background, and I didn't want to draw diagonal lines to sew on with the flippy corner method. So every time I thougt about making the block I also thought 'Meh. Can't be bothered'.

A while ago I wondered why you couldn't cut that trapezoid shape with a ruler. And it turns out, the Easy Angle is made for it.

I already use and love this ruler, as does Bonnie, but now I love it even more. When I think of all the patterns made with this shape I can't wait to get started on them.

These are cut from 2.5"strips, using the 2.5"and 4.5"markings on the ruler. It will also work with other measurements, like 1.5"and 3.5", and the larger Easy Angle gives even more sizes.

To make this block, use a 2.5" background strip folded double, so that you are cutting a reverse shape at the same time. Cut both sides of the ruler, the straight one and the slanted one.

If I were clever I would have taken a photo of the end trimmed square, and the ruler aligned with the edge, but ......

Rotate the ruler, and cut another shape from the folded strip, and then you can even use the same ruler to cut a pair of 2.5"squares. Neat!

Stack two dark 2.5" strips, wrong sides up, and cut out a traapezoid shape, rotate the ruler and cut a triangle, then 2 squares; remember there are two layers, so you are cutting all the shapes needed for one block with as few cuts as possible (2 trapezoids, 2 triangle and 4 squares).

Line the ruler up with the points on those trapezoids, and nub off the points. This makes it super easy to line up the pieces later.

Lay out the shapes, so you can see what has to go where.

Take the 2 trapezoides on each side and lay them right sides together like this; see how easy they line up? Press the seam towards the dark patch.

Add a dark square to each light end, and press towards the dark fabric. Make the remaining squares into a four-patch.

Sew the triangles to the other light trapezoids. Press the seam towards the dark patch.

Layout all the pieced units, and sew together. Press seams away from the four-patch.

Sew the three rows together and press seams away from the four-patch.

And there you have it, a Road To Oklahoma block, in record time with no unecessary seams. I think I need another 50 for my quilt, so I'd better get sewing.

2010-11-29T11:46:00.000-08:00

These apricot and brown stars are on my design wall now, and my cutting table is full of scraps so I can cut out more. Problem is, I don't particualrly like the colour scheme any more, which is why blue and green and red are creeping into the blocks. I can't do a controlled colour scheme, it's beyond me. Before I know it, it's all gone scrappy again.

I've had this block on my To Do list since the early '80s, so it's good that I'm actually making it. I came up with an easy way to do it, so I'll do a little tutorial on that as soon as I find time to edit the photos.

2010-11-27T14:13:00.000-08:00

Finally the move is complete, and now it's just a matter of arranging everything and getting back to work. The Statler isn't running every day just yet, we've had too many other things to do, so it will be wonderful when that part of the business is back to normal.

We've had the most amazing weather, very cool and rainy, and it's bad for the farmers trying to harvest crops, but Mereth and I just love it. It's raining today, the perfect day to stay inside and sew, which I intend to do next.

I bought all my pot plants from the other house, so I have an instant garden;

it's so lovely to have all my favourite flowers here, I'm going to enjoy making a proper garden once the worst of the summer is over. I'm already making huge plans for a rose garden, it will be easy to go overboard as I have so much land here, but I will try to be sensible.

The sewing area is set up, and it's a little bit smaller than my old room, but I will make do.

I've stored all my UFOs in the back of the hall, and I'll probably forget they even exist. Out of sight, out of mind.

But there's not enough room for everything in one spot, so I'll have to adjust to that. Maybe I'll make a rule that I have to work on one UFO a month till they're all gone.

Mereth sent me a link to a blog post on the Stash Manicure blog, and I keep going back to look at it. This woman's sewing room is amazing, and I would love to be that organised. I'll use a few of her ideas in my new sewing area,

What a wonderful room.

and this

The puppies are utterly adorable, at 5 weeks old, and we go out each day to drop supplies off to Matthew (lots of newspaper and puppy milk) and spend a few minutes playing with them. It's important to socialise puppies, so we feel like it's a valuable job we're doing. Dolly is amazingly gentle with them, and follows them round protectively, even letting them pull on her ears or bite her face.

She's like her dad in lots of ways. I must take some little videos, because this stage goes so quickly, and the puppies are ready for new homes in two weeks time.

I haven't done a bit of sewing for 5 weeks, so today I will unearth my apricot and brown stars, and sew some more of them. I think I know where they are....

2010-10-22T14:02:00.000-07:00

Long time, no blog. Things got very hectic after the AMQF at the start of the month; on the last day of the festival I found out that I have to move house, so ever since then Mereth and I have been packing and shifting, toting and carrying, lugging boxes and hauling furniture. The end is in sight though, and we might have a lazy day today.

Life has been constant upheaval for many months; first there was Mereth's shift, which is now almost complete. Now I'm shifting. And our bother and sister-in-law moved over from Western Austalia, and have been decluttering their house, which seems to involve giving us what they don't want; when DB arrives on the doorstep with a trailer full of stuff we have to stop what we're doing and rush to help unpack.

And where are we going? I always knew that I woud have to leave this place one day, when our friends came back, so I had the foresight to buy a place that could take Millhouse. Two years ago I bought the Freemason's Lodge, which is a gigantic hall, just two blocks down from where I live now.

It's only two rooms, so Millhouse will be set up in the back, and I will live in the front room.

There is loads of space, so it won't be too bad, and it will only be until I can get planning approval for a house on the land next door.

I've lived in caravans before this, and student accommodation, and single rooms, so a 6m x 7m room won't be too cramped. And I'll finally realise a longheld dream and get to actually sleep in my sewing room! I bet I'll have to move the fabric off my bed first.

2010-09-07T05:06:00.000-07:00

Time is a precious commodity just lately, and there doesn't seem to be any spare. What few free moments I have are spent in the sewing room working on my projects, but there's not much progress to show. I would love to have a quiltathon with Judy, but there are too many other commitments. I'm helping Mereth shift house, and working long hours, plus I'm teaching at the Australian Machine Quilting Festival in October and I need to get everything prepared for that. Which includes working on a few quilts, so I must find time for that. I need to give up sleeping.

This is my design wall, fairly well unchanged for several weeks. I keep making more of those blocks, and lots more of the Square in Square units, and countless Flying Geese, I still have no idea where I'm going with these blocks, but I like them so far. I've used up a lot of scraps from the stash drawers, and that's a good thing.

The green and floral triangles are my leader-ender project, a simple way to use the drawer full of large florals that I've accumulated. I don't know where they came from, surely I didn't buy them all? Anyway, these 4" HSTs will help whittlle them down, and there's always backings to use up more.

A customer dropped off a quilt last week, and I was smitten with it. I love the color scheme so much that I immediately cut out a few blocks to see what it looked like in my fabrics, and I loved it even more.

So I immediately started cutting out yet another project. In my defence I'd already culled all these peachy apricots from my stash, and begged some from Mereth, and was about to cut them up for a brown and apricot quilt. I like this blue and red and green colour scheme much more. I won't make a large quilt, so I should be able to pull all the material needed from my drawers and cupboards. I love being able to do that.

And lastly, this is the most recent quilt I've quilted, a customer's bright Nearly Insane quilt.

It was fun to work on, her colour choices were so unusual. I quilted it with a Baptist Fan, and a separate border. Hopefully tomorrow I'll be able to get a good picture of the finished quilt; I'm amazed at the amount of work in a quilt like this, and yet the thought of starting one of my own is tempting. Must not start anything else....

2010-08-21T15:36:00.000-07:00

Time for the weekly post. It's terribly slack of me to only post once a week, but it's better than nothing. Life is busy right now.

Our Show last week had terrible weather, rainy and windy, but we rugged up and went along anyway.

If you have to rug up against the weather you can at least be fashionable while you're about it.

First stop was the shearing competition, which is my favourite.

You can see why shearers end up with bad backs.

They were shearing a sheep every 3 minutes on average; I can't imagine doing this for a living.

There's a real knack to throwing out the fleece so that it lands on the skirting table with the tips up and the cut side down, all in one layer, so that the daggy, inferior edges can be pulled off and discarded.

I wanted one of those fleeces so bad, but I have 5 whole fleeces already, so space is an issue; I'd better spin some up real quick.

Then we watched the show-jumping; this is Mereth's favourite show activity.

The horses were so beautifully turned out, they were a pleasure to watch.

When the rain started we ducked into the pavillions to see the exhibits.

There were the usual things, like honey and eggs;

but also some entries in classes that were a little out of the ordinary.

In earlier times the ability to render fat and dripping from home-killed meat was a necessary skill; I'm glad I don't have to master it these days.

And this is butter sculpture; the lady who made these little works of art is nearly 80, milks her cow every day and made all the butter for these creations. She's truly remarkable.

We bought a little bit of fabric from a booth, and indulged in a pair of Ugg boots each. Then it was off to see the birds; I think pigeon fanciers are a strange breed themselves.

The proud owner assured me there was a head in amongst all those feathers.

I much prefer this sweet little hen, lovely colours.

Last stop was the mettwurst stall, to buy a metre long pepperoni stick, like this one.

It was very hard to manouevre, so once it was bought we had to leave. We had a lovely day, even if it was wet and muddy.

2010-08-12T13:35:00.000-07:00

Another busy work week is nearly over, and I'm looking forward to the weekend. It's our local agricultural Show tomorrow, and we're going to attend for a couple of hours, after a customer consult that is. It will be fun to see the quilts and the cooking and the flower arranging and the tractors and the show-jumping.... Might take more than a couple of hours.

I want to get a lot of sewing done, and some garden chores, so I've resorted to a list. I know some people like Judy make lists for everything, but I don't normally work that way. I don't normally get a lot done either. So it's a detailed list this weekend, and I'll let you know how I go. I have to tidy up the garden before Spring bursts upon us in only two weeks time, and I want to spin up a lot of wool that a friend gave me; I need to deep clean the workroom and the laundry and the kitchen. That's just for starters!

The sewing project of choice is the blocks on my design wall. When I started off it was to use up scraps and make a block that I'd wanted to make for a long time. Only when I checked, it wasn't the same block at all. My memory is not up to scratch.

This is the quilt I've had earmarked to make. It's from Nancilu Burdicks's pattern book that accompanies the book Legacy, and is based on a quilt her grandmother made.

The blocks I started making are very simple versions of the quilt I actually wanted to make. No problem, I just start making more complicated ones, and I'll merge them all together.

Don't look at the photo below if you're squeamish!

Last weekend I was shifting furniture, and an antique table bit me.

All I did was put my hand beneath it to pick it up, and a waiting splinter went right under my thumbnail. Mereth, in true blogger fashion, looked at it and said 'We have to take a photo of that!' Amazingly it didn't hurt much, and at the emergency room our lovely doctor numbed my whole thumb and then dug it out. And it still didn't hurt a lot. I'm very lucky I think, it could have been worse. All week the two spots where he injected the anaesthetic have hurt much worse than the original injury. Here's hoping this weekend doesn't have an eventful end like the last one.

2010-08-08T03:35:00.000-07:00

My Stash report for this week shows some large figures in, and some bigger ones out. I still have another parcel from Hancocks coming (damn their free shipping offers!) so the overall total will plummit once that arrives. Still, I've taken more than 170m out of my stash this year, and I'm pleased about that.

Bought this week;   13.75m
Used this week;     22m
Bought this year;   64.7
Used this year;   176.4
Overall total;    111.7

I've cut up mountains of small pieces this week, and sewed lots of Square in Square units and Flying Geese.

I haven't assembled any of the units into blocks though, haven't had time for that yet. I'll see if I can find time for that tomorrow.

2010-08-06T15:22:00.000-07:00

When I buy fabric on the net I often choose cheap fabric, close-outs and discounted older lines; I tell myself I'm being a wise shopper, and that it's a canny thing to do and saves money. Then when the fabric arrives I'm a bit disappointed, or not happy with the quality, or just underwhelmed with the whole experience. The new stuff gets packed away and forgotten, and the next time I feel like going shopping I remember the last time and think, Maybe Not.

The first of my parcels arrived from Reproduction Fabrics. Unpacking it was a sheer joy. This time I only chose really beautiful patterns, from my favourite designers, and I'm thrilled to bits with all of it. There was a special on their shipping, a maximum of $15 for an international order, so I went a bit wild and bought 14 yards. The actual cost of the shipping was $43, so I certainly saved myself some money there.

I sort of concentrated on the shirtings and madder prints, with some brown and double pink thrown in. I was very nice and shared with Mereth, but she's a bit over the whole madder thing, having created two enormous quilts from her madder stash already.

I have a quilt pattern earmarked for this lot, and when I get a few more of those scraps dealt with I'll start cutting for it. I'm going to have a lot of fun with these gorgeous prints. They are mostly from the Twelve Oakes range by Judie Rothermel, with a few others thrown into the mix. I may have to go back and get the prints from that range that I didn't include this time.

The downside to all this is that next time I'm tempted to go shopping online I'll be full of enthusiasm, rmembering how wonderful this was. Not good news on the stashbusting front : (

But for now I'm just going to revel in these new fabrics and I may even cut some strips to make tiny 4-patches, just for fun, and to get acquainted with the lovely prints. While I wait for my next parcel to arrive.

2010-07-29T05:35:00.000-07:00

Time slips away so quickly these days, it's hard to schedule regular blog posts. But I sort of have an excuse; I'm completely obsessed with cutting up my fabric. It's hard to stop and do all my other chores, because the only thing I want to do is zip the rotary cutter through all these pieces until there's nothing left to put back in the drawer.

Why the grim determination to clear all these small pieces out of the stash? Well, I sort of went mad one day, and ordered about 20 yards of fabric online. It was a moment of utter insanity, and I'm not proud of it, but I can't take it back, so I'll have to live with it once the parcels start arriving. However, I don't like the thought of trying to cram new fabric into the drawers that are already bulging at the seams, so I'm trying to whittle the stash down a little.

I weeded out snippets and strips and bits less than an eighth of a metre, 800grams worth, which translates to about 6 metres; then I got ruthless and pulled out lengths and FQs that I hadn't ever cut into. If I didn't love it, then I needed to get rid of it. I'm going to make some pieced backings out of those bits.

Most big projects look much worse before the good results are visible, and my sewing room is a pit, a shambles, a teetering stack of remnants. But I can see progress, room in the drawers for my new fabric, and a steady pile of pieces ready to be sewn into the block of the moment on the design wall.

I'm just going to keep cutting, and keep sewing, and keep thinning out the stash, and before long I know I'll be a lot happier with the contents of my sewing room.

I've been sewing late at night, with lots of coffee to keep me going. Last night I was clipping the little dog ears off my triangles, and throwing them into the pretty cup that stops them migrating all over the sewing room.

It ws inevitable that I was going to get tired and throw them in the wrong cup; when it finally happened I figured it was a sign that I needed to go to bed. What a waste of good coffee!

2010-07-20T19:00:00.000-07:00

We've been busy these last few weeks, and there has been almost no sewing taking place. Things have to change, I'm getting cranky at having no time for the things I want to do. So my new policy is at least an hour a day in the sewing room, and 15 minutes in the garden. That should help me see progress at the end of each week.

This last weekend saw me sorting out scrap containers and deciding on a new project for all my precious bits and pieces.

I like this simple block, and it will give me lots of practice making Flying Geese units. I think I'll change that large centre square to lots of different little blocks, 4-patches, 9-patches, square-in-squares etc. That will keep me interested in the project, and let me use us lots of tiny scraps too.

I came across a heap of black and blue scraps, so I made 56 nine-patches in two days,

and they are nearly assembled into a top already. If I'd had enough of the pink sashing fabric I could have finished this on Sunday, but it had to wait until the patchwork shop opened on Tuesday.

I'm ready to cut out the rest of the sashing this afternoon and get this top completed; not bad, seeing it wasn't even on the drawing board last week.

And I was a bit bad at the LQS, and 4 metres came home with me. (Pink and brown and shirtings, I can't resist, and even more hand sewing needles!) 1.5 will go into the sashing straight away, and the scraps I'm weeding out of the drawers will help lessen the pain of writing up more purchases in the spreadsheet.. I'm still over the 100 metres used mark, despite adding a fair bit recently.

Maybe I need to cut a heap of bindings and backings next weekend, to get even more fabric moving in the sewing room. Sometimes it's a good thing, being forced to neglect quilting for a while; I feel so much more enthusiasm for all my projects after a little break.

Time to finish lunch and get busy!

2010-07-13T21:39:00.000-07:00

We went to Adelaide for a quick visit last weekend, because Mereth's second-born son Rob, and his lovely wife Elisa, were visiting from Newcastle. John and Liz have a new member of the family, the lovely Jezabel. She's a sweet, good-natured kitten, very charming.

On Saturday morning Mereth went off shopping with Elisa, and the rest of us planned a trip to Central Market to stock up on fresh food and coffee and little nibbly things.

On his last trip home John wheedled the family recipe for Cinnamon Scrolls out of Mereth, and he and Rob decided to make a batch before we left for the Markets. It was like MasterChef, with lots of conflicting ideas about hydrating the dough and starting the sponge ahead of time, and which sort of sugar to use. I was just an amused spectator, except when I nursed the bowl of yeast sponge to keep it warm (it was a cold morning).

With the dough set to rise in the sun by the back door we set off for the markets. It's such a fun place to visit, all sorts of cooked food available, and stalls selling the ingredients for just about anything you could dream up.

I don't really care for any of the meat listed at this butcher; I'm not that adventurous thank you.

The camel sausages looked OK, but the kangaroo tails were gross; I have no idea how one would go about cooking a kangaroo tail. Don't want to find out either. I was much more drawn to the vegetable stalls, these Chinese Cabbage were so fresh and inviting.

We went and had an O-bun, fascinating little Chinese cakes like doughnuts, with a range of fillings. I had a custard one, which was very nice;

maybe I'll have a cheese one next time, or coconut, or red bean paste

We bought food for dinner that night, and I stocked up on things I can't get in Crystal Brook, like soy flour and cocoa nibs and black turtle beans. I had a huge carton of really strange food to take home by the time we'd finished.

When we arrived home the dough was nearly out of the pan; we'd taken longer than we thought.

John was being silly and worshipping the great god D'oh! So while we girls sorted out the purchases, John and Rob got straight into making the cinnamon scrolls, with much banter and boasting about who's scrolls were going to be the best.

Once they were cooked we had to taste test them of course, and it was a tie; John's were sweeter, but Rob's were lighter. They were all eaten in a matter of minutes, they were so good.

It was a quick trip, just to catch up with family, so there were no fabric shops on the agenda; we had a late breakfast with everyone and left at luchtime Sunday. And it's been work, work, work ever since. I'm glad the weekend was such fun.

2010-07-02T23:03:00.001-07:00

I have finished one quilt top with the Fig Tree fabrics, and it's very pretty.

It used hardly any fabric though, which ordinarily I would be pleased about; I've still got heaps to play with. Except I'm not really sure I want to play with the leftovers; I might donate them to someone in our quilt group and be done with them.

I've had several reproduction projects on the back-burner for months, so it will be full steam ahead on those next. Time to put aside the duty sewing and devote myself to quilts that I truly adore.

On another note entirely, I wonder how many of us grew up with books showing mice in aprons and little waistcoats, and lots of little baby mice with cute curly tails? I actively discouraged that view of anthropomorphistic animals with my kids. When, as an adult, I faced the reality of mice that had to be disposed of I had to fight off that image of Mama Mouse with a wooden spoon and a pinafore, cooking dinner for all the baby mice. I didn't want to burden my kids with that little hangup.

The whole district had a mini mouse plague this year; whenever people met they compared mouse stories, and tallies of how many had been caught in one night (12 was the highest I heard). I trapped 10 in my bedroom alone, erch!! And as I disposed of each body I thought that most wild mice don't resemble the cute images in kid's books. These were nasty, nasty vermin.

And hungry too. These are little silicon moulds that I make chocolates in. These were left on the dish drainer overnight, and some hungry mouse thought they were worth sampling. Heaven knows what he was thinking, probably that it didn't taste very nice.

2010-06-24T10:22:00.000-07:00

I haven't done a Stash Report for a long while, but I"m still keeping track of my purchases and usage.

Used this Week: 17 m
Used year to Date: 141.6 m
Added this Week: 2.5 m
Added Year to Date: 38.25 m
Net Used for 2010: 103.35 m

I'm over the 100 metre mark at last, cause for celebration. I should say that the 17m used this week is the total of two quilts I've been working on for the last month, and I never counted the yardage used till they were finished. It's not like I had a wonderful week of sewing, cause I didn't. And they're commission quilts so I can't show you what they were. : (

I'm really pleased with the amount I've used this year, and the nearly 40 metres I've added is very moderate for me. In the not so distant past I could come out of a shop lugging 40 metres all in one go, so it's wonderful to have controlled my aquisitions for 6 months. Mind you, that 40m has cost nearly $500, which is kind of sobering. If I stay in control for the rest of the year, and only buy that much again for the next 6 months, it's still a total expenditure of $1000 per annum.

My Mum would be horrified beyond words at that, but $20 a week seems a small price to pay for a bunch of pretty stuff that makes me feel happy. I could spend that at the movies, or twice that having my nails done, or I could drink it away at the pub or gamble it on Lotto. 2 packets of cigarettes would cost more than that; it's not even a downpayment on fancy shoes. I don't have to justify it to anyone, but I do need to make sure that I buy what I actually want, not just something that appeals to me on a whim. No more 'What was I thinking!" purchases.

It would be nice to say there's a bit more room in the sewing room, but there's not. Or it's so disorganised that I can't tell. My goal for the rest of this week and on the weekend is to clear out some of the clutter and make space, so I can work happily in there.

There's nothing new on the design wall, same blocks as last time; I will have to get cracking and do something interesting to show you, won't I?

2010-06-15T16:45:00.000-07:00

My design wall is full of projects that aren't the sort of thing I normally make.

I blame the whole jelly-roll thing for that. I would never buy these fabrics by the metre, yet I willingly pay for a jellyroll of them. Incomprehensible.The blue batiks are gone, all used up by that top. However, the Fig Tree fabrics are proving harder to get rid of.

I had a jellyroll and a layer cake of these, plus some strips from a scrap bag from Hancocks. (must stay away from Hancocks....)

I've cut 20 of these Churndash blocks out, and there is still a great pile of strips and squares and offcuts.

There's enough for at least 2 quilts, and even though these ranges are pretty, they're just not Me. I'll have to buckle down and use them up, but I do think I need to be more discerning when I buy jellyrolls. Or not buy them at all.

These Civil War Home Front fabrics are much more to my liking.

As are the French General prints; some of these are wonderful. But there's that other jellyroll just waiting to be used. How many quilts can we have in those colours??

It's so easy to buy a jellyroll, there seem to be so many ideas for them, until the time comes to actually cut into one. Then it's really hard to make a decision, you don't want to 'waste' it, but you can't decide what is the 'perfect' pattern. I should just make a comittment not to buy them in future; I'd be better off buying a tower of FQs.

What am I saying???? I can't afford to add that much fabric to the stash on a whim! I think I have to veto all these pre-cut options entirely. And I will, as soon as I buy the set of Attic Shirtings, and maybe Cocoa Express....

2010-06-15T07:27:00.000-07:00

It was another busy day today, with customers picking up quilts and bringing in tops, Mereth quilting and me slaving away on the computer. Around lunch time there was a diversion. Last week I bought some fleeces from a hobby farmer up north, and they were delivered today.

Can you believe that all that wool came from a single sheep? The fleece was crammed into a wheat sack, so it's horribly tangled, full of grass and weed seeds, but still useable. Mereth and I sat in the sun for half an hour, picking out the best bits and throwing away the rubbish. We filled three grocery bags with locks that I will carefully wash, but the remainder of the fleece still seemed just as huge. And there are two more like this!! I will be spinning this up for years to come, and there will be a fleece every year as long as this particular sheep exists. Good-O!

I think I have a fleece stash; there's a light grey fleece in the laundry, and a quilting customer has a brown one that she'll bring with her next quilt top. I don't know when I'll find time to process them all, but it's a lovely hobby. Mereth has plans to make a quilt with a homemade wool batt...

After lunch Mereth and I sorted out the finished quilts on the bed in the spare room; Dolly came in and begged and begged to have one of my teddies, who live on the dressing table in there.

She's already had a go at Ted, on the left, his face is a bit chewed. Patrick and Olivia are unscathed so far.

Oh she wants them so bad!!!

2010-06-07T16:21:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago we visited the patchwork shop at Jamestown, delivering a quilt. I didn't really want any new fabric, but a jellyroll of blue and green batiks caught my eye, and before I knew what was happening, I bought it!! I wonder if it was something to do with the incredible restraint I showed while piecing this top; at the time I struggled not to buy more of those fabric, and thought I'd done remarkably well. Then, months later, out of the blue, 3m comes home with me on an impulse.

I cleared my design wall off on Saturday, and began cutting up the jellyroll, determined to use it up before it achieved permanent status on the shelf. I made sort of a quarter Log Cabin, which was blindingly simple and went together really quickly. I didn't want much definition in the blocks, I was after a swimmy sort of underwater feel. I think I managed that.

Some of the fabrics in this are so ugly I had to grit my teeth and make myself use them. And they just blend in, which is a relief. While I was sewing the strips together I had moments of doubt, but the uglies don't dominate. That's the magic of scrap quilts.

I don't have anything in my stash to add to these strips, so the top had to be complete out of the jellyroll. I had to piece two of the setting triangles from scraps, but I did it. Now I just have to get all the blocks sewn together, hopefully sometime today. The border will prove a bit of a problem, but I will take care of that on the next trip to Adelaide. I love fabric shopping when there's something specific to buy.

Dolly and I went for our usual walk this afternoon, on the golfcourse. It's a scene of carnage at the moment, for some reason. There are rabbit and bird bodies everywhere, rather gruesome; I suppose the cold is killing them off. Of course Dolly finds it all pretty interesting, and I have to drag her away from some of the more intoxicating scenes. At one stage I climbed a stile over the fence, so we could continue walking on the road; I was holding down a strand of the wire fence, so Dolly could get through, when a strange expression came over her face. She froze, staring at me; I could see her brain ticking over, thinking 'Hey, if she's on that side of the fence, she can't stop me doing what I want....' And she turned and galloped back to the nearest carcase and started throwing bits of it around in ecstasy. I was so not amused, but she kept on leaping about, bits of bunny fur flying and indescibable things hanging out of her mouth. Talk about disgusting! She kept an eye on me, and when it became clear that I was going to climb back and deal with her, she charged over and got through the fence, good as gold.

Except she stank. Thank heavens we don't have skunks in Australia, because day old bunny is bad enough. It was straight back to Mereth's place and into the bath with her, while she grumbled that she didn't want to smell nice, she'd worked hard to build up that toxic-green aura, and it was all going to waste down the plug-hole. We don't see eye to eye on what smells good.

2010-06-03T16:37:00.000-07:00

As Mereth pointed out in this post, we have been working seriously long hours for the last three weeks. And I don't want to talk about work on this blog, so I haven't had much to say about anything lately. I think I may be caught up now, enough to just put in 6 hours a day instead of 12, so just maybe I can have a Life again from now on.

Luckily for me, a lot of what I do is on the laptop, and with wireless internet I can work in bed at night.

Dolly adores this. In fact, she's come to see it as the only place to be, now that the weather is getting colder. She burrows down under the covers and luxuriates in the warmth, snoring gently and twitching occassionally. What a life she has, a very spoilt girl. She's an excellent hot-water-bottle, and good company.

Late each afternoon I put on my walking shoes and we're off for an hour and a half, tramping the golf course and enjoying the winter scenery. Dolly has caught three rabbits to date, and dispatched them swiftly. That may sound a bit brutal, but the golfcourse is strewn with the bodies of rabbits that the foxes haven't been kind to either. And in Australia, rabbits are vermin who destroy our environment, so a few less are no cause for mourning.

We've been for a few walks at Bowmans Park too, and came across this sandstone wall, sculpted by wind and weather.

It is so soft a fingernail left marks, just amazing. It would be fun to carve something out of this stone, it would be really easy to shape. Maybe I'll take that up as a hobby, when I need a break from quilting, (Like NOW).

I have made a few blocks of this Cracker patterns, for stress relief.

It's so cute, and goes together so easily, perfect for those odd moments when I have time to sew. Now that things have calmed down a bit I'll tackle my longterm projects first, like the Lady of the Lake blocks, and then jump right into kitting up more of the Cracker blocks.

Oh well, it's time to get to work, much to Dolly's dismay; she'll have to leave her natural environment, my bed, and go sit in the office and keep me company. Her work is never done.....

2010-05-24T14:36:00.000-07:00

Seems like lots of people want to know about how to take cuttings; it's not hard, but some plants grow as cuttings more readily than others. Chrysanthemums are among the easy ones. This site had good instructions, but there are plenty more out there if you google it. A lot of commercial flowers from florists are treated so as not to grow as cuttings; something to do with the plant breeders wanting to retain control of their products. That's why I used bouquets grown locally, in an ordinary garden.

I use a mix of sand, peatmoss and perlite as a growing medium, but you can buy bags of it from any garden centre. I sometimes use a hormone powder to dip the ends of the cutting; it promotes lots of root growth, but I've hade good results without it.

And to answer another question from the last post; a heavily quilted custom quilt like that, 98" square, doesn't leave much change from $500 (Australian, of course). And while some readers are gasping at how much that is, others are thinking that it's awfully cheap. It was on the frame for 5 days, a whole working week; it's always a relief to get those huge custom jobs finished and out the door.

I put in a huge amount of time and effort over the weekend, and finished the main piecing of my commission quilt. British police drama DVDs get me through a lot of duty sewing; this time it was Prime Suspect that helped me stick to the job at hand. Midsommer Murders has been a helpful in the past (ímprobable plot lines and beautiful English scenery in equal amounts), but Inspector Morse is my all time favourite.

I have two borders to add, and then my design wall is clear. I'm sure it will take a while to get going on another project, so I'll just putter around with some longterm UFOs, and more crumb blocks, and I just may make a DJ block or two. One of the girls in my piecing class has begun a Dear Jane, and her excitement is infectious.

I actually have photos to load, but blogger is being obstinate and won't co-operate; maybe tomorrow...

2010-05-15T16:44:00.000-07:00

I've been busy this week quilting this very large machine embroidered quilt and finally the end is in sight. It took four whole days, hovering over the machine, making sure that the quilting was in exactly the right place. The embroidery is beautifully done, so the quilting had to be spot on.

The centre and sashes still needs some freehand work, which Mereth will do on Monday, and then I need to clip about a thousand thread tails. I feel like my life is not my own until this quilt is finished and back with it's owner. She's going to be surprised when she sees it, she had no idea what we would do with it.

Cross-hatching at this density doesn't always work with embroidered quilts, as the quilting can pull the fabric in too much. Luckily with this top there was a bit of fullness in the blocks, mainly because they were all separately backed with pellon before embroidering.

The fullness meant that the heavy quilting actually made the block flatter, all the puckers quilted out like magic.

I will put a flower in the middle of the heart shape on this block, and that will tame the centre fabric. This is going to be one gorgeous quilt when it's finished.

Once the owner picks it up I am going to have a day in my sewing room, puddling around in my stash and making progress on my projects which have been ignored for too long. I miss my sewing room. But while I was quilting all day I had to spend the evenings catching up with other business things, so I had no spare time. Next week should be quieter. Mereth will be glad to have the machine to herself; we had to take turns with Millhouse, zipping my quilt off so she could go to work after I'd finished for the day.

I really enjoy Mother's Day flowers, they are always chrysanthemums for me.

My kitchen table was covered in vases of them; one from each of my kids and I bought two local bunches so I can grow cuttings from them. Three of the cuttings from last year grew and are blooming, so it's definitely worth trying again.

I just can't decide what my favourite colour is, so I'll have them all.

2010-05-08T17:07:00.000-07:00

It seems as if I've loved florals with a blue background forever. And I certainly have collected a few of them.

I used this one as the backing of a favourite quilt.

And I have 2 metres of this one

1 metre of this one;

2.5 metres of this one;

4 metres of this one;

3 metres of this;

1 metre of trhis;

and 2 metres of this latest one, which is my current favourite.

I just adore this, couldn't leave it behind.

I'm sure, absolutely positively sure, that I have enough blue background florals to make all the quilts I could ever desire. But this little beauty, from a Charity charm pack, has my fingers itching to go shopping online.

It's in my shopping basket at Hancocks, I just haven't pushed the button yet. How much is enough? It's useless to ask if I need it, of course I don't. But it's pretty, and I want it.

Below is a picture of the fabric that caused this obsession.

My Mum had a bedspread and curtains she made from this beautiful barkcloth; it's so faded now, but when we were little it was a beautiful vibrant sky blue. The set was in constant use until we were 15, and they're a bit dingy and damaged, but I still love them.

It's interesting to think that this material had such an impact on my tastes; as a child I would sit by Mum's bed admiring the pattern and the textured fabric. It was as good as a picture book in my eyes. I'm actually very grateful that Mum never made us go to Kindergarten; we spent all those years before school at home, playing with fabric and books and amusing ourselves. And if I wanted to lie on Mum's bed for an hour, looking at the roses and dreaming, then she let me. A little quiet contemplation is a good thing.