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.

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21 oct 10

The custom quilt was finished at last, and it seemed to get bigger the more we worked on it. It just swamped the whole table when we laid it out to trim and bind it. It was 104" x 109", and that's a lot of quilt. We are so lucky to have the tables and workspace to handle such a large item, it's so much easier to manage when the quilt is completely supported. I often help Mereth out with the really big custom quilts; I use the Statler to put in large motifs, or elements of the border, and Mereth freehands the spaces that are left. I get to play and experiment with the software, and it cuts down the amount of work that she has to do. In the huge corner triangles I put the feathered heart in the centre, and Mereth free-handed the feather sprays either side. She's pretty good at placing feathers to completely fill an area. The border was 14.5"wide, and I quilted lines 2" in on either side, then put that elaborate Interlaced Feather border in the remaining space. Those straight lines help define the border, and by making the space smaller (9") the border pattern can fill it entirely at a nice scale. If I'd done this pattern at 13" the individual feathers would have been too large. Straight lines are good value. We can't post pictures of the entire quilt, as it may end up entered in a show, but it did look wonderful, and worth all the effort. In the comments on my Stash Report, Kathi pointed out that my maths was up the creek, so I went back and looked at the spreadsheet; I wrote down the wrong number in my totals, so I've actually used 90.6 metres this year, bought 15.25, for a total of 75.35 metres used. I'm much closer to that first 100 metres used than I thought I was. It's HOT! That's only to be expected in summer, but expecting it doesn't make it more bearable. Still, there is a cool change predicted for tomorrow, and that does make the heat endurable. Only 24 more hours of this, then we can go outside without melting into a puddle. And I can play in my sewing room, and cook up some more of those blessed zucchini....

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