Taking It Easy

 I've been good about not stressing my hands with too much work, and I think my wrist is much better. I put a new blade in my rotary cutter and cautiously cut some pieces, with no problems. Then another night I sewed all those pieces together; I ironed them in another session, and last night I trimmed them. 

That wasn't comfortable, so I had to take a break between each set, but I got them all done. I think the message there is to stick to pushing pieces through the machine for another few days, before I go back to cutting. I see people on YouTube videos cutting with left and right hands, and that impresses me no end. If I tried that I'm sure I'd either wreck my fabric and cutter, or I'd need lots of bandages afterwards.

I'm only making one quarter of the units for Bonnie's mystery, and it's much more enjoyable than stressing about how to get them all done in time for the next clue. The half rectangle triangles in this last clue were a doozy; I kept tripping up on the bit that said, stack right sides up, rather than right sides together. Habits of a lifetime are hard to break, so I had a few miss-cuts.

And then I didn't have enough fabric to cut more, so I have two sets that look like this. I'm definitely not going to stress about that. It's a scrap quilt.

We have a spell of hot weather predicted for this week, so I need to tidy up my workroom so I can hide there in the AC. What I think will happen is that I'll go to tidy up the string piecing, decide to just make a few more blocks to whittle down the strings, and then I'll be totally side-tracked and no tidying will happen. I must try and resist that scenario.

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Hmmph!

 I finished quilting and binding the enormous quilt, and it will be picked up tomorrow. 

It all went without a hitch, which I'm very grateful for. Now I need to pull the Statler to bits and give it a spa treatment while there are no customer quilts due. Lots of oil, new needle, pull off the needle plate and clean out the innards, adjust the tension, and maybe order more bobbins. That will keep me busy. 

I'd like to quilt a quilt for myself over the break, so one day will be spent getting the backing and batting prepared for that. By the time I've done all that it will be time to head off to Adelaide again. 

Alas, I spent too much time trimming units without a break, and then binding 2 quilts in one day, and now my right arm has pins and needles and my wrist is sore. The only cure for that is rest, and rest is boring. Super boring. I'm reading, which is fine, but unproductive. I'm tidying up in small bursts, but I can't shift anything heavy, like boxes of fabric, so basically it's just shuffling things around. Even typing hurts. I'm not very patient it seems.

I've dug out some more old fabric for the mystery;

I bet Bonnie herself would recognise these old patterns.

Today I will tidy up the workroom and set up a small jigsaw, and maybe when that is finished I'll be back to light sewing duties. I can only hope.

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Home Again

Back home again, but I've had to dive right into quilting 2 quilts for a friend. One was a Bluey cot quilt, very cute, but the other is a King Size one and it's taxing my reserves. The backing had to be pieced out of three lengths of fabric and it was so heavy I could barely manage it. It took forever to iron too, but at last it was loaded on the frame. 

I ironed the top and put the batting in place, set up the panto and it's ready to quilt tomorrow. Unfortunately I have to bind bind both quilts, but once that's done I don't have any more jobs until after Christmas. Thank heavens.

I was 2 clues behind in Bonnie's mystery, so I have been cutting pieces for that whenever I have a spare moment. I decided that I was going to use some of my oldest fabrics and get them out of the stash drawers at last. I was also going to raid my scraps first, and try to use the ironed fabric hanging on the racks and in the scrap drawers. 

For the HSTs in Clue 3 I decided to use the 8-at-a-time method so that I would have 2 sets from every pair of squares. It was so fast; I know they need to be trimmed, but I choose to trim them no matter what method I use. At least this method doesn't have bias edges, and the initial cutting was really quick.

I'm only making a quarter of the units because I know I won't have time to do them all. But I'll probably catch up after Christmas. I'm wanting to add green into the mix of colours, but I'll need to see the overall design before I choose what I want to replace with green. It's certainly taken the pressure off, with the smaller amount of units to piece.

Trimming, trimming, trimming.....

I was having withdrawal symptoms in Adelaide without my sewing. The closest I got was helping Seonaid with the costumes for Thomas's class for the school concert.

40 pirate bandanas and cumberbunds, all torn because we couldn't find the fabric scissors or the acrylic ruler. Oh well, we had a good afternoon chatting and ripping and clipping all the threads.

I found graph books for the boys, so they could draw up Minecraft figures. Thomas presented me with this.

He's going to be some sort of engineer in later life, he has such a methodical mind. Before he could play with his book he had to map out some colour theory on the first page.  Actually I think he could make a very pedantic lecturer or professor; I can't count how many times I've thought, 'Don't tell your grandmother how to suck eggs' as he explains to me how to butter bread, or make a taco, or peel a boiled egg, or turn a tap on.  But he does it to share what he knows, to process it logically, and organise all the steps needed. He's a very thoughtful child.

And, he's the one who can use the TV remote when Nan is mystified by it; I'm humbled by his superior knowledge.

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I'm away from home again, in Adelaide to babysit while some end-of-school-year events take place.  I deliberately didn't bring any handwork, so that I would be forced to work on loading software onto my new laptop. It's not my favourite past-time, so many usernames and passwords to remember or retrieve.

Before I left home I reworked the measurements of my block so that I had more room at the edges to trim the block without losing my points. It's all much neater now, Im looking forward to kitting quite a few when I get back.

I do like the blocks with more than one fabric, I'll throw in a few of those. The plan was for 42 blocks, so there will be lots of fabric choices to make along the way.

I have 12 on the design wall now, and several kitted. I'm looking forward to using up some of my pink repros; I have a large collection of them and a lot of them are untouched FQs. It will be fun to finally cut into them.

And we've started on the jigsaws a bit early this year, just to keep the kids occupied. There's too much yellow in this image, even the rhino and elephant were yellow. Very confusing for the kids. They enjoyed the zebra; at least that was easy to do😄

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More Kitting Preparation

While I was hunting out my strange, stripey fabric I unearthed another unrecorded UFO. 

At least I had an EQ8 printout, and a status card, but no list of sizes I was cutting. I'm sure when I packed this away all I cared about was getting it out of my sight, and I was confident that I would remember all the sizes and strips I needed. I measured everything, including a lot of strips that were included in the project box, and wrote it all down on the back of that card.

I also made up one of the kitted blocks to make sure that everything really did fit together, and yay, it did. So now I want to fully prepare a lot of kits for these 9" blocks so that over summer when I'm confined to the AC I can just open this box and sew.

I have 32 of the Sawtooth Stars for the Annette Gero quilt prepared, and a stack of 6.5" squares, so all that can sit in it's box until I want to sew on it. It's no different to buying a pre-cut kit from a quilt shop really, and I'm relishing the thought of playing with these little stars.

Oh dear, looks like I've succumbed to the latest Quiltville mystery. I'm making one quarter of the units needed, and if I feel like it later on I'll make more. I certainly have enough of these colours in the stash.

This ice blue fabric is so prone to fading; it's a loss of colour everywhere it's folded, and it's happened to most of the early material in my stash. It looks like a grubby yellow line, but it doesn't wash out. I'm cutting the faded bits out and using the good bits, and I'll just enjoy the quilt until it fades too. And if I don't use this stuff then I might as well throw it out right now.

This is another very old piece that I got in a scrap bag. I had a pink and brown version of this and I treasured every scrap, but it's long gone. The colours are perfect for Lupine and Laughter, so I'll be using this as my neutral. 

Seeing as 2 of my fabrics are ancient I'm digging out some old pinks to include too. The above pink is at least 40 years old, and I bought it because it reminded me of our baby blankets.

Pink on one side, yellow on the other. I wrapped my babies in this blanket too, it's so soft and cuddly and full of memories.

It even has the label intact.

I like the emphasis on all new materials, because a lot of bedding was stuffed with old army blankets after the war years, or shredded cotton clothing. One cushion that I unpicked was full of old stockings and underwear; double yuk!

 I hope the finished design has a vintage vibe, because my fabrics are vintage 😁.

When in Queensland DIL Naomi schooled Isla on how to cut out a pattern using a projector system and a rotary cutter, and then Isla sewed it on the coverstitch machine. 

She is justifiably proud of the result. It should be roomy enough to fit her next year; we are leaving long sleeved weather behind here, and moving into summer mode.  Naomi put a lettuce edging around the edges, which Isla was very impressed with. Her Dad was a bit mystified by how enthused we were about it, but he's a guy. He doesn't understand these things.

(I spend more time fighting with Blogger about the formatting and the position of the photos than I do writing the post. It's strange how it used to work perfectly until they 'improved' it. 😠)

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I continued working on The Annette Gero Star quilt yesterday, ferreting through drawers and boxes and pulling out any fabric that I thought would work in this. 

I didn't want the stars to be too much darker than the alternate blocks, so I'll add a few muted pinks like the ones in the original quilt. Those stars probably started out red and faded to pink; I'm going with pink so I can use some of my old favourites.

Look at that, I dated the photos and the negatives. This was a few years before I could afford my first digital camera (it cost $1000 and I could only afford it because it was a business expense). Back then, once the film was used up there were no more photos, and then it was a wait of 2 weeks for developing.

It's sort of appropriate to use this fabric from the same year. An oldie, but a goodie.

I was good and cut a 6.5" strip from all my fabrics and then put the remainder away so it wasn't cluttering up my surfaces. Then I ironed the strips and cut squares from the ones that I'd earmarked for the alternate blocks.

I think I'm going to like this!

I also cut up all the background fabric I had, and there was enough for 36 blocks. I might want the quilt to be bigger, so I'll need to investigate another off-white for that. I'm strenuously resisting the Connecting Threads Black Friday emails, but I'm tempted ....

This is another of Annette's quilts, so beautiful, the amount of tiny stitching was incredible.

Oh my goodness, the trapunto, and the background quilting, and the perfect applique.

The pink was probably red once, and those white dots are where the iron based mordant destroyed the fabric over time. The close quilting preserved the integrity of the piece; such a beautiful, beautiful quilt.

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A rough week.

Last week I didn't feel the best, not sure why. I could blame the weather I suppose. It's been hot and cold and rainy and stormy and generally unsettled. I had a couple of quilting jobs to do for a friend, and I'd come home so wiped out all I could do was have a nap and try to recover. When I have a late afternoon nap I'm usually up later than I intend, so I sleep in, and I'm tired all day, and then I have another nap and perpetuate the bad routine.

When I'm up late I often do some last minute sewing, trying to make the last bit of the day productive. For some reason I fixated on these black and cream chain blocks from February 24.

They'd been kitted up waiting since May 24, and I had no interest in finishing them, but they jumped to the head of the queue for some reason. Mereth hates it when I get stuck on my duty sewing, she says it's so boring to come visit and there's no change to my design wall. But I persevered and now I have 26 blocks ready to sell. 

I think they'd be great to frame machine embroidered blocks, or hand embroidery in black or red. Or applique. Must not get involved on any of that, my saner self tells my Inner Squirrel.

I could pat myself on the back for taking another thing off the WIP list, except that I started another one immediately. I was sorting through some orphan blocks and found these 2 from 2012. 

I made a quilt I  called This And That from my scraps, and these 2 were spares. 

I remembered that they were so much fun to make, they solved my 2.5" scrap overflow and the quilt they made was one of my favourites. I had just weeded all the small strips out of the 2.5" drawer, so I cut piles of them into squares and triangles for this. So I had 37 WIPs, down to 36, and now back up to 37. I'm starting to think it's just not humanly possible to eliminate all the UFOs.

Working my way through the archive of tops that I've completed and sold:

Ladder Star, another of Bonnie's patterns. This was made entirely from my plaid stash, and unfortunately it only dented it, not eliminated it as I'd hoped. I overcut of course, so now I have a kit with enough squares and triangles for a Sawtooth Star top. Must try harder not to overcut.....

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