We went to the last patchwork club meeting of the year on Monday, and I sewed all these little 5" blocks. I was diligent in my sewing, whereas Mereth was extrememly distractable and was off chatting for a good portion of the day. We both took our Elna Lotus machines, and they looked so cute together. When we were leaving, both carrying the same sort of machine, one of the husbands stared and said "Snap!" If we ever start to dress alike I think we may need a friend to take us aside and tell us that it's just weird.
I have to find the photo of the quilt that inspired these little Monkey Wrench blocks, so I can decide what I want to set them with. I only have 10 so far, but they pile up pretty quickly. They are made with 2" finished HSTs, of which I have a few already made, so it's just a matter of putting them together with the little 1" squares, which I strip piece. And I could have got a lot more done, except I was busy chatting too at times.

We played a silly swapping game with ugly FQs, except one was gorgeous and I wanted it badly. So did Mereth, but at the end of the game it was in MY hands! No-one could call this ugly, surely.
Last weekend we went to a clearing sale in a tiny town nearby, where a longtime collector and dealer was having a final sale. There was a lot of rubbish there, but as everything was half price we found a few bargains that we had to have. Mereth and I can spot what appeals to the other, which can be useful when there are lots of people grabbing for the same stuff. I found her a print of terriers thatshe loved, and she found me this crochet motif of an elephant. I think if I had an animal totem it would be an elephant; I love the images of them in Indian art, and I'm sure I have a project brewing there somewhere. Later...too busy right now.This came from the collection of a lady who had to go into a nursing home, and was most upset that her collection of 658 elephants would be broken up. The dealer bought them all, and kept them together for many years before having to sell them herself. This is no. 618. And I don't collect elephants as such; I don't want circus elephants and tourist carvings and plastic monstrosities. Just occassionally something appeals to me and I want it.

My friend Meggie collects owls, so I thought I'd show her this tape measure that belonged to my great-grandmother, who was a tailoress. I'm sure she didn't use this professionally, it's too fragile for that. In out childhood it lived on my Gran's dressing table, and we used to reel out the tape measure and wind it back again. Alas, some enthusiastic grandchild broke the mechanism, so it no longer works, but it's still a favourite.
And the penguins? I mentioned in a previous post that I have an irrational fear of being reincarnated as a penguin. These little chaps make me smile, and be grateful that I have hands to hold things.....

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I just can't seem to get it together enough to come up with a new blog post. There's too much else demanding my attention just lately. So I figure I'll just show the blocks I'm working on in my spare moments. I kitted these last year sometime, and have 10 made. I ran out of the white shirting, so I need to find a replacement for the next 10 blocks. I would love to be able to buy bolts of white shirting fabric; I have plenty of cream shirtings, but very little white. It's a good excuse to go shopping, but I can't find any online either. Dang!

I'm stalled on the Double Anvil too, the border is being a problem. We have a trip planned to a fabric shop with lovely reproduction lines, so maybe I will find something and can get that top finished. It's been so long since I completed a top that I feel quite cranky. I need to see progress! I've quilted quilts and made bindings, and done a truckload of work, but I seem to measure progress in completed tops only....

Matt rang up the other day and told us to come out and see the tree that fell down near their house. These huge gum trees are nick-named Widow-makers, because of their habit of dropping their branches without warning. He and his mate were luckily nowhere near this when it went down, exploding on impact and sending a cloud of dirt and dust into the air. He said it was quite spectacular. The fallen branch is balanced on this broken bough, which was driven 18" into the ground. The force behind it must have been immense.

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Another week has flown past, with so much achieved that I think I need to sit down and do nothing for a whole day to recover. My DS is installed in the red bedroom, and has made it his own, as teenage boys do. That means all his clothes are on the floor and the bed is unmade. And the sitting room is full of guitar equipment while my laptop contains Frank Gambale and Chick Corea music (Jazz I think....) and links to computer warehouses. It's all good though, as he has worked on the big computer and made it behave nicely, and he has learnt to hang up wet towels. We are getting on fine.

The Adelaide show was great, I talked to so many people I nearly lost my voice. Caught up with old friends, and met lots of new ones. I do love catching up with so many people, after my cloistered time in the office and sewing room.

As to what I bought, well you'd expect me to buy this, wouldn't you? It's so pretty!
But this is not my usual style at all. It's a bundle of hand dyes from my friend Lisa Walton, and I fell in love with the marbeled texture and wonderful colours. They are much richer in real life than my computer is showing. I can't wait to cut into them..... Sometimes I get a little bored of only working with reproduction fabric, I just need to be different for a while.

I picked up another machine on Monday, a wide format plotter, which I think I love as much as Miz Millhouse. It prints my pantos on 10' long paper, and we all stood around watching it print and marvelling at it's perfection. I call him Gilbert.

Miz Millhouse has been busy; this is a little checkerboard quilt that I custom quilted, just to see if I remembered how to do it. It stayed on the frame for three days, which is far too long for such a little quilt, but I could only find scraps of time to actually work on it. It's a sweet little thing, and is pinned up on the board where I can admire it as I work. I will try to get some quilts bound this weekend, and this will be first in line.
On the machine now is Mereth's Fancy Bowtie, being quilted with her FeatherMe design. I'll let her show you the closeups of the details. It's a lot of fun to choose patterns and threads, and to watch the machine create the stitching. We're still not sick of watching her at work.

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It's been a quiet day, a bit of sightseeing with Kaye and Bruce, a bit of teaching, a bit of playing on the machine. Mereth has bonded with it nicely, and is free-handing happily, filling up a bit of spare fabric at the bottom of the second quilt.I like more formal designs, whereas she likes to invent organic sort of patterns as she goes along. We have totally different ways of working in that respect.

OOOPS! Looks like it's all been a bit too much for Mereth.....
Actually she's just lying under the frame admiring her stitches from underneath.

Hang on Millhouse, you're in for a ride.

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Miz Marjorie Millhouse is stitching away as I type, finishing the second quilt. What a day!!!!!!

Kaye and Bruce arrived just after lunch and the truck was unloaded with the help of some big strong guys. It took most of the afternoon to set up the table and unpack the machine, and then it was time to put on a quilt and see if it worked.

Mereth got her first official lesson from Kaye, and Bruce gave me some machine maintenance tips. The first quilt was finished soon after tea, and now I'm sitting up late finishing off the second top.

When I pieced these tops I never dreamed I would be quilting them on my own Statler, it's like a dream. It will be such a thrill to walk in here tomorrow and know that I have a whole day of playing ahead of me.

And I might let my little sister have some fun too, as a reward for all that furniture shifting over the last month. I just hope we don't have to shift Miz Millhouse for a loooong time.

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It's very tiring being a responsible adult. Lots of work and cleaning and sensible decisions. To get me through all that boring stuff I choose something I really want to do, and use it as a treat to keep me motivated. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. For weeks I've been using a trip to a neighbouring town as my reward; yesterday, having done three of the four things on my list, I sanpped and called Mereth. 'We're going to Jamestown' I declared.

Jamestown is a pretty place about 45 minutes from here, a beautiful drive in this late spring weather. I had the coffee and snacks packed in minutes, picked up Mereth and we were off. Our destination is also home to a very nice patchwork shop, but that is entirely co-incidental. We used to come here with Mum, and drive around choosing which house we wanted to live in, and which garden we loved the most. Lots of happy memories there.Ahhh, Roses!
I love hollyhocks, but have never grown them. Mereth said they selfseed in my front garden here, so maybe I can finally have some of my own.

At the patchwork shop I reminded Mereth to remind me that I wasn't in the market for more fabric, and I didn't want to buy anything.

Didn't work a bit. The nicest garden of the day was actually in another tiny town; the roses forming a hedge were breath-taking, and I love all that riot of flowers; perfect cottage garden.
And this is a curious little house, only half a house really. Maybe they intended to build the other half later, and never did. I love the blue it's been painted, very pretty.

Back to work now....

Every morning when I walk into the workroom I brush into a dangling spider web. Just a thread or two, but enough to make me stop and reel it out of my hair and wonder, Is this like Charlotte's Webb, or Night Of The Arachnid?

Yesterday I was in the workroom, auditioning fabric for the border of the Anvil, and noticed a spider that had just abseiled down from the ceiling and landed on the lucite table round the sewing machine. So that was the culprit! She looked harmless until she turned over, and then

(link to picture of horrid Red Back Spider) Don't look if you don't like spiders!

Yep, definite Night Of The Arachnid stuff.

I investigated a couple of sites for info, and one was written by someone with English as a second language. I had to smile when I read 'The most effective way to control Red Back Spider is to find them out and distort...'

I certainly distorted this one!

My DD was bitten by one as a child, and I can say with certainty, these things HURT. We spent 8 hours in the Emergency room, and it was awful. Her arm was painful for weeks. I don't want to share nicely with these critters.

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The show was a success, and we had a steady stream of visitors over all three days. Mind you, some of them may have been there for the wrong reasons; more than one person, on hearing me speak, immediately turned to a friend and said 'You're right, they even sound the same!' So the twin thing was a drawcard as well as the quilts. Apart from feeling like a freakshow it was funny to see the reactions.

We talked to so many lovely quilters, and would-be quilters, and people who just admired quilts. We met a Canadian couple who had sailed a yacht over here in 1997, and had toured Australia in a motorhome ever since. She was a quilter, and said it was time to go home and get back into her sewing room again. I can't imagine living a gypsy life for that long, without my sewingroom and stash and machines. But what wonderful memories that couple have, for those long cold Canadian nights!

Our aunt and cousin came to visit too, and they thought I was Mereth! The real Mereth had sneaked off to have a cup of tea and a scone with friends, so it was an understandable mistake. Side by side we look quite different, but when we're apart people see who they are expecting to see. On Mereth's wedding day her FIL called me Mereth all day; um, she's the one in the WHITE dress, I had to keep telling him.

After we closed the doors we went up to the Institute to help pull down the show. Everything vanished within half an hour, as teams of people stripped the quilts from the racks, others folded and piled and ferried them out to cars. Watching the people working like a huge family made me remember the shows I've seen taken down in America, with security guards and checklists and eagle-eyed supervisors making sure the quilts go to the right people. All very necessary, but we can afford to be a little more relaxed here.

And then Mereth and I dumped all our quilts and racks and stands in one room and crawled off to the kitchen to drink coffee and groan about how tired we were. Luckily dinner had been in the crockpot all day, so we had a very early meal and a quick visit to the sewing room to rummage through the new fabric. But we didn't have the energy for anything else.

This morning was a different matter. I have pinned up the finished Double Anvil blocks, with their red setting squares, and I'm sewing them together in between other chores. I'm liking how it looks, it will be a wonderful winter quilt, very warm looking. BUT....
remember my over-cutting problem?
Somehow I have enough pieces for 10 extra blocks! I kitted up the 31 blocks I needed, so I have no idea where these extras came from. Maybe I sleepwalk, and cut up fabric without remembering it. I do love making these blocks, so I will add the extras to the Orphan box, and see what I can do with them there.

This last photo is one of Mum's cactus plants, with flowers bigger than my hand and stunningly beautiful. Unlike the red ones, these only last a day, but what a display!

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I suppose you've been thinking that my silence is due to long hours spent in the sewing room, playing with my fabric purchases. Not likely! This weekend there is a quilt display in the Institute building, with work by the local group exhibited as a fundraiser for the primary school. We decided to do our bit to keep the visitors amused, so the bank building has been transformed into a mini quilt show.

It didn't look too promising.....but we kept on.....
and now it looks great!
Two days of exhausting effort has paid off, and the room looks lovely.Mind you, my house is trashed, and it will take hours of work to put it all back the way it was. Can I just say 'Bother!'

A steady stream of people this morning has commented on the fact that they are all our quilts. It is quite impressive, especially as I have 10 or so in the actual show as well, and Mereth has a similar number.

I would have been sitting at my machine piecing, for demonstration purposes only, if my computer hadn't decided to do everything in ultra slow motion. As in taking 3 hours to start up! So I spent the day setting up my laptop as a replacement, connecting it to the net and installing an updated virus program and registering all the programs I use every day on the other computer. I am grateful that I know enough to get me out of trouble, but I don't know enough to fix anything. It being the weekend almost, I'm sure the computer guy won't get here till Monday now. I will make do.

Mereth sat and sewed on some applique, so at least she achieved something today.I did get a few blocks made and sewn together last night, so that made me happy. Very early this morning I re-potted some plants that desperately needed it, and that made me feel good. This afternoon I baked muffins, which made me feel even better. Tonight I will sew some more, and have a muffin for supper, and then get caught up on all the work I didn't get done today. Tomorrow I will sew those demonstration blocks and hopefully get my quilt top in one piece, except for the borders. I am such an optimist.

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What a week so far! I need a day off already.

We left Monday for another trip to the city, to line up suppliers and printers etc. We left after a quick visit to the patchwork club, to have morning tea and say hello. It was horribly hot and muggy, and we were delighted at the prospect of three hours in the air-conditioned car.

First stop in the northern suburbs was a Spotlight, a chain of fabric stores, which was obligingly having a 20% off sale. It was Mereth's birthday, so we regarded it as a birthday present and a sign that we needed to buy fabric. Which we did.Do you think I'm a bit obsessed with stripes lately? Maybe....I got enough of this lovely pastel print for a backing. It's a lovely silky fabric, should look pretty. I also got some dutiful purchases like window blinds for the workroom, and pillows for beds, but quite a bit of material came away with me.
I may be fixated on brown as well.

We then drove through the city in peak hour traffic, which was just horrible, and met Mereth's family for tea at Ikea. What's with the meatballs? And the Fish!!!! The cafeteria smelt like a beach at low tide, not at all pleasant. The 5 of us managed to polish off three plates of the meatballs between us, and 3 cups of coffee each; the coffee was great! It was my first time at Ikea, and I enjoyed it. There is so much to see, and so many ideas.
That plastic storage container is going by the Janome, to hold bobbins and cotton and machine feet. There were three in the pack, so Mereth scored one, and the other will find a home somewhere in the workroom. The Lazy Susan will have a tiny cutting mat on top so I can swivel pieces around as I cut them. I hardly need to explain coathangers and placemats; aren't they pretty tho?

We stayed the night with first-born son and his partner, then set off the next morning on an arduous trek around the city. Gak, I couldn't live with traffic like that! I got quite daring by the end of the day, zipping between lanes and scooting through amber lights with everyone else, but I much prefer driving in the country.

I had two pages of chores written in my notebook, and managed to tick all of them off by two o'clock. Mereth expertly navigated me here, there and everywhere, even to a quilt shop that we happened to be within cooee of. I picked up a smidgen of fabric, all of it half price......
I'm glad I'm not in the No-Buy group on Stashbuster.

It was an exhausting day, and we were glad to head north and see the city slipping away behind us. The sky was overcast and the wind blowing hard. As we got further and further north patches of water appeared in the fields, and the creeks were flowing. It wasn't like that when we left! By the time we got into home territory the fields were flooded and the creeks raging. What on earth happened while we were away? We must have had inches of rain. This is not good harvesting weather....

I am so glad to be home; I've almost caught up on messages and chores and now I'm going to have another cup of coffee and enjoy a jolly good gloat.

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The weather was vile yesterday, windy and hot and dry. Watering and mulching the garden became a priority, so we spent several hours tending to the plants and trying to get them prepared. Of course everyone else has had the same idea, so there is a scarcity of mulch hay here, but every time we travel to another town we find a few bales to bring back. We never did go in for normal souvenirs.

And we were mad enough to buy some punnets of petunias for a bit of colour, so those had to go into the ground quick smart. Along with my usual lashings of parsley and spring onions. And I cannot resist blue flowers, so these campanula had to come home with me. The flowers are very dainty, only about 3/4" across, but there are masses of them and they are so cheerful.I think we are close to calling the garden finished, and then it will be just a matter of bucketing enough water onto it to keep it alive.
There are roses blooming bravely, and snapdragons too. The lemon and orange trees are covered in flowers, so hopefully there will be some fruit later in the season.It's nice to inherit these established plants, so that I don't have to start from scratch.

I made some more letters last night, and sewed them into this little banner, to go with the first one I made.I am gradually creating order here, and now I need to focus on the important things. Sewing, designing, making new contacts.

Mereth was disappointed to learn that it will be another two weeks before the Statler arrives, but the delay does have advantages. Once it's here we are going to be completely absorbed in quilting our stockpile of tops, so we should use this next fortnight to get our projects up to date and all other work sorted, so that we can devote ourselves to the new machine. Well that's my theory anyway.

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