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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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....

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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!

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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!

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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.

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