Second week of January, and I have a finish.  That's a good way to start off the year, I hope I can keep it up.

 I love these colours together, and I still have enough left for another quilt.  I just hope I don't go and buy a whole heap more purple, just because I've whittled the stash down nicely.

It's better to be quilting than sewing a dog bed.

Dolly scritches around in her bed so much she ripped apart the mattress that was in there.

I finally took pity on her and made her a new mattress, out of strong cotton, and hopefully it will take a lot longer for her to destroy.

'That's better!'

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All the time I was making my Jarred Take A Wife blocks I had a nagging feeling that I was missing some purple fabric.  I had more than this, I kept thinking, but I couldn't find it so I resorted to raiding Mereth's stash, and buying several FQs. 
When all the blocks were done  I was worrying about what I could use for borders with such meagre pickings from the stash.  I resigned myself to a shopping expedition, when I happened to notice a box on top of the highest stash drawers. 

This is what I found; all the purples that I put aside for the project, including enough for a border.  Really, I need my head examined.  Why would I put fabric I knew I needed in a plastic container above eye level.  Out of sight, out of mind. And none of these made it into the blocks, which is annoying because there are some nice prints in there.

I decided not to have yellow sashing, it's so light and fresh with the white in between the blocks.  So there will be no shopping trip today, and I'd better get the borders on the quilt without any more prevarication.

It's cool and raining today, so lovely after the 40° scorching heat of yesterday.  I stayed in the air-conditioned shed for most of the day, but had to spend the evening in the hall because there was work to do.  It was still 35° at 9.30pm, perfectly horrid.  Poor Dolly was so hot; I draped her in a wet teatowel, kept the fan on her and sprayed her with cold water to keep her damp.  It worked, but she didn't like it one bit.

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My final figures for fabric usage in 2014 were:
Fabric bought;      138.1m
Fabric used;          170.15m
Total for the year; 32.05m

It's a good result, my stash shrank by 32 metres but I know I could have done better.  I had a lot of fun buying that 138 metres of fabric, and it certainly livened up the quilts I completed last year.  I don't want to limit my buying this year, but I want to use a lot more fabric. 

I'm going to have a backing and binding blitz for the tops I've already completed.  A lot of them do have backings stored with them, but many don't, so I want to go through the stash and see if I can get them all paired up with backings.  I like pieced backings, so it will be good to make some out of the smaller pieces in the stash.

I want to put aside bindings as well, I really love having the binding made and hanging in a bag with the top, it's one less job to tackle after the quilting.  And even if I change my mind, bindings never go to waste, I would just use it on another quilt.  It's only .5m for most quilts, so I can go through my regular stash and choose any half-metre that I'm not in love with, or has been hanging around too long.

I've been thinking about what I want my stash to look like at the end of the year;  I want lots more batiks, and more modern fabrics. 

This is my entire batik stash; not much, just two baskets, but once upon a time I had zero batiks, so I've come along since then.  My gosh though, it's expensive to build a stash from scratch!

I want lots more pretty colours, and not just the Reproductions that I love.  My stash used to contain a much wider variety of materials, and gradually it was pared down to just 1800s reproductions.  I don't mind that, I use them all the time, but I miss the pretty stuff, the things that I used to buy just because they made me smile. 

I think I'm going to have fun shopping this year, with an eye on expanding the variety in the stash drawers.  Maybe I should make this the year of Batiks!

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2014 was the year of the UFO, I dealt with 22 projects on my list.  Two of them were repurposed, the other 20 were finished to the stage of becoming tops ready for quilting.  Most have their backings assigned, and are just waiting for me to have the time to quilt them.  It could take a while.  I'm really hoping that this year we get to quilt our own tops as well as customer quilts; it's been all customer, all the time just lately, and it would be nice to get a better balance in future

It's a motley collection, but some of these tops were decades old, and tastes have changed.  I sincerely hope that none of the projects I start this year are still unfinished in 2035!

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It's a baking hot day today, and I'm not going outside unless I have to.  That means sewing time, so I've been watching the latest QuiltCam,

and putting together the Jarred Takes A Wife blocks that I cut out before Christmas.  I have 9 kitted, and 7 finished,

and it's only going to be 20 blocks, so I could have them all done today if I try.

I think I"m ready to be moving on to a new project, I just haven't decided what yet.  So today will also include a lot of looking through books and magazines to see if anything jumps out and demands to be my next new project.

Yesterday our family gathering was in Port Augusta at our second brother's house, and it was fun to have all four of us siblings together. Doug is 13 years older than Mereth and I, and Greg is 3 years older.

 We didn't spend a lot of time together as kids, Doug left home for his first job at 17, and when he was home he spent his time teasing us to tears.  In my memories of him he was always an adult, and pretty wild, so his tiny little sisters were kept well away from him.  He smoked, he drank, he played the drums, he was so Cool!

Greg was always there as we grew up, and his specialty was the sly dig, the surreptitious punch, always having the last word, and being unbeatable at card and board games.  There's no way I will ever play Monopoly with him, ever again! 

Luckily they've both mellowed, and we all get on really well together now.  We still have lots of older aunties and uncles in our family, but when we all get together it's clear that we are on the way to becoming the Elders, the ones who remember the Great-grandparents of our children.  This is the year I want to start recording our family history, so that it's not all lost.

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Dearie me, I've decided that Christmas is just unbloggable.  I can't seem to do all the stuff required, and take photos and write posts about it as well.  So you'll have to take my word for it that we had many festive gatherings and meals, there was much laughter and eating and drinking and present giving, and we all recovered nicely from the excesses.  It was a good time, with a whirlwind visit from DD Seonaid and her partner Hayden, and the fun of great-neice Isobel's first Christmas.  The weather has been wonderful, not cool, but not blisteringly hot either. 

This time between Christmas and New Year is a nice, quiet interlude, where there isn't much mail at work, and all the big occasions are over.  We have one more family gathering today, and that will be it; time to move on with 2015.  I'm not ready to be writing that date yet!

 

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The Album quilt top is finished, and I'm so happy with it. 

 It looks just like the picture of the antique quilt, and I can't quite believe I did it.  I was so unsure about all the set-in seams, and whether I could make the blocks measure the exact size that they needed to be. 

I'm so thrilled with these blocks, they are just spot-on; I normally make patterns where I can fudge the less than perfect blocks, and I never worry too much about cut-off points and such.  This quilt really made me lift my game, and that's a good thing every now and then.

 The first lot of blocks weren't correct, so I worked on getting the right seam allowance, which made things better.  I discovered that I needed to use an Omnigrid ruler to cut the strips, it was the most accurate of all the different brands I own.  I find it requires more attention when I'm cutting, because of all the markings, but once I was used to it I seldom made a mistake.  And the perfect blocks were worth the effort.

And they had to be perfect with this setting; they had to be the right measurements, and they had to have the right angles, or they wouldn't fit with the set-in squares.  I unpicked a lot of seams to make this as good as it could be, so this is going down as one of my favourite quilt tops.  I want to quilt it with lots of feathers and make it really special.  Wonder when I'll find time for that?

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There are things that I haven't blogged about, and I wish I had, but there weren't any photos, and we're really busy right now... Insert excuse here...  So I'll just mention that at the end of November Mereth and I packed the car full of quilts and went to Pirie to give a talk to the quilting group there.  We had a wonderful night, showing the group our quilts, that showcased our progression from beginner handquilters to professional machine quilters.  We enjoyed chatting to like-minded quilters, and had a lovely surprise seeing our Auntie Edna, who is a member of this group.  It was lovely to catch up, and also see what this group has been making; they have some talented quilters there.

We also had fun one afternoon, picking up pea straw from our friend Helen's farm.  It was baled and sitting in the field, and we took two cars and trailers and went off to load up what we wanted for our gardens. 

My SIL Bev came too, and lets just say that a country paddock isn't her natural element.  However, she did a grand job of driving the car while DB Doug loaded the trailer.  Mereth drove my car, and Matt and I loaded.  It was lovely to be working outside, and driving over the immense paddock wherever we needed to go.  I always, always wanted to live on a farm, but I doubt that will happen now.  That's why it's great having Helen as a friend, I can go and play at her place!

You'll thank me for not having detailed photos of the next incident.  Yesterday we went to the beach, and the dogs had a lovely run.  However,  Dolly got so hot she went right out in the water where we couldn't get to her, lay down and then drank a bellyful of salt water.  She looked like a little barrel, her stomach was wider than her chest.

A blog friend once warned me of the dangers of that, and in 5 minutes Dolly gave a spectacular demonstration.  YUKK!  She must have been completely empty by the time she vomited half of it up, and the rest went out the other end.  I elected to walk her back to town, after she had a huge drink of fresh water at the car, figuring that would give her time to process the water and get it all out of her system.  Once I was reasonably sure that her insides had calmed down I gave her a scrub under the tap, yet another drink, and tied her to the table while we had our fish & chips.  By that time she was feeling good again, and begged mightily for chips, but there's no way she was getting any.  Matt joked that he was scarred by the whole incident, and I have to agree, I've never seen anything like it!  I had some chicken broth at home, and that's the only thing she had for tea, even though she was really hungry.
The sad thing is, she probably doesn't connect the digestive mayhem with drinking sea water, so she's likely to do it again.  She's earning the right to never get off the leash again!  This is one of the drawbacks of having a dog with personality; she livens up any outing, and not always in a good way, but I love her anyway.

"Can I have some breakfast Mum?  I'm reeeeally hungry!"

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This morning I tipped over the edge into Obsessive Completion Disorder.  I've been so good about working on my Album quilt in small amounts of time, moving it slowly towards the finish line; it's all about the process, and it's so much more important to enjoy sewing than to have a finished top.  Last night I sewed till midnight, happily adding blocks to each other and thrilled with the progress I've made.  I have 2/3 of the blocks joined into two sections, and I have to finish another 9 blocks to make a third section. 

I put those incomplete blocks up there to make sure my fabric choices would work;

 now I have to add all the corners, and that will be all the blocks completed.  Well done, I thought.


When I got up this morning I was Over It.  I just want it finished and off the design wall.  It had to happen, I get this way with most of my projects, and my patience is running out with this one.  That doesn't mean I'll abandon it, instead I'll sew like a mad thing until it's Done, Done and Done.

I love the intensity of working with so many set-in seams, and it's crucial that they are correct or the top won't lie flat.  Every time I press another one and it lies flat I feel wonderful.  But I've been working on it for a long time, the end of the year is upon us and I want to make more progress on other UFOs.  Time to swap persnickety, difficult patchwork for something mindless and quick.

The Jarred Takes A Wife blocks continue to be fun, and I'm slowly building them in between the album blocks.  I need to cut a lot more pieces, and find some lighter purples, several of these are a bit heavy.  I've shopped my stash and Mereth's, and I fear I need to go to a quilt shop and see what I can dig up.  I sold most of my purple fabrics in a garage sale, perhaps I shouldn't have?

We're off to the beach in a little while, after a customer drops a top off.  I need some fresh air and exercise to counter all that sitting and sewing!

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I'm in an organising sort of mood this morning, and I've already spent several hours cutting strips needed for the two major projects I'm working on.  I have only 11 more album blocks to make and I'll have enough; I'm so close to the finish on that one that I want to just sit down and do it all in one session, but common sense tells me I'd burn out if I tried that.  So it's back to bagging up the necessary pieces, and doing as much as I can in my little bits of time.

I've made some low contrast blocks, and they look fine, but this is as light as I want to go. 

When my quilt is more than 100 years old I'm sure that there will be faded blocks anyway, so these are just a nod to the original, and a lesson to me that I can step outside of my comfortable working zone and do something a little bit different.

It's really starting to look like a quilt now....

I sewed up my trial block of Jarred Takes A Wife, and I love it to bits. 

The colours are so happy compared to the grubby, retro Album browns, and it cheers me up to look at the pretty, modern prints. 

I want to cut most of the strips I need for this and have the whole 30 blocks kitted and waiting.  I always forget that 12" blocks are BIG, and 30 of them take a lot of strips.  I've been cutting for hours this morning, and I think I have most of what I need. 

This afternoon I'll parcel it all out into ziplock backs and see what I need to add to complete the kit.

December is almost upon us, so I will have to make plans to put the tree up, and make a few Christmas treats in the kitchen.  I want to have things in the freezer this year, so that I'm prepared for unexpected visits, and when I"m on holidays I won't have to run around making things. I'm going to make mayonnaise this afternoon, I've always wanted to try that and it's salad weather now.

Cutting and cooking are so hard on the feet!  I need to sit down and sew and let my feet recover.

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5 weeks till Christmas!  Mereth and I don't do much at Christmas now, as our children are scattered around Australia and it's difficult to arrange a get-together with in-laws to take into account.  The Christmas rush now is the amount of extra work we have to deal with as Posties; the parcels are arriving thick and fast, and the weeks until Christmas are just a lot of hot and heavy work, culminating in a mountain of stuff to be delivered on Christmas Eve.  That makes our time off even more enjoyable though, and instead of moping because we don't have all the family around, we'll have the luxury of lying about and doing exactly what we please.  I see a couple of jigsaws in the near future, for a start.

My Leader-Ender project is coming along nicely; Mereth donated a pile of 9-patches that she made on spec, so I'm up to 120 of them now.

I'll have to do some calculations to see exactly how many I need, because I'm not making it as big as Bonnie's.  I may very well have enough already.  I had to buy a piece of yellow fabric to use as the setting blocks, I Hated everything in the stash.  I had a half-yard piece of the exact fabric Bonnie used in her quilt, which I loved, but there wasn't enough to do anything with it.  I'm going to make a mini quilt with that fabric, and the big quilt will be a softer buttery yellow.

I had some lovely Asiatic lilies in the garden this year, they put on a stunning display.  I love plants that are so easy to look after, yet have amazing flowers.  I'll be growing more of these next year.

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I love lazy Sundays; on Saturday I'm still tired from the work week, and mostly trying to achieve something significant in my free time.  On Sunday I tend to take it easy, which is the way it should be.  There's still stuff I need to be doing, but I enjoy pottering around and taking things at a slower pace.

There are 15 blocks to do on the Album and then it will be time to get them all put together.  I usually choose fabrics that are too dark, so I've consciously gone a bit lighter, but not light enough.

 I'm such a wimp sometimes, going for the safe fabrics with 'enough' contrast; it's the odd blocks that bring a quilt to life, the ones that don't follow the rules, that break up the ordered, predictable pattern.  In the quilt that inspired this project there were some very pale blocks with little contrast.  I've challenged myself to put something like that in my quilt.  Am I brave enough?  Time will tell.....

Oh dear, this photo from the net is about 14 years old, and it was terrible quality even then.  Still, I'm glad to have it, how else would I have remembered this lovely quilt.  We are so lucky to have the fantastic images we enjoy now. 

You know what this is, don't you.....

I'm making a test block of Jarred Takes A Wife, so that I can start cutting strips and kitting blocks when Bonnie's first mystery clue is released at the end of the week.  I really can't devote a lot of time to a mystery, when there are so many of my own projects I want to do, so I'm quilting along with one of my favourite Bonnie patterns.  I've had the fabrics for this in a box for nearly a year, so it's time I pulled them out and got going with it.  I'll enjoy reading all the mystery clues, but I'll be sewing a quilt of my choosing.

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In  between all the work and gardening stuff there has been sewing.  I'm still working in little sessions here and there, which I never like.  It doesn't feel like I'm achieving much, but there is real progress.  I'm more than halfway through the blocks, and I have a third of them joined together. 

 I thought I'd better find out if I actually had the patience and skill to do all these set-in seams on a grand scale, and surprisingly I like sewing them very much. 

 It's been such fun picking out the fabrics for each block, it only takes two 2"x 18" strips of the feature fabric, so I've been using some precious scraps. 

I think this is my favourite block so far, I just love this fabric.  I don't have very much left, which is sad.

As much as I adore my Singer 538, I have to find a replacement machine. 

I'm  going to work my Beloved into the ground, and she's an old girl to begin with.  I fixed her once, but if something else goes wrong there's no guarantee that it will be repairable.  I've always wanted to sew on my old Bernina 730, so I hunted down a quarter inch foot on Ebay.  I've been waiting impatiently for it to arrive,  and yesterday it showed up, just in time for the weekend.  I set the machine up and made a test block, and the seam allowances were perfect.  I do what Bonnie does, sew some block pieces together and see if they fit a longer piece in the block; if they are exactly the same length, then you know your seams are spot on.

How exciting to have another machine to rely on for piecing! Now I just have to find a way to set her up permanently in the sewing room; there's not much available space.

And I'll have to find a name for her, if I'm going to sew on her every day....

We went to our favourite garden shop for a bit of R&R, and I bought some more seedlings, probably the last of this season.  It's getting too hot to be starting new plants off;

petunias for a couple of display pots, jalapenos because it's too expensive to buy them at the supermarket, more cherry tomatoes.   I'm always quick to complain about the weather when it's bad, so I should also admit that this has been a lovely spring.  Each week there has been one or two horridly hot days, but the rest of the time it's been very pleasant.  The garden has flourished, but unfortunately those hot days have mostly ruined whatever flowers there were.  The roses are covered in buds and blooms, but the flowers are nearly all heat damaged;

the Pierre de Ronsard climber manages to look lovely, even with the damage to the outer petals.  The plants themselves are growing well, so I will just have to wait for the autumn flowers, which are always better.  Gardening is not about instant gratification, no matter what the shows on TV say. 
It's going to be hot today, so I will spend the day in the sewing room.  I always imagined that I would race to the end of 2014 in a flurry of finishes, but it's more likely that I will dawdle there, admiring the scenery and enjoying the details.  I've done a power of sewing this year already, so these last few weeks can just be about the fun, not the numbers on a chart.  While I'm beetling around my sewing room I will have to think of what I want the emphasis to be on next year; 2014 was the year of the UFO, what will 2015 be?  Applique, hexagons, embroidery, hand-piecing or quilting?  I'm going to have a jolly good think about that one.

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Nothing is jumping out and demanding to be finished, so I pulled out a long-term UFO and I'm working on it here and there.  I blogged about this here and here in December 2012.  I think 2 years in the cupboard is enough incubation time.

It's such a sweet block to put together, there is nothing hard about it;

 it's the setting that is difficult, and I intend to keep adding blocks to the existing section, so that I don't have to do it all at the end.  I'm still committed to finishing it with the set-in alternate blocks, and that is what is piquing my interest.  I have to be very careful with every seam, and that's not my usual way of working.  The slower pace appeals to me just now, so I'm enjoying my slow progress.

I made a mockup in EQ7,so I have some idea of how many blocks I need, and how much of the setting fabric.

I need 50 blocks for this size, so I will be making these for quite a while.  The layout I've done is only 67" wide, which I don't think is enough. If I make it bigger it will need 71 blocks, ouch!   If I get sick of them I'll just put the project aside, because I don't want to ruin my enjoyment of this quilt by forcing myself to work on it.

I just might lose all self-control in a week or two and cut out something new, wouldn't that be Fun?  I'm not going to do Bonnie's mystery this year, but I just may have to make Jared Takes A Wife, I've had the materials set aside for that for months.  It will be a treat to finally cut into them.

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Finally, the batik quilt is in one piece!

It only took a half hour this morning to get those final borders on, and I'm so relieved to have it done.  It will look beautiful on my green couch, so when this is quilted it will live on the back of the lounge where I can admire the glowing colours.

 What shall I work on next?  There are plenty of UFOs left, and I'm not keen to start something new, so I will probably pick another project box from the shelf and work at that.  Once upon a time that would have bored me rigid, but for some strange reason I'm still excited about the UFO list.  I'm going to have to do a sampler of all the finished tops for this year, there are more than 20.  What an excellent year it has been for clearing up the old projects.

If I can spare the time I'd like to take a photo of every UFO, print them out and make a collage board of them.  It would be very satisfying to have a visual record of how much I've done and what is left.  Plus it might give me some ideas on how to finishe the ancient ones that need borders. I need to stare at them for a while until an idea occurs to me; when they are languishing in the cupboard I'm not even thinking about them.

It was a hectic day yesterday, fitting the screen door.  It would be easy if the doorway was square, but the opening bowed out in the middle like a barrel, so there was a lot packing needed to turn it into a rectangular shape.   It's all done now, except fitting the strike plate, and I'll do that this afternoon.  If Dolly goes charging out and hits the steel mesh at top speed I'm going to be very cross; I'm not sure it's engineered to withstand 20 kilos of excited Staffy.  I may have to attach a bar across it at her eye height, so it will stop here in her tracks. 

It's a glorious morning, so I'm off do some outside work, including getting rid of anything that could harbour snakes; twice I saw a big brown snake in the Princess lillies, so I need to clear away the old stalks and make it less attractive to him.  I'm sensible enough to leave a poisonous snake alone, but Dolly surely isn't, so I'll just have to encourage him to go elsewhere.

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