Hunter's Star progress

Sometimes a little time away from the sewing room can be a good thing.  Before I went away I made a decision about the borders on the Hunter's Star, and I cut out all the pieces I would need.  By the time I'd finished all the cutting I was pretty sick of blue and white, and sick of trying to find the perfect fabrics, and sure it had been a colossal mistake to make the quilt in just two colours.

Now, after I've had some time and space between me and the design wall, I'm really happy with how my two colour quilt is working out. 

I chose to use the big triangles from the die as the border, knowing they would tie in to the actual piecing really well.  It was pretty easy to cut some strips and send them through the cutter till I had enough. I did choose to use one light print throughout the whole border, and the blues were scrappy.

I have a heap of leftover shapes from that, and I'm going to incorporate them into another design that is yet to be decided upon.  I like this pattern enough to make another one, but it will be scrappier and have a lot more colour to it.

So now all I have to do is get busy sewing.....

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Playing catch-up

The last post was written more than a week ago, and I forgot to actually hit 'Publish'. Then I went to Adelaide and was very busy there, and only discovered the poor old post languishing unread when I got back.  So I just published it anyway, even though it was all out of date. 

I'm too hot to think anyway.  The temperature this week has ranged between 102 -114º, and I'm ready for a cool change on Sunday.  Just one more stinker of a day to get through.

I had a lovely time in Adelaide, helping Shonny prepare for a family get-together to find out what the next baby will be.  Hayden was away working when she had the scan, so she didn't peek at the screen, and asked the technician to write down the babies sex, and put it in a sealed envelope.  The envelope went to a lady who makes up party balloons, and only she knew what colour balloons and confetti to put in a giant black balloon.  On the day of the reveal, poor Hayden was so nervous, he almost didn't want to break the balloon in case it was pink.  I had my 'It's a girl, how lovely' face ready, but I didn't need it.  BLUE balloons.  I'm going to have a grandson.

There were three toddlers present when the balloon popped, and all the adults yelled in triumph, and the babies cried and cried at the huge noise.  But they got lots of celebratory cuddles, and we were all so overjoyed.  Hayden has had a boy name picked for 8 years, and finally he will get to bestow it on his son; Thomas Charles.  Love it.

Shonny's only half way through this pregnancy, and I'm wishing and praying good thoughts for her, because we don't want the drama of Isla's birth to be repeated.  Here's hoping the arrival of little Thomas is drama free.

So now I can try and get some sewing done, and finish cleaning up the sewing room, and put the house to rights before I set off to Adelaide again.  I'm determined to make some progress on the borders, and to get my handwork project up and running.  I just need this weather to cool off and I"ll be sewing madly.

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Goodbye scraps

Lordy me, the weather has just been insane!  It was 45º yesterday, the worst day of this summer.  Then today it's 25º with a breeze that makes it seem even cooler. 20º difference from one day to the next is a bit extreme, but I'm just grateful that it's cooled down.

I've used my time today sorting out the sewing room.  I am done with the scraps, they are making me miserable and I can't find anything I want in the mess, so I'm donating them to Mereth, or (gasp) throwing them away.  It may seem a bit drastic, but I was overwhelmed with all the baskets and boxes and piles that needed to be dealt with.

This is the first installment of what I gave Mereth;

there is more than this, because I dug down to the bottom of some very old containers and pitched heaps more stuff out.  I'm being ruthless, and it's easier this time round, because this stuff has sat there for 6 or 7 years and I haven't touched it.  I'm certainly not going to miss it now.

I found pieces of blocks left over from projects, and I sewed them into blocks and put them in the orphan box.  Soon I will go through that too, and make a scrappy album, or backing, or donate the whole lot to someone who wants them.

It's been boring and irritating; all those decisions make my brain ache, but I can at last see the difference so I'm going to keep at it.  I want to be able to take a photo of my sewing room and see surfaces, not towering piles of fabric and project boxes.

On the sewing front, I'm up to the dull stuff.  It was so much fun to keep swapping from one thing to another, but now I have to buckle down and finish them.  There is still blue fabric everywhere, and I can't put it away until I put the borders on the blue squares and the Hunter's Star.  I have one more row to attach to the Hunter's Star, and then I can design the border.  I will do a piano key for the squares, so that's fairly easy and will be a good leader-ender.

And the Pretty Tumblers needs one more row and then it can have borders.  That will be three tops finished if I can just stick at it.  Alas, I'll be off to Adelaide on Wednesday, so there won't be much achieved until I get home.  And on the 18th of next month I"ll be helping Seonaid out for a month, while she works a festival and a concert.  I'd better make sure my hand work is ready by then.

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Charm Square stash

Three Christmases ago I cut up nearly all my charm squares and made nine-patches from them.

I'm making these blocks with them; 2½" HSTs turn them on point, it's a real stashbuster.

It was a lot of fun, and I remember thinking, Oh good, that's got them out of the stash!  Like it was a virtue or something.

Then two Christmases ago I mourned the loss of my charm pack stash, so I ordered about 10 from The Fat Quarter shop when they were on special.  My stash was restored.

Last Christmas I did the same again.

The trouble is, I hadn't used any from the year before, so now I have quite the pile.

I'm not sorry about this at all.  I've used so much fabric over the past few years that I need to buy certain things to fill in the gaps.  I have very few shirtings with white backgrounds, and almost none with blue prints on them.  I've nibbled away at my yardage, so I don't have any decent amounts left of good background prints.  So much of what I order online turns out to have a yellow cast, or a mottled background (HATE the mottle!), and I end up disappointed.  The charm packs allow me to see the fabric in real life, and decide what I should and shouldn't buy.

I prefer white backgrounds, or a very light stone colour, not yellowish.  It changes the whole look of the block, makes it too warm and cosy for me.  Of course everyone else in the patchwork world must love it, because that's mostly what's available.  When I find a shirting I like, I buy yardage now, it's so hard to get.

My stack of charm packs is waiting for me to go through them with an eye to ordering some new pieces.  And when I've done that, I can start thinking of another project to use a few of them up.

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Pretty Tumblers

One of our customers asked for a Queen Size quilt in summery colours of blue, pink and green.  It has to measure around 95 x 80, which is large but not daunting.  I immediately thought of one of my UFOs, a tumbler quilt of my pretty fabrics.  Unfortunately I'd included a lot of brown in the bit I'd already made, so it was back to the cutting table to amass a lot of clear pretty shapes.

I seemed to cut for days, and then spent ages at the design wall, arranging pieces exactly so.  It's so much fun to work with these fabrics, I'm really enjoying it, and it puts me in a good mood.

It's so annoying though, when I agonize over each piece and get it all juuuuust right, and then I go and sew things out of order.  I added a row to the top of another one instead below it.  Really?  But I didn't unpick it because it looked fine, and I just had to spend a bit of extra time blending the new arrangement.

This is 12 of 18 rows, so I'm nearing the end. 

I've added the darker shapes for the next 4 rows, and I quite like the effect of an alternating plain block, in dark or light,  That's just the colour of my design wall showing through, but a pretty tone on tone in white or cream would really pad out the pretty fabric.  Something to think of for the next quilt....

I'm going through my border stripes to see if anything suits it, I think it would look pretty special with a large floral border.

I don't know if this is what the customer had in mind, but I'm perfectly happy to keep it if it doesn't sell.  There are some delicious fabrics in here.

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EPP

I've been watching the English Paper Piecing craze for the last few years.  I made my first project using this method more than 30 years ago, and there have been many, many others since then.  I do like it, but my hands hurt after a while, and I have to give up.  

However, I think I need to have a hand work project for all those times when I'm not near my machine, and so I'm going to have another go with a slightly different method.

I've always tacked through the papers when I cover them, and preferred to do it this way because it was so secure.  I was a bit sceptical of just tacking the material around the paper template because I thought it would shift too much without the stitches anchoring the paper and fabric together.

But what if the paper shapes were cut from freezer paper and ironed to the fabric?  They wouldn't shift then, so tacking would work.  And if I wanted to applique the hexagons to a background then the edges would stay turned down once I took the paper out, because the tacking stitches stay in.  And the seam allowances wouldn't kick up when I ironed the finished units.  This started to sound good.

I have a hexagon cutter, it's by Creative Memories I think, with two sizes of hexagons.  It says the larger one is a 1½" hexagon, but that's from point to point.  It's actually ¾" along the side, which is a bit small, but still comfortable.

I'm using the larger one, and cutting shapes out of my ancient roll of freezer paper.  That roll is nearly 20 years old, I bought it on my first trip to America in 1998, just shows how much I use it..

My first rosette is finished, and I enjoyed the process and it didn't take too long.  The freezer paper is softer and more flexible than other paper templates, and my hands don't hurt.  I even have a little box that's just the right size to make a sewing kit for this project.  I chose the madder stripe for no other reason than that it was close at hand, but I think I'll go through my wonderful madders for the next blocks too.  Madder, black, grey, cheddar;  I think that would be a lovely colour scheme for these little fussy cut hexies.

Another WIP to add to the list.....

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January WIPs

I didn't finish anything in 2017, I can't remember the last time I didn't finish a thing all year.  My UFO count currently stands at 27.  Of those, 7 are actual Works in Progress; they are being worked on as Leader-Enders or main projects as the mood strikes me.

The Economy blocks, Blue Squares and Hunter's Star are awaiting borders; I'm working on blocks called

North Wind

Country Cousin

6" Ohio Star

Checkered Lattice.

Of course I could be making major progress if I just concentrated on one thing, but I don't want to feel obliged to finish anything.  I'm just sewing and enjoying it, and if I don't find pleasure in it then I move onto something else.  I can be quite beastly to myself, pushing myself to keep on and finish things when I'm tired and unhappy.  Part of me is a bully, lecturing and hassling and critical.  I really don't need that right now, so I'm just puddling around amongst my projects.

I don't normally work this way; I'm usually much more focused.  Mereth has dozens of collections of blocks, she can pull out a set of blocks and build them into a quilt at a moments notice but I make a set of blocks, I work on the borders, and then I have a finished top.  I have to admit this is fun, and the lack of pressure is the best bit.  

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2018

It was another busy Christmas;

I spent 10 days with Shonny and family in Adelaide,

getting home here on New Year's Day. 

Yesterday I spent with the family in Pirie, so it's been non-stop socializing.

I never seem to make resolutions on New Years Eve, either I'm asleep early, or staying up with family, so there's no time for quiet contemplation.  The first week of the new year is when I do my thinking and planning and reflecting on the past year. I don't know what word for 2018 I want, but I keep coming back to Resolve.  It can mean a solving a problem, or making a decision or determination, and all those meanings are appropriate; there are things in life that I have to find a solution for, and I have to decide what to do about them and then be determined to actually do something.  There's nothing life-changing going on, just niggling issues with my living arrangements and my quilting set up.

The other word I'm thinking of is Begin.  So many things never get started, I never take that first step and so there's no progress.  I need to make an effort and actually do the things I dream about.  Surely if I take those first steps then the momentum will keep me going.  I'm tired of staying in the same spot because I can't get started.

Today I'm going to contemplate the sewing room, and list all my projects, and try to tidy up the layers and stacks of fabric everywhere.  I'll list the problem areas, and what I can do to make working in there more fun and more effective.  I might just have to look at what I hope to achieve this year too.  We are getting lots of requests for specific quilts, and have two commission quilts to make, so I need to look at ways I can sew those while fitting my own projects in.  I hope 2018 is going to be a year full of activity in the sewing room, lots of achievements and fulfillment.

2018 is going to be filled with my grandchildren too;

Shonny is expecting another baby in June and we are all so excited about that.  We don't know if it's a boy or a girl yet, but we're hoping for a boy.  These three girls need a little brother I think.

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Old Favourites

Recently I found some older books online, at ridiculously cheap prices, so I bought them both.  I had a young family when they were new on the shelves, and though I desperately wanted those books, there was no money in the budget to buy them.

  Marsha McCloskey has always been a favourite, and so has Judy Martin. Jinny Beyer was the queen of quilting in those days. In some ways patchwork was very limited then, but there were some very talented quilters out there.  And they're still around, still making wonderful quilts.

I felt quite nostalgic, looking at the pink and blue quilts, and the old fabric ranges.  There was a lot of fussy cutting striped fabric going on at that time, it really adds something to a block design.

This colour scheme really appeals to me, and I love the setting for the sampler blocks.  So many ideas! 

I'm feeling very inspired by all the ideas in these two books, ready to pull out fabric and start cutting. I have 2, nearly 3 tops finished up to the border stage, and both these books are full of ideas for pieced borders.  

I'm going to finish the last 12 Hunter's Star blocks first, and then work on borders for them, and then the borders for the blue squares quilt.  Once I've done that I can pack away the blue fabric completely.

The leader-ender blocks are going well, but I've cheated a bit and sewn quite a few of them in between the main projects.  I can't help myself it seems.  And I've totally given up on the scraps, and now I'm cutting into yardage as well. The scraps are going to be gifted to Mereth, because they really don't bring me any pleasure. And they take up a huge amount of room, so I can't be doing with that anymore.

I haven't made a sampler quilt since who knows when, but I'm tempted to choose a few of these and start cutting.  I should stipulate that I can only cut them out of scraps, but I know that idea wouldn't last.  I just love cutting into my stash fabric.

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Organising the leader-ender project

I'm working away at my Northwind blocks, cutting up piles of scraps and deciding on what colours to use and the best approach to using them as leader-enders.  I can get horribly confused when I'm working on two projects at once, so I needed to have some sort of a system to these blocks.

The 6" blocks are made with 2"and 4" finished triangles. Each block needs three 2" HSTs, and two dark and two light triangles.  I made sets of 5 pairs of light and dark triangles to begin with, then chain sewed the HSTs.  Once the HST seams are pressed (open in this case) I package them up with the remaining triangles for that block and they go into little ziplock bags.

These will become my leader-enders in between sewing together the Hunter's Star blocks.

When I have a fair few of the chains of triangles done I add the big triangles, and voila, a block done almost instantly.

I'm doing mainly red, brown and green scraps, with a touch of purple thrown in every now and again, just because I have the scraps there waiting to be used.

Now that I've decided on a logical way to sew these blocks I can sort all these triangles into kits and tidy up my sewing table.  I love knowing I have heaps of pieces cut and waiting to be sewn together.

I already have 26 blocks made, and I like the colour mix, so I will attack the scraps again and do some more cutting. The 2.5" triangle die I'm using needs a 7.5" strip, so I have cut up some pieces from the stash drawers as well; I'm certainly getting rid of a pile of pieces, which is what I meant to do. I'll need about 120 blocks, enough to keep me busy for a while.

Once the Hunter's Star is in one piece I can get busy working on the Checkered Lattice, I need the design wall for that so I haven't made much progress.  It's fun to be working on all these projects at once, I might even have some tops finished before the end of the year.

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Scrap progress

I sewed the rest of the Hunter's Star blocks, and decided the new sewing room arrangement was going to work really well.  I should sew the blocks together, but I'm still fine-tuning the placement of them.  And it seemed like hard work, so then I decided to come up with a scrap project, to use up the mountains of scraps and to be a good leader-ender.  That was a monumental task, but I finally settled on some Northwind blocks.  They are lovely to make, I did 16 and cut out a whole heap more. 

Scraps make my brain hurt. I spent most of the weekend looking through boxes and plastic containers and ziplock bags, trying to make some sense of what was in there.  It was so overwhelming that I actually achieved very little, but there was one positive result. I was so confused that I resorted to writing down what was wrong with my scrap setup, and then writing possible solutions, and then making lists of things to do to make those solutions work.

I'm not that sort of person normally, I like to potter around and make a mess and only clean half of it up, and leave the rest for another day.  Then, at some stage, I go through the whole sewing room and put it to rights.  The problem now is that I don't have the time to spend wading around in half finished stuff and discards from two projects ago. I'm wasting the sewing time I have, trying to find things or tripping over unnecessary things. Sigh ***

I'm using my accuquilt dies wherever possible, but they require quite large pieces, and there were many, many scraps that were too small. After a whole weekend of prevaricating I finally sat down and cut a whole box of bits into strips or squares and filed them away in the scrap drawers.  Which was wonderful, but I could have done so much more if I'd worked at it all weekend. 

I set up a cutting station on a small folding table, using an IKEA Lazy Susan and a small cutting mat. My Martelli cutter made all the difference, it was easy to cut sitting down which is a huge thing for me.  I find it really hard to stand up and cut for hours at a time, so this was brilliant. In fact I'll do it again next week, after I return from a trip to see the family.  Just when I'm getting enthusiastic I'm leaving for a week. Never mind, Isla and Seonaid are more fun than scraps.

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Happy sewing time

I needed a quiet day to catch up after my week away, so not much happened when I first arrived home. The next day I felt much better, and spent many hours in the sewing room, sewing and cutting more pieces. The Hunter's Star is growing quickly, which makes me want to see even more progress.

 I've sewn a heap of pieces together for the next 6 blocks, which will make this top 5 x 6.  I'll have a break from them then, and think about how big I want to make it.  I'm not sick of the blocks at all, which is a bonus; I'd hate to be making all these 8-point stars and not enjoying it.

 When I get tired of matching points on the 8 point stars, I move onto the Checkered Lattice blocks, which are mindless sewing.  I'm really enjoying these soft green fabrics, they aren't my usual palette and it's a pleasant change.

Some madness possessed me this week, and I changed my whole sewing room around yet again.  I moved all my spinning and knitting stuff into the lounge room, and now I have a lot more space in the sewing room.  I want to do a lot of cutting and sewing this weekend to make sure that the new setup feels right.  I will be tackling my scrap fabric I think, while I was moving things around I uncovered many, many containers of scraps, and a lot of fabric pieces smaller than a fat eighth.  They need to be dealt with, not shuffled into a new spot in my rearranged room.  Didn't I already do this in January?  Where did these scraps come from if I haven't been quilting this year?  It's a bit of a mystery.

I bought the whole series of Lewis,

which is a follow-on to the Morse series.  I love these British police dramas, set in Oxford.  The scenery, the music, the clever plots; I never get tired of them.  And because I have something interesting to watch on TV, I'm inclined to keep sewing longer than I normally would.

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A busy week

Last week was very intense.  My daughter Seonaid works in Events Management, which means long, long hours before the event.  She was working the Stevie Nicks concert, and I was due to go down and look after Isla for the last few days.  However, a week before the concert Isla developed a horrible viral condition called Hand, Foot and Mouth, involving painful blisters.  She couldn't go to daycare because it's so contagious, so it was Nan to the rescue, and I nursed her through it for 6 days.

Her mouth was full of bleeding blisters, and she couldn't eat anything, which is the end of the world for a little girl who loves her food.  She lived on bottles of formula, and yoghurt when she could manage it. She just wanted to sit with me and draw or play with her stickers, so that's all we did.  Her routine is built around meal and snack times, so when she couldn't eat the day seemed to stretch out in a formless string of hours.  

Seonaid left for work before Isla was awake, and got home at 9.30 when she was asleep; Isla never even batted an eyelid at her Mum being gone for a week, and me being there instead.  It's such a blessing to have been a huge part of her life, so that I'm just as much a comfort as her mum.

I knew she was on the mend when she started playing with her doll again,

and trying to wrap the dog up in blankets, 

and arguing with me about whether she should be allowed to stick pencils in her ear (I won that battle).

Seonaid worked until 4.30am the night of the concert, making the figures from the bars balance, and finalising all the admin stuff, because she and Isla were leaving the next day to fly to Queensland to spend time with the family there.  There was the rest of the day for packing, then we were up at 3.45 the next morning to leave for the airport.  We were a bunch of tired little Vegemites, but at last they were on the plane, and I could drive back to collect Dolly and make my way home, 2 hours north.

In Brisbane Seonaid collected her brother Rhys, and they visited Great Grandma. 

 Isla was a frazzled little camper in the Queensland heat, but was happy to sit with Uncle Rhys and look at his phone,  before flying on to Rockhampton to see Grandad.  This is her third trip, she's a well travelled baby, but she doesn't always behave herself.  

As Uncle Rhys says, "It's a good thing she's cute."

  

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