It's finished!!!  I am reeaally happy with how this turned out, it looks much better than I thought it would.  It started as a project to use up material I had lying around in scrap drawers, not all of it lovely; many times as I pieced the blocks I shook my head over the fabrics and colours and thought it was dreary.  But now, looking at it pinned up on my design wall in the early morning sunshine, I'm thrilled with how it turned out.  It looks antique, and interesting and the triangles are soothing and rhythmic.  Looks like I'm in love with the triangles again.

I've cleaned up all the fabric scraps from this quilt, and organised the remainder of the 1.5"strips that were still littering the sewing room.  I have a clear space to work when I start the next project, but for now I'm off to putter around in the garden.  Time for some fresh air and inspiration from my flowers.

Read more...

Thank heavens for DVDs is all I can say.  I'm making great progress on my Lady of the Lake, but only because  a dozen Seinfeld episodes have kept me entertained while I sew triangles.  And more triangles.  And More triangles.

 This quilt is all triangles, and nothing but.  I'm not tired of them yet, but they demand a bit more concentration than my normal sewing.

And then it's a bit nerve-wracking putting the blocks together and hoping that all those points match. Most of them are not too bad, but not perfect either.  Perfect is over-rated.  It will take another long session tonight, but I think I can get it finished before I go to bed.

I dealt with another UFO and forgot to mention it.  I pieced together all the bits I had cut out for this quilt, and now it's squared up and ready to be the centre of an orphan medallion.

I don't like the hexagon shape enough to make a whole quilt from it, and I'd rather do the original pattern in my beautiful reproductions that just weren't available all those years ago.  This isn't a finished UFO, but it can wait quietly in the Orphan box until I decide what to do with it.

I discovered this pile of blocks that I made from charm squares and never really felt enthusastic about.  I'm going to set them with that tan fabric and donate the top.  And there won't be any fancy piecing and triangles either; it's going to be a good, honest, plain quilt with big easy shapes.  Maybe I am a bit scarred by all the tiny triangles after all.

Read more...

The promised rain arrived, to the delight of Pippi and Dolly.  We had two wet and muddy dogs to deal with after they ran through the garden like mad things in the rain.  We made them sit outside the front door while we armed ourselves with old towels.  Then we let them in and grabbed them straight away, to be carted off to the bathroom and cleaned up.  It's like having little kids again.  They are so funny to watch though, it's better than TV.

I'm making a serious attempt to pare down my UFOs, and tackled the Lady of the Lake blocks today.  It's pictured in this post on point, and much as I love that setting it just wasn't working with these colours.  As soon as I laid the blocks out in a straight set I felt more enthusiastic about the project, which is good.  I made 14 blocks today, and I think another 6 will see it finished.  Then I'll have a think about the borders; I'm thinking something pieced would be fun, and I may have a play with EQ7 tonight.  Or I may go lo-tech with the pencil and graph paper.  It will be good to see this in one piece, and to get rid of all the various bits of material that were earmarked for it.  Some leftovers will go back in to the stash drawers, but most will be cut up or gifted to the Flood Appeal.  One way or another I want these fabrics dealt with.

I'm so surprised to see that I started these blocks in January last year.  I thought they were from August, or maybe July.  The blog is a great way to keep track of things; I often forget to update my spreadsheets with the latest projects, but so long as I blog about them there is a record to refer to.

The next UFO on the list is these scrappy blocks;  they've been littering my sewing room for months on end, so it's about time I did something with them.  I'm so glad there's another  whole day tomorrow to work in my sewing room.

Read more...

Those donation blocks I showed are made entirely from 4.5 x 2.5" rectangles, and they are so simple to put together.

We made a heap of blocks from this size rectangle when we were making quilts for bushfire survivors, in 2009; if you click on the'bushfire quilts' label in the list on the right hand side of the blog you'll find a heap of posts about those quilts.

For details of this paticular block you can go to this post;  I love how easy these are to sew, and there are no places where seams have to match, except the actualintersections of the blocks.

That's sort of magical in my book; it takes all the stress out of sewing the pieces together.  I used to make my students sew a couple of these every lesson, and we got a few donation quilts made that way.  The pattern is very forgiving, and even the absolute beginners had no trouble with it.

We're supposed to get a cool change tonight, and rain.  It would be so lovely to have a break in the muggy weather, I'm sure I'd get  more sewing done if the temperature was more comfortable.  Maybe this weekend I'll be able to tackle some of the ancient UFOs....

However, if I keep buying new fabric, and planning new projects, how will I ever have time to finish the old ones? 

I need to stop finding gorgeous fabric that I 'have' to have. (Wild Rose, by Blackbird Designs)

Read more...

I'm having one of those weeks where there is too much to do, not enough time, and nothing co-operates.  Yesterday I was all set to  do some more work on setting up my new website, only to discover that my little mobile internet stick had been left at my brother's place, and I was too peeved to get in the car and go and get it.  So I finished the donation quilt on the design wall instead.  It didn't take too long, and I'm very glad to have one thing crossed off the To-Do list.

I rummaged and found border materials that would work, then cut the small borders 1.5", and the large borders 5.5".  By using those measurements I can use the leftovers for another quilt in this pattern; the small strip leftovers will make more sashing and four-patches, and the 5.5" leftovers will make more strip pieced squares.  How's that for planning ahead?

I was too lazy to add the small borders separately, so I sewed them together and then joined them to the quilt.  I don't mind the way this corner looks, but it's not what I wanted for this particular quilt.  I didn't want that light fabric touching the outer border.

I decided to add a 3.5" flippy triangle corner, and that way the brown is at the outer edge all the way round.  What an easy fix and it looks like it's a lot harder to do than it is.  I'm all for looking clever, even when I'm just being lazy.

You can see what I've done, because of the stripes not meeting, but in a printed fabric this would be  a lot less noticeable; I'm going to put this little trick in the arsenal of border treatments.

Amazingly, no one pointed out to me the mistake in my previous picture of this quilt;

look at that bottom right corner!  Was everyone too nice to mention that I had a couple of strips in wrong way round?  I was full of bravado about leaving it there, and then I thought that I might as well unpick it and fix it before it was too late.  So in the final quilt that particular mistake is not there; if something else is wrong, bad luck.  Too late now.

Read more...

My sewing room is still covered in 1.5" strips, sewn together in various combinations and waiting to be assembled into blocks.  I'm tired of them now, but I want to deal with them once and for all.  No way I want to open a drawer three months from now and see this lot waiting for me.  So I'm plodding away, and hopefully tomorrow will see the last of them.





As a bit of fun I cut up some charm packs of Park Avenue that I collected when  Hancocks sold them for $3 each. 

I also have a jellyroll of these, so quite enough fabric to play with. 

I'm making the blocks up as I go, just seeing what I like.  I started off with the pale blue units, as the fabric was too lovely to cut into little pieces; these units show off  the large print fabric very well.

I made the little 3" ninepatches in the middle just for fun, and framed them with .5"strips so that they'd fit as the centre of the block.  I like the little touches of red, I think I want the quilt to be mainly blue and brown, with red as the accent.



I'm pretty sure I won't be able to make these blocks just from the Park Avenue range.  There are so many other fabrics in my stash that would look good in these blocks, and I'll have fun combining them all.



In my fossicking I found this set of blocks, destined to be a donation top from two years ago. 

I counted them up, and there's already 65 made; instead of putting them together myself I'm going to send them off to some ladies making quilts for people affected by the Victorian floods.  There are a few other sets of blocks and pieces that I'll be glad to donate; the volunteers will welcome them, and I'll be clearing out my sewing room and creating more space.  And ultimately somebody who deserves it will receive a quilt.

Read more...

We raced into town the other day to pick up a few necessities, and somehow managed to pop into the patchwork shop.  Dearie me, how come this came home with me?  I know I've sworn off jellyrolls forever, but I wanted some of this Civil War Reunion, and this was the quickest way to get it. 

Mereth was scoffing at my weak resolve, but she was very quick to accept the gift of a couple of duplicate strips in the batch.  I can see yardage of this fabric line being purchased in the not-too-distant future.

The other jellyroll is Antique Fair, and I purchased that from an Ebay seller.  It will work in very well with some other precut lines that I have, so I'm hoping that now I officially have 'enough' to be able to start a project with them.

I don't know how I feel about the precuts coming out first, and the yardage later on.  Seems like the impatient ones among us are being 'made' to buy the precuts, instead of yardage.  I know the answer is to just wait, but it's that whole impatience thing that we can't seem to control.  In my defence, I would rather buy charm packs, but they weren't available at the places I was shopping.  See previous comment about impatience.....

I'm still shifting furniture around in my living quarters, trying to find the perfect setup, and it's starting to feel very cosy and homely. 

My sewing space is just about done, and all I have to do now is sort out my projects and boxes and find a permanent home for it all.  I like that sort of fossicking and rummaging though, so I'm looking forward to it; I imagine I'll find a lot of things I forgot I ever had once I get into it.

I'm still cleaning up strips, and making crumb blocks, but I will have to start working on a good quilt soon, just to take advantage of all the lovely fabric in the stash.  I treated myself to a few books over Christmas, including Gone To Texas, by Betsy Chutchian. 

It's a pattern book of new quilts, and I don't normally buy those, I like ones about quilt history and the State projects.  However, the quilts in this are gorgeous, and the photos are beautiful so I don't regret it for a minute.  I'm trying to decide whether I make the Baskets first,

or the Ocean Waves. 

I have so many fabrics for these two, just crying out to be used.  Would it be wrong to start both?

Read more...

 A few hot days have seen me have sent me to the sewing room, escaping the heat and being productive.  I'm enjoying the 1.5"strips, so much so that I relieved Mereth of her spare strips, and now have an ocean of little pieces all over the table.  I've used up 3 small drawers full of scrap strips, and I refuse to cut more from the stash, so it may be time to move onto something else.

I have one top completed up to the borders, which I didn't take a photo of, so that will have to wait till later .  I decided that it was too much effort to choose a single fabric for the setting triangles, so I strip pieced those as well.  It took a bit of time, but it was very easy and I like the look of it. 

I have lots of these 5.5" pieced squares left over, so they are the beginnings of another quilt.  I love the simplicity of them, both in the making and the final effect.  I haven't decided if I will set these in a simple basketweave like this, or maybe use them as units of a bigger block.  There's plenty of time to choose.

 For months I've been wanting a labeller, and boring Mereth with stroies of how my life would be different if only I could label everything.  Lo and behold, for Christmas this showed up under the tree.  What a great gift, and one I truly wanted.

I'm enjoying getting more organised, and I'm sure that once everything is sporting it's own little tag then life will suddenly become much easier.  Is that an unreasonable expectation?

Read more...

 This is the current state of my strippy blocks, and I think I'll make another 20 or so , to make a large single bed size.

It will be a donation quilt, to go the Queensland flood appeal.  Lots of groups are making raffle quilts to raise money, so that might be where this one goes, or I might donate it to someone who needs it.  My daughter lives in Emerald; it wasn't that long ago that they were in severe drought, and the dam was empty.  Now they are recovering from a flood where 80% of the town went under water.  Talk about a land of extremes. She's still a bit shocked that her house was one of the few that didn't get flooded, luckily.

I've been involved with a little fundraiser of my own, with the computerised quilting lists that I'm on, and we have raised nearly $3000, which is absolutely fabulous.  It's good to be able to make a contribution, no matter how small. I 'd like to echo Bonnie's sentiments in this post, about how you can give to the Premier's Appeal.  A lot of the places under flood are places I've lived, including the Lockyer valley where I went to Agricultural College.  It hurts to see such devestation wreaked on an area of  beautiful, productive farmland.

I haven't had a lot of free time, so not much more sewing has taken place, but for my own sanilty I need to get back to my machine. Dolly and Pippi know the antidote for stress; a comfy bed in a patch of sunlight, and a quilt to snuggle on.

Read more...

 I've done a little bit of sewing in amongst other chores, but not as much as I could have. 

These scrap blocks are fun and easy, but the seam allowances of adjoining blocks were clashing, and I was too lazy or distracted to work out how to press them to avoid that.  And that was stopping me from sewing more of them.  The best to do was to take photos for a tutorial, so that I can refer back to the blogpost whenever my fickle memory forgets exactly what I did.

I could always refer back to the correctly pressed blocks, or I could do what I did in the past and copy the pressing of an incorrect block too many times to count and have a dreadful mess to deal with later.  The blogpost is the sensible option.

There are two blocks with the values in opposite places, what Mereth and I refer to as Counterchange blocks.  Both are laid out a little differently, and pressed differently.  But they all start out with these basic units.

I sew most of my longer 1.5" light medium strips into pairs, and then sew those pairs together to make a pieced strip 4.5" wide.  I cut those into 5.5" slices, and add a fifth strip, 1.5" x 5.5". That allows me to use up all shorter lengths of strips.  I do the same with all the dark medium strips.  It doesn't matter what way the seams are pressed in these units.  The aim is to have a 5.5" pieced square.

The dark and light strips are sewn into pairs, seam pressed to the dark fabric; then they are cut into 5.5" slices.  At then end of the strip, when there isn't enough room for another slice I cut 1.5" pieces, and these are paired together to make fourpatches.  The fourpatches are pressed like this.

Because there are two different blocks to make I can't just sew all these units together any old way.  I need all the blocks oriented the same way for the pressing system to work (I sound as bad as Mereth now, who has confessed to not making blocks she likes because she can't get the seams to nest nicely!)

I lay out the light blocks like this, and sew the fourpatch to the light/dark rectangle, seam pressed away from the fourpatch.  A light/dark rectangle is added to the side of the strip-pieced square, seam pressed to the dark.  See how the strips in the square are aligned vertically?

Sew that final seam through the block, and press it towards the dark strip.  It will want to do that anyway, because all those seam intersections don't want to press back on themselves.

Lay out the the dark square as shown; the strips in the pieced square are horizontal. 

Sew the units together as in the other block, seam pressed away from the fourpatch, and away from the pieced centre square.  Sew the joining seam, and press it down towards the pieced square.

If all the blocks are made and pressed like this, they fit together without a hitch, all the seams nested together.  That makes me a lot more enthusiastic about getting on with the project.

 The photos are crappy, taken late in the afternoon with bad lighting, but they will have to do.  I'd rather spend today sewing than taking decent photos. 

Oh and it's going to be on point now, because everything looks better on point.

Now that I look at it, some of those strip squares are oriented in the wrong direction.  It doesn't matter a bit, except that those blocks won't play nicely with their neighbours when it comes time to join them.  I don't mind mashing a few bulky seams flat, but a whole quilt like that is daunting.  I'd rather take the time to work out a system and stick to it, even if I have to do a tutorial to remember. 

Now if I could just remember where I put my Ott Light, and my hand-piecing supplies. and my Etui sewing box, and my other box of 1.5"strips.   I thought we were being so careful when we moved here, but that last flurry of packing the presious stuff was done in an unsound state of mind.  I have no idea where some things were stowed, and it will be a voyage of discovery to track them down.

Read more...

It didn't feel like Christmas this year for some reason, and now I can't quite believe that we've nearly finished with 2010.  The year is galloping to a close, and I feel totally left behind.  I'm not ready to start writing 2011 as the date.

We did have a lovely get together with Mereth's boys and their partners, plus Curtis the WonderDog and new baby Logan. 

It was great to see them all again, and Logan was welcomed with delight.  He hardly had a chance to sleep in his bed, there was always someone waiting for a turn to hold him.  He was placid and good-natured and utterly adorable. 

Dolly and Curtis got on like a house on fire, but Curtis just couldn't work out what Pippi was.  She was too small, and too quick, and she kept chewing on him with needle-sharp puppy teeth. He was reduced to begging his mum to protect him.

We went to Adelaide on Boxing day for a quick visit; this photo is of the salt lakes at Lake View.  They were a vivid fuchsia pink, completely unreal.  We took lots of photos, but the colour doesn't come out true to life.  It's particularly pink this year, it looks like it's been Photoshopped.

I thought that it would have been a terrible Christmas break if there was no sewing accomplished, so I sewed a few more of the Road to Oklahoma blocks, but my heart isn't really in it.  Then I decided I was thoroughly sick of my overflowing drawers of strips.   I usually do Bonnie's mystery quilts, and that helps clean out the strip drawers, but I didn't have time for that this year. 

The first drawer I tackled was the 1.5" one.  I had no idea what I wanted to do with them, so I just started sewing them into pairs, which I've done two or three times before.

The sewing time lets me decide what I'll do next.  Last time I did this I made hundreds of four-patches and it took ages before they were all used up.  This time I wasn't particularly keen on the four-patch idea, and I'd been thinking how much I like the way Bonnie makes new fabric by string piecing all the little bits together.  So as well as sewing pairs of light and dark strips, I also sewed similar coloured strips together so I could cut a larger square out of them.

The light/dark pairs will form a sashing around the strip pieced squares, the small bits will make the four-patches and hopefully every last little scrap will find a place in this design.

What amazes me is that if I've regularly cleared out this size of strip drawer; why then are there such old and unlovely bits still there??  Where are they coming from?  Will I never be rid of them?

Once all these bits are used up I'll make crumb blocks as the large square, and just keep going until I've used up all the stray bits cluttering my workroom.  And I'm going to get rid of anything that makes me think twice about including it. If I don't love it, it's going to be thrown out or given away.  I'm going to start 2011 with the scraps thinned out and the drawers a lot emptier.

Read more...

It's a working weekend for me, I'm trying to get all the quilts with Christmas deadlines finished.  We've already done 5 quilts this week, but there's no time to waste if these quilts are to get  back to their owners in time. 

The cross-hatching on this embroidery quilt is nearly finished, then it's a matter of filling the 13" wide borders.  At least there's lots of room for quilting.  And the owner of the quilt is going to finish off all those thread ends, which is one less job for me to do.

I can't believe it's nearly Christmas, it just doesn't feel like it at all this year.    Maybe one evening we'll go driving and look at all the lights and decorated yards, that always helps set the mood.  The weather is really strange too, it's positively cold at times, and that is so unusual for our summers.  Last year there was a record-breaking heatwave, this year is the coolest, wettest summer for decades.  I'm loving it though, certainly not complaining.

I even did a little bit of sewing, trying out another idea for using the Easy Angle ruler.

 I've always loved this shape, but it's not the easiest thing to rotary cut with an ordinary ruler.  This is how I did it with the Easy Angle;

start off with a 4.5" square.  Place the 2.5" line on the edge of the square, with the other edges of the ruler lined up with the edges of the square, and trim off the corner.

Flip the square over and trim off the other corner.  You can flip the ruler if you prefer, but I like doing it this way as the markings are easier to read.  You now have an irregular pentagon shape.

Cut two 2.5" triangles with the Easy Angle.  Place one on the pentagon, and sew with a .25"seam.

Press seam towards the light fabric, and add the other triangle.

TaDa!!  I love these little units, they're like houses. 

I can see me making a lot more in my spare time, there are so many nice blocks that can be made with them.  In fact, I've already whipped one up.

Mereth came round this afternoon to do some work, and I showed her the evidence of what her puppy has been up to. 

Apparently Pippi has a taste for literature!  We'll have to stop her chewing precious things like books, she can have bannister brushes and tennis balls and wooden spoons, but stay away from the bookshelves.

It's hard to be cross with this face though.

And this is my pup, in her guise of Hypno-Dog, trying to hypnotise me into taking her for a walk on this windy afternooon.  Looks like it worked, we're off to the golf course.


 

Read more...