Still struggling on

I'm still coughing and spluttering and completely fed up with being sick! This has lasted forever, or it seems so. I have terrible cabin fever but don't quite have the energy for going anywhere... Never mind, I'm on the up so it can't be long now. 

I did drag myself to quilters on Saturday because I promised I'd do a fabric dyeing workshop (we had tubs of donated plain calico that no-one was going to use for anything). It was super fun, I made up the dyes in advance and we had a happy couple of hours splashing it all about. I was exhausted by the end but it was worth it to get of the house and have a bit of socialising. I now have fifty bags of dyed cloth to rinse, but that can wait for a day or two longer.

We have put up a bird feeder by the garden shed for the king parrots. They are very young or very dumb or very hungry because you can walk right by them without disturbing them. The oak is slowly losing its leaves and the garden is lovely ... not that I do much but wander about in it at the moment.

Bouncing around

I bounced down to the coast for a couple of days (new car, so much fun, love driving everywhere) and then into Canberra for the day (old car with trailer, got ebike serviced, not much fun driving at all). In Canberra we took number one and girlfriend out for a lovely birthday lunch (Afghani restaurant, absolutely delicious) and I saw the new flat, which is light and lovely and in a super location close to town. So grown up!!!!!

At art class I finished my watercolour of Abbotsford Convent (in Melbourne, where we went in March). It's an awful picture and it kept getting worse the more I did to it. I broke out the pastel pencils as well and I don't think that was a good idea. I wanted to have it a bit wonky and artistic but it ended up in some uncanny valley between correctly proportioned and properly freeform. 

This is the original photo I took.

I finished a quilt finally, which made me feel better, because it's pretty. I pieced this last year some time but just got around to the binding and finishing now. Part of my push to use my solids! Not doing so well, I keep getting distracted.

More vertical quilt

 I had another go and managed to get some better shots - way less windy! It actually takes a strong wind to keep a quilt from hanging down, they are quite heavy, not like sheets or towels. Anyway this is the creation, I don't like it as much as I thought I was going to.

The one I got inspiration from had a white background (where I have the pink triangles) with different coloured trapezoids (where I have green) and it looked like a starburst or a flower - coming out from the middle. I decided to go with two solids and I think the pink triangles come forward too much and ruin the effect. Maybe it would have been better with swapping the colours over? We'll never know because I'm not going to make it again but it's interesting that it gives such a different vibe to the one I was trying to re-create.

I like the colour combo though. Nice and bright. I quilted feathers all over it - mostly as practice because I haven't done them for so long. And because I basted this one with glue! Elmer's washable school glue, just dribble a really thin layer on, let it dry and quilt away. Then wash it out - which is why this quilt looks a bit wrinkly. It worked very well, it was lovely quilting without having to remove any safety pins, and I will keep gluing things in the future. I called it "My way AND the highway" because quilt groups are an interesting social experiment. 

Finished a solids top

I have no memory of sewing this top, so I think it must be from 2020, when I was doing a lot of solids and everything else was a bit of a blur. For everyone. 

It is super simple, just rectangles. Was I trying to use up leftovers? Not impossible, or maybe I just felt like something very straightforward. Solids look good in simple blocks. I called this quilt "Sensible decision making" - not because I feel that the quilt represents sensible decisions. I think I am trying to manifest sensible decision making in my life, so calling a quilt that seems like a first step.

It was blowing a gale while I tried to take these photos - the quilt was horizontal half the time. We have had massive rain, followed by a sharp cold snap. Our fire doesn't take much encouragement to stay banked overnight, and is easy to wake up in the morning. It's lovely ... but a bit of a trap if you want to go out into the weather and do some gardening, and not spend the morning sitting by the fire reading. I have come very late to Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan novels and my word they deserve all the hype. I have been transfixed.

Simple quilting too - like a meander? I did the binding at quilters, very easy to sit and stitch while chatting / listening. Or not! The group can spend fifteen minutes in silence, just sewing away with their own thoughts. It is very peaceful.

A quilt!!!

Can you believe it, I finished a quilt! I needed something to do at quilters, and this top was entirely done except for the binding. So I bound it with random solids and sat quietly doing the binding with the ladies on Tuesday.

According to my blog I did this in August 2018, and I can't remember when I finished the hand quilting. I do love a big stitch. A finish, so exciting.

Dyeing wool again

Doing some weaving really made me want to dye up some wool again - it is satisfying and much easier than fabric. Well, not really easier, but it takes less time and is less fuss. So I dug up my skein winder, made some balls into hanks, and dyed and dried them.

Not the most fabulous of colours but yarn is very forgiving, especially when you weave it together with another yarn. You can make unappealing colours look just fine.

After they were dry I wound them back into centre-pull balls. See how boring and blotchy the hank looks on the winder.

But how cool it looks on the ball - this one is on the top left. I would totally buy that in a shop. 

It was a good hobby for this weekend as I was operating in ten minute bursts between getting number two organised for uni. It looks like a lot of stuff but it's not really, just spread out. I'm sure it will fit in his (tiny) room. He's not taking the painting with him, that is just there because, some reason, husband, who knows. 

Making Music with My Friends

Another solids quilt! This is the little flying geese on an angle blocks. Not much to say about it really, what you see is what you get. I like the orange. All colours were completely random!

Nothing much to say about the quilting either, I did a design that following the line of the blocks but I'm not sure about the quantities of unquilted space. It is definitely enough quilting to hold it together, but this might have worked better with an allover design. Or maybe not....

I did the quilting a couple of weeks ago but it took me a while to get around to sewing the binding down. And now my sewing machine is trapped in the repair shop! I took it in for a service a couple of weeks ago and the technician was in Queensland and unable to get back ... but I dropped it off anyway thinking it would be four weeks instead of the usual two, and now we've gone into lockdown so who knows when I will be reunited with my favourite object! I do have another one of course but it's not as good. 

But I will not despair, I have another hobby now. Which I am terrible at, but will pick up the courage to show you photos before too long....

Cognac in the espresso

Here is the scrappy solids quilt that I finished the binding on over the weekend. It is very scrappy! I did not plan any of the colours, as you can probably tell, just whatever came first out of the bucket. Or off the shelf, I had to go to yardage in the end as I used up the big scraps. 

I took the photos this morning before work ... it was a rainy morning and the sun wasn't properly up. The light looks very blue! The towels on the back are dripping wet.

I'm not sure if this is a traditional block. I know that if you are careful about colour placement then you get a very strong secondary pattern, and I think there's a version where the alternate squares are the same rather than scrappy which looks more coordinated. If I cared I would do a reverse image search ... but I don't. It's triangles and squares, what more do you need to know?

At least those squares make it easy to do a regular 'kite' quilting pattern, that was very fun to do. Now I just have to pin and quilt the next one before I get too distracted with the current solids I'm doing out of the scrap bucket! It was still very full....

Pinned up a quilt

I don't think I've shown this quilt at any stage of its construction - but here is a shot when I was pinning it up on the weekend. Ongoing theme of solids - lots and lots of colours - in a reasonably traditional layout. I don't know what this block is called. When you do it in restrained colours (and use the same colours in the same spots in each block) it makes an interesting secondary pattern ... but I thought it was a bit boring. So went completely scrappy.

No dog 'helping me' with the pinning this time :(

And now on to the quilting. Because it's all the same size squares I've gone for the grid-based 'kites' again. Easy!

The Crisp Crack

I finally finished this solids quilt that I started last July - it got overtaken by weaving then sat in the queue while I got distracted with new things and has now been finally bordered, quilted, bound, photographed (and carefully folded up and put in the cupboard with 400 of its brothers and sisters). This was inspired by Bonnie Hunter's unity quilt along - I didn't follow the quilt along or do the really complex piecing of her beautiful quilt - but I just liked the vibe. Limited colours, stars, triangles... what's not to love.

It is called "The Crisp Crack" because I was watching the latest season of the Great British Bake Off. I can't even remember what had to have it, some kind of biscuit? I have gone and googled it now, which took half an hour because I got distracted into episode by episode reviews and twitter reactions, god people are funny, and I think the florentines required a crisp crack.

It is quilted with an all-over swirl meander because I Couldn't Be Bothered with anything else and I'm still using the $10 IKEA doona covers for the backings...

Changing colours

A few weeks ago I went to the annual church craft de-stash sale that I've mentioned before ... a very happy hunting ground for bargain-priced fabric. This time I was fully prepared: large amount of cash in small denominations, several shopping bags and ready to rummage. As last time, it was super crowded and awesome. I picked up a heap of quilting fabric and several lengths of dress fabric that people were very happy to get rid of. Win win!

One of them was a reasonably ugly tan coloured linen that I decided to dye. I did the burn test and it definitely had some poly in it, but thought there would be enough linen (or cotton) to make it worth dyeing so I did a deep red in the hope it would come out a sort of chestnut or darker brown. I'm not used to full-immersion dyeing so I put it in a bucket and weighed down another bucket on top.

It didn't work very well - the colour didn't change much and it was badly blotchy. I might have another go using more dye.... or I might just use it for some item of clothing that screams "rustic" or "homespun" and tell everyone it was a design choice.

In other more successful colour-changing news we repainted number one's room. After a gap year spent pretty much within these four walls we were all happy to take the furniture out, scrub and scrub and scrub, then undercoat over the Egyptian Gold (a June 2009 project, so chosen by a six year old, surprisingly  nice) and make it all new and fresh. And buy a new king single because child is LENGTHY, which is very good for painting the tall bits. It was a fair bit of work but satisfying all round, especially coinciding with a 19th birthday :) So grownup.....

Weaving with the Ice Yarns

I've been very happily using the Ice Yarns in every possible combination, and with random things from the cupboard. Scarves are great - they take enough time to get a feeling of accomplishment, but not so long I get bored. And then on to the next one! I will no doubt get sick of it soon but not yet. 

Here's the random few balls on the sewing table. I wind the bobbins up in my sewing room and it is getting covered in fluff and bits of wool. The orange and the green at the bottom of the picture are the same wool in different colours, so I put them together in a straight houndstooth.

The grey is a similar weight but has bobbly bits hanging off it, which gives an interesting texture. I put that with the orange in a log cabin style (yay! quilting term!) that is more subtle than I thought it would be but still quite nice.

The green on the top is a lovely fluffy wool / cotton blend and the colour seems to go with everything. I used the 'zucchini' colours that I dyed ages ago on the warp, with the fluffy green on the weft, and it turned out really pretty. It is super soft as well.

I wanted to keep using the fluffy green so I put a very random collection on the warp of bits of left over green. It is different but I still like it, and of course nice and fluffy. What is the point of a scarf that isn't snuggly?

We had a great weekend once I'd recovered from the week and had some naps. Lovely, lovely naps. I did the 16 km walk again (anti-clockwise this time! quite a different experience) which was easier than the first time. We went out for a fancy lunch with friends and I even managed an hour or so of gardening before it got too hot. 

The town you left behind

 And finally, here is what the Carolina Chain turned into - scrappy solids. It is a variant of the Bonnie Hunter pattern because I didn't put the squares on point, which I don't enjoy doing, and fiddling around with setting triangles, although I think the finished look is better when the lines go vertical and horizontal rather than diagonal. 

I enjoyed making this and not thinking too much about what colour went where. I tried for a light / dark difference but not sure if I succeeded.

The quilting was fun too - I followed the pattern in a way that avoided as many of the seam joins as possible! It made an interesting secondary pattern so I just continued that into the border and it was easy and looks good, if I do say so myself.

And another Ikea cream doona cover on the back. This quilt is called "The town you left behind" because I think the quilt looks like a country song. Here is quilt with dog.

Quickly, slam the door

 Here is what those peculiar circus circles with ric-rac turned into - not as bad as I thought it was going to be but definitely not one of my favourites. It is called "Quickly, slam the door" because I feel like those circles are trying to roll right into my house.

The blue is good, and I like the border, but that's about it. I left the circles unquilted so they'd poof out a bit, which they do, but I'm not sure it helps. It was reasonably fun to make - and I like ric-rac - and it used up quite a few solid scraps, so there's that. It is a good size for a sofa quilt or a car quilt so it will no doubt have a useful life ahead of it (in case we ever run out of quilts HAHAHAHAHA)

I didn't take a photo of the backing but it's the same vague cream abstract pattern as all the other quilts because IKEA was selling queen size duvet covers for $10. Pure cotton, but quite loosely woven (definitely not 400 thread count!), which is actually perfect for quilt backings, when you don't want anything that is too dense and unyielding. I bought six of them, and I can get two backings of out each, so that is super frugal and they look just fine. I don't particularly like taking it out of the packet, ripping off the snaps and seams and throwing them away ... terribly wasteful. But my hobby is inherently wasteful, like most useless things ... I'm still going to keep doing it. Here is a shot with laundry!

Toast for every meal

Here is another solids quilt; after the bright circles one (which I am just finishing the binding on) I wanted something a bit more restrained with limited colours. Unfortunately I think it went a bit boring - the colours were quite pretty together before cutting but I think they are a bit muted in the finished product.



It is a copy of a Gwen Marston quilt from her wonderful Abstract Quilts in Solids book. She doesn't give instructions or anything, just pictures and finished sizes, but it is not complex. I sized it up considerably so it would be bed size but kept the proportions and the use of three different colour families. Hers is more interesting than mine - perhaps my lights weren't light enough, or my darks not dark enough? Or my colour families were too different? Here is a photo of the book quilt.



It was enjoyable to make anyway, and I quilted it all over with big fat feathers. It probably would have suited hand quilting like Gwen's one, but that was never going to happen, I didn't love it enough for hand quilting! The quilting shows better from the back. It is called Toast for every meal because the pandemic seemed to result in a lot of toast, and I am definitely not complaining. I could eat toast for every meal quite happily .... sometimes butter, sometimes hummus, sometimes even vegemite.