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....

High risk, high return

I've been down with a bit of a cold the past few days - nothing major but enough to have me at home sniffling one day and a very quiet weekend. Number two had the same thing but worse so went off to see the doctor and have a COVID test (which hasn't come back yet now I think about it, but it's OK, he's still at home miserably snoozing and drinking orange juice). 

The one thing I did was finish up my return-to-quilting big scrappy  number - the tulip blocks I saw on Keryn's blog a while ago - with a white background. It is called "High risk, high return" and was quilted all over in big fat feathers. Blue sashing, a red border and 50 random fabrics.

The blocks finish at 13.5" which is a nice chunky size, nothing too fiddly. I used mostly scraps from the bucket with some yardage when I couldn't find pretty scraps. 

Wonderful to have a finish finally! Next for binding is the yellow/pink/purple that only needed more borders, and I've started piecing another solids quilt, because I'm enjoying the mosaic effect of lots of solids together. Good fun.

The crafting pendulum swings back

It's happened again, the crafting urge has swung - I was starting to miss quilting, and thinking about quilting, and dyeing fabric - so on the weekend I finished up everything weaving-related and started in on some quilting again. In theory I could keep both hobbies going at once but that's not really how I operate; I liked to blast ahead at full speed, so it's better to have clear decks. I finished the scarf that was on the loom, twisted all the fringes, wet finished every scarf and hung them out to dry.

I tidied up my sewing room, looked through my books and thought about what I should start with. I like to start with something scrappy and not too difficult to work my way into it. I thought about doing yet another scrappy trip around the world, but then got distracted into doing something scrappy with a white background. I played around with some patterns and drew up some blocks but couldn't quite find the right block until I saw this on Kerryn's blog - perfect!!!! 

I think it's bigger - 9" finished - and I've done the triangles already, watching Bridgerton. Soooo good to be back at the machine.

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.

Tsunamis and standing waves

This is the quilt idea that happened when I was making Blood and Gold and arranging all those flying geese - when some of them were next to each other and had the same fabric it made a cool chevron effect. So I did a whole quilt of cool chevrons - in the same solids - and I really like it.



Nothing very earth shattering about the construction. I did stitch and flip and used the offcut triangles to make the border. This one needed a border so I thought blue was the best colour to tie it all together. There was a bit of headscratching to make sure that the chevrons happened - I had thought I had scientifically planned it so it would be infallable ... but no. No no no. Swearing happened.



After being a bit disappointed by the way Blood and Gold's quilting turned out I decided to go with an allover pattern in my good old standby baptist fans; random this time. I like it more than something that follows the pattern lines, at least on this quilt. It is called "Tsunamis and standing waves" because they are two different but related things. I was not aware of that, and then I was, so the quilt can mark my gaining a small amount of knowledge.

Blood and gold

Back in October I was making random flying geese from my solids, and this is what it eventually turned into. Random flying geese! In solids! I think it's called Blood and Gold for more UB40 earworms, but I can't be bothered googling to find out.

 

I am not completely convinced about the quilting, I think something allover that didn't follow the pattern so closely might have been more interesting. But it turned out better in the end than I thought it was going to half way through, so that's something.

To be honest, if you do anything out of solids in a simple block it's going to look good. I took a set of photos with the geese going sideways on a sunny day, and then a set of photos of the geese going up and down, on a cloudy day. I think I like cloudy better.

We have survived the first week back at school and the first parliamentary sitting week. Tired, but hanging in there, and apparently it is meant to rain on the weekend! Can you believe it? Water falling from the sky, incredible. We will wait and see.

Scorned by the gods

I pieced this last year before the weaving took over and I was clearly in a very colourful mood. I did notice in the last few weeks when I've been using solids again that I didn't seem to have very much yellow or pink, and this might be why.



Free form wedge-type things, or possibly tumblers, and random borders too. I quilted it with allover baptist fans which is safe and boring but still one of my favourites. I like doing an allover on the solids, it gives it texture. I don't know why I called it "Scorned by the gods" but it seemed like a good idea at the time.



I took the photos in the last minutes between when the sun goes down and it gets dark. I tried five minutes earlier but just got photos of my own shadow in the setting sun - see below -  the washing line faces due west this time of year and I had to wait until the last trickle of sun had gone before taking my photos ... and even then the colours are a bit peculiar. It is super bright though.



We had a quiet at-home weekend, with just a short outing for brunch with friends that we hadn't seen for at least ten years! They were down from Brisbane and it was a great catch-up.

We also spent a couple of hours picking out appliances for our MUCH overdue kitchen renovation. I'll take some photos of our appalling kitchen, it's beyond a joke. The oven won't heat up above 180, and only on the top third of the oven, and only three of the four hot plates work, and the cupboards are beyond disgraceful. So we've got a quote for the cabinetry, and chosen some appliances, now we just have to talk to the flooring people and make the final decisions about what goes where. So many choices! So much MONEY to spend .... but it has to be done. I think our kitchen is actually dangerous.

Like a fiesta

This is the quilt top I've been working on lately - inspired by Freddy Moran again - or at least just by a part of a quilt that I saw on an old blog post when looking for something else entirely. It's about halfway down the post ... isn't it such an explosion of colour? Inspirational.

My version is a bit tidier. I wasn't game to have things on too much of an angle, and the joining strips are a uniform size. So it lacks a bit of character, but the colour more than makes it for it. It was a very fun quilt to make! Can you tell I'm jealous of my sister and her husband who are currently on holiday in Mexico? That is a very exotic place for us antipodeans to holiday, and they are putting up heaps of photos full of colour and fun. Like a fiesta.

Taller than Jesus

I have finally finished the green and blue courthouse steps that I started ages ago. This is the one where I decided to pre cut all the strips - unusually for me, I tend to chop away as I go - but got the maths horribly wrong and cut exactly half as many as I needed. Which made me cross, because I'd folded all the greens and blues up and put them away, but instead of cursing the whole project and throwing the blocks in the cupboard I got the fabric out again like a grown-up and cut some more strips.



The sewing was straightforward and I completely ignored value, which makes the courthouse steps pattern not nearly as obvious as it would be in a  traditional quilt. Just the colour to show it, green and blue.



The quilting is an overall clamshell. Like the Santa Fail and Autumn Rhymes with Boring, I just went for repeated simple shapes which I think looks good on solid quilts. I haven't finished with the solids yet - there is the sticks, and the triangle things, and I am currently sewing up a mixed solids and prints all in half square triangles. It is quite in your face, but I love it so far.



The name is for two reasons; firstly because I was having a bit of a Lloyd Cole fiesta and it's a lyric from "Holier than Thou" and secondly because at sixty inches square this quilt is almost certainly taller than Jesus. I googled "how tall was Jesus" which was a mistake because there are some lunatics on the internet, but generally anything over five foot is considered optimistic.

Santa Fail

So many years ago I made some improvised triangle things in sort of 'Santa Fe' colours - turquoise and ochre and fuchsia. But it didn't work out properly, and I didn't like the next border of chevrons so I chucked it in the bottom of a drawer and ignored it. As part of my current  drive to "use up what you have and stop shopping for god's sake" I pulled it out of the drawer, whacked some borders on it and finished it off.




I'm still not a super big fan of it. The triangles are a bit odd - they look a bit haphazard and blobby. I didn't want to put anything complicated around it, so it's just a plain border or two and some half-square triangles.



The quilting is circles of different sizes ... or at least they're meant to be circles! I don't think I picked the most even bit of quilting to take a photo of, some of them are quite like real circles. It's all freehand, in case you can't tell...



I've been trying for a while to find a time without rain or a line full of washing, but this morning I gave up and got my husband to hold it. Unfortunately the quilt had been in the sofa in the "yet to be photographed" spot for slightly too long and when I went to find it it had gone ... unearthed on number two's bed after five minutes searching, but it does look a bit rumpled. The name might be a bit harsh but I couldn't resist.

Autumn rhymes with boring

Here is the finished blue and brown triangle quilt. I did just stick with triangles in the end - different sizes and heading in different directions but still just triangles. Very autumnal colours but perhaps not very exciting.

I am not a huge fan of this quilt (as you can probably tell from the  name), but it is an interesting exercise in colour. I remember only two dyes - light blue and brick red - but perhaps I had some leftover black or yellow that I threw in there as well. It is definitely all the same cotton though, and it's not a very good one. God only knows where I picked it up - it was probably on sale - and it is very light and falls into a slight crinkle. It's definitely cotton otherwise it wouldn't have dyed so well, but I don't think it is 'quilt shop quality'.



So perhaps making the whole quilt of it was a bit risky ...especially then doing straight lines. It ended up really really wavy on the edges, and there is some pleating in the backing and some strange wobbling as you get to the final corners. I am blaming it on the dodgy fabric and not at all on the dodgy quilting.



Here is the back - still using up stuff from the shelves! I went with as co-ordinated as I could.

Sticks

Whenever I don't know what to do next for a quilt, I pick up a book by Gwen Marston, and find something. Despite looking through the books for years, and making heaps of quilts inspired by them, there is always something that catches my eye that I haven't done before. And this time it was sticks! I am still going full steam ahead with solids. And yellow ... so yellow background and multicoloured sticks.

Time will tell how well it works. I love how vivid the red quilt is; the yellow might be a bit more one dimensional. This is from "Freddy and Gwen Collaborate Again".



We've been having a great long weekend. I have done about a million loads of washing, practised my guitar, sewed and went for another run this morning. There were more people running than usual on my normal route but I didn't think much of it until I rounded the first point and saw a big "finish" banner with people standing on either side cheering! It was the Sri Chimnoy, and I went through the finish barrier (it was across the whole path) with people clapping but I'd only run 300m at that point. Bit awkward.

And that hanging thing I thought was a bell actually is a bell. It didn't have a clapper, but today they had a solid pipe of wood supported by a sling at both ends hanging from the roof of the pavilion, and they swung it forward onto the bell a bit like a battering ram. It made a lovely rounded deep bell noise.



Last night we went round to friends for dinner, which was lovely, and met their two new dogs. One is a lovely Tibetan spaniel with a fluffy tail, and one is a little fat black pug dog. Number two son thought she was lovely, and it seemed to be entirely mutual. Funny little creatures (both of them).

Xavier Mertz

Remember the pastel solids I was making? It turned into this quilt, called "Xavier Mertz".



I got a bit arty with the photography and took one of it on a chair.



And one hanging off a tree. I'm not sure if that is entirely successful.



The quilting is baptist fans in the middle, and a squiggly thing with pea pods around the outside. I think I like the denser quilting better ... the idea was to give it some definition because it's all very similar across the quilt, but it may not have worked.



I called it Xavier Mertz after the explorer, because it was one of those coincidence things where you never hear of a person then hear about them half a dozen times in a week. It started off when I was listening to a Andy Irvine album (I saw him at the folk festival) and he has a song about Douglas Mawson, then I went to Hobart and went past the replica Mawson's Hut a few times and there were things about the expedition in the information centre, and then it came up on a quiz in the newspaper and I was the only one that knew it! So the quilt is Xavier Mertz ... and it looks a little bit snowy and icy. Maybe.

Finished my lemoyne stars

And here is part two of the white-with-scraps ... the lemoyne stars. Points chopped off, no thought given to the colours and bordered with a random print.

I thought there were too many seams to do complex quilting, so went with a design that avoided the seams altogether. Circles in each of the squares joined together by a straight line. I called it "Please disregard my previous email" because my binding was being interrupted by having to respond to work things, and perhaps I wasn't always sending the right email to the right person. Oooops.

Winter has hit with a vengeance, which is a sudden sharp change, and one I possibly wasn't prepared for. I had to work late a couple of nights this week after not being outside all day, so left the building at 8.30 Thursday evening feeling  very grumpy and sorry for myself .... to be hit by two degrees and pelting sleety rain. I stomped to the car feeling very hard done by indeed.

Sixteen patch scrap

I have quilted and bound the sixteen patch scrap quilt and called it "Propping up the bar". Wishful thinking I suppose. The quilting is very boring straight lines, and you can see that the colour wash is more optimistic than real. I didn't really have the right mix of colours to gradate it properly.



But it was a very good way to use up one of the strip scrap bags and it makes quite a pretty quilt for something that hasn't had any thought put into it at all! It is nice to get something finished finally. I haven't had much time for quilting, but I potter away for twenty minutes or so at a time, and I get there in the end.



After deleting Candy Crush I have now gone and installed Farmville 2 which is proving to be just as much of a time suck!!! I have no self control. It is not very good though, and I should get bored of it quite quickly. Honestly, what is wrong with me that I spend the tiny amount of spare time I get doing something so completely pointless.  Yet another character flaw. 

The shock of paid employment

Talk about slamming into it! Last week was crazy busy with work and this week is shaping up much the same way. Those beach afternoons of swimmings, DVDs and beer are another life and it is totally back to the treadmill. Except not actually to the treadmill because I have been too busy to get to the gym at lunchtimes. The dog and I walked round the lake on the weekend which was lovely, but not really exercise.



I finished the scrap sixteen patch quilt top. I tried to colour wash the top - graduate the colours across- but it didn't really work because it was made of random scraps! So I've put all the browns together, and that's about it.



I told number one son to look like he was thinking something intelligent about the quilt. He had his first day of college today! The ACT system has them at a separate school for the last two years, where they do their major school leaving qualification (and university entrance ranking) as continual assessment over the two years. I think they put the fear of god into the newbies, which has my full approval. He was excited but a bit nervous when he got home.