Charity quilts

I'm still making lots of quilts, but forgetting to take photos because they are for charity. What usually happens is I make them at home, then take them into quilters to sit and do the binding, then leave them there! Which makes perfect sense rather than pack them back into my bike bag, but it does mean I'm not taking photos.

But I did remember to do the last couple. We are making "large single" sizes - about sixty by seventy inches - mostly from donated fabric. Although I did use a bit of my own in this, it is not like I'm going to use it for a desperately needed quilt at home. I still have way too many quilts. 

I like this yellow one - the points of the triangles are all from the very very random scraps pulled from a stuffed plastic bag of fabric scraps. This quilt did not make a tiny dent in the stuffed bag ... and apparently we have four of the bags. I will be making scrappy quilts forever.

Pam, those rocks are apparently magma. The clay soil that starts just to our west is mostly ground down volcanic eruption, but there is something called Braidwood Granodiorite which formed from magma, and makes up the big hills and also the rocks that are everywhere around here, including in our garden :)

It has a lot of gold, which is why the mines exist and there was a gold rush; and it is also unusally magnetic, which is why the lady next to me at a meeting once said that Braidwood attracted unusual people and had tremendous amounts of lightning. This lady also made her own chunky jewellery, so I had treated that information with some scepticism, but it appears to be scientifically correct.

Basketweave strings

Sorry Pam, but here's another quilt - if it's any consolation it is a real utility one. When we were sorting out all the donated material and trying to get it in shape to be sold there were all sorts of odds and ends going into 'the tub'. So a couple of us decided to make string quilts from the tub and this is mine! The scraps are pieced over squares of calico (there were two whole tubs of that) without any thought or design.

Not pretty in any way! But a quilt, that can be used for something, and all from real scraps.

We had a go at the stash sale up in Gunning over the weekend. There's a big craft group there that puts this on every year but this is the first time our little quilt group had a table. We did OK - didn't get rid of masses of stuff but certainly got rid of some, and made a few hundred dollars to keep the lights on for another month or two ... and the material is all prepped now so we can try again in our own town later on.

I had quite a fun day chatting with crafty people. Gunning is about an hour and half's drive away so it was an early start (still dark! lucky I didn't hit a roo) but quite an interesting drive on roads I haven't been down for a while (if at all). I was resolved not to buy anything but I failed. All yarn! I have finished my first sweater and will take photos of it when it's blocked, so now I'm looking for the next project. Just what I need, another hobby.

There's been a lot of driving this week - Thursday we went in to Canberra to pick up our new (not new, new to us) ute! Very exciting. We bought it off a friend's 17 year old daughter, who chose an enormous diesel twin cab as her first car ... and after about six months has realised it is not the most practical vehicle for suburban life so we happily took it off her hands. It is a tank but our cars were not cutting the rural life. Friday I went back into Canberra for drinks for a colleague who is stopping work and lunch with another friend who has also just gone on long leave pending retirement. I enjoyed both but not as much as these pigeons enjoyed outside the Vietnamese cafe where we had lunch.

"Who sent you?"

This is a scrap quilt called "Who sent you?" from some song lyric, as usual. It is a floribunda block which I have done a few times before, but this time in old-school browns and creams with a bit of red.

I love the block and I love the colour scheme, so this was fun to make. The only problem is my machine went on the fritz half way through the free motion quilting - nothing serious, it just needs a service and kept skipping stitches - so it is partly quilted in flowers and partly just straight lines. 

It doesn't seem to matter too much. Cat included for scale.

Happy New Year

Look at this, the first post for 2026!!! I don't make resolutions, but after the massive changes of 2025 I am looking forward to a gentle, settling year of quietly seeing what is what. 

We are continuing to learn about summer in the country. The flies were driving us MENTAL so I bought some fly screens to wear under your hat. Or over your hat if you cut a big hole at the top (of the screen, not the hat). Either way, it is an absolute lifesaver, we were going crazy with flies on our face the second you started to sweat. They love a bit of moisture.

Here is a very scrappy quilt - called "Voodoo doll". I had made a few dozen of the scrap blocks so decided to use them up in this bold extravaganza of dots and purpleness.

I got in a car to go to the hardware store today and it was the first time I had been in a vehicle for ONE WEEK. Can you imagine? I had been down to the quilting premises a few times (we are having a tidying / sorting / decluttering effort) on my bike, but nothing else. The rest of the time has been at home on a project to clean, mend and re-paint the inside of the garden shed ... shocking no-one it has taken much longer than we thought. I will post photos when it's done but - fair warning - it is the dodgiest set of handy tasks ever done by anyone ever. 

Frequent flyer

No, not me, I am very happy to be an infrequent flyer these days. But that was the name I gave to this quilt because it is made up of lots and lots of flying geese blocks. Hilarious play on words, I know.

It was meant to be a scrappy quilt but could actually have benefited from using fewer fabrics, because then there would have been more surprising shapes. You do it in rows of flying geese that are offset, so then if you use the same fabrics in adjoining blocks you get odd shapes ... but I used almost too many scraps for that to work.

Nonetheless, I do really like it, the colours are lovely and it's gone straight on my bed because it looks good with the gaudy ikea curtains that I love. 

Very basic meander quilting. In other news, I had another lovely day at the beach, we went in to Canberra for drinks on Saturday (very fun) then back on Sunday to pick up number two from the airport for a few days! It is very lovely to have a child at home and we are trying to make sure the countryside isn't too boring. Also, a few months of bar work is resulting in some excellent christmas cocktails - this is a caipirissima. Icy and rum and lime and delicious! Yay for kids with random part time jobs. 

Distance to the ground

I called this quilt " Distance to the ground" because it made me think of sky? Air possibly? I made it because another woman at quilters was doing a blue and white quilt, and it is such a lovely classic colour scheme, that I thought I needed one. Another one, I have made blue and white quilts before.

But not this pattern which is a traditional block that's called about fifteen different things. All of my points are chopped off and I had to trim the blocks about half an inch so they would be even remotely square, so it does not look at all the way it should look. Am I bothered? I am not. 

It is quilted in an allover meander. This possibly the laziest quilting pattern you can do other than straight lines (which I am also very fond of) but it looks fine and you wouldn't notice much on this busy piecing. The outer border was meant to have those four-patches floating in the same fabric but I got the maths wrong and didn't have quite enough ... so a recalculation and some unpicking meant two colours. As ever, it looks like that's what I planned all along! Hah!

Log cabin

I finished the log cabin that I started at the quilter's Saturday Sew Along - I do like a log cabin and this is nice and small and pretty. I was the only very scrappy one - most people had a more curated selection :) - but it turned out OK. It was going to be far too small for anything so I put on the border and brought it up to a reasonable size. And less long and skinny.

It's just quilted in straight lines because of all the seams. I wasn't going to get swirly and creative with that much going on.

We finally have a new sofa and it is surprisingly comforting. It feels like the living room has finally got its proper shape, and we are very much enjoying having somewhere to loll. Once again, despite swearing I wouldn't fill my house with shit from Ikea, we bought it from Ikea - exactly the same as the one at the last house except smaller. It was super comfy then, and it's super comfy now, and the colour is good, and the price was right, and it only took three hours to put together, most of which was putting the cushions in the covers ... like putting a duvet cover on but ten times as hard. Here is an action shot...

So I think that was the last house thing we had to do? We have lots and lots of more elaborate plans (if we ever sell the Canberra house and have two cents to rub together) but that was it for immediate things. No outdoor furniture yet but we have camping chairs... And finally we have my husband at a eight-hour lunch last weekend (Christmas in July [August], which is why the Santa headband) bonding with the house dachshund. It was a flighty little thing but followed him round like a sausage missile the whole time.

The selvedge quilt!

Sorry Pam, but here is another finished quilt. Yes, I do make them quickly, but it is amazing how much quicker you get with practice, and also what else am I up to? Nothing, that's what. And it's great. 

In my defence, I have been working on this one for about 15 years. It takes a LOT of selvedges to make a quilt, and I'd do a few blocks every now and then, when I felt the urge for mindless sewing. I found them in a drawer, realised there were 100 (actually 102) which is a nice 10 by 10 quilt, sewed them together and quilted it up.

Strictly speaking I didn't quilt it, I tied it with embroidery floss. And there's no batting because it's so heavy - strips sewn over strips onto a backing fabric - so I just backed it with a flannelette sheet. Although I stuffed that up a bit because I bought something I thought was a flannelette sheet but which was actually some weird synthetic with a slight stretch ... I liked the colour (pale pink) and it felt soft and fluffy but the fabric was a bit of a disaster. It was from Kmart though, so I probably could have predicted it.

But I ploughed ahead, made 100 little thread knots, put some binding on it and who would know? It looks like a proper one. It was lovely to put it together because of the trip down memory lane with all the fabrics. Some of them people had sent me which was even lovelier! A group effort. 

Scrappy stars

Here is a little quilt I made because the scrap strips were getting a bit out of control ... and I do love a scrappy quilt. I called it "pruning and mulching" because that is all I think about other than quilting. It was a fun make. 

I tried to do a floral theme but I didn't have quite enough florals so some are just floral-adjacent. I did capture the sunset on the washing line though, it was very pretty.

We have Brad's brother and 11-year old niece staying at the moment, which is lovely, to have visitors! Unfortunately we have had the worst weather with serious rain all up the east coast. They managed to get a bush walk in Monday but Tuesday was a Canberra day of museums and yesterday was wandering around Braidwood (ten minutes max) then driving to see the floods. It's clearing now thank goodness.

The most exciting thing was watching our wombat discover that its burrow was completely flooded and it had to find somewhere new to sleep. It rampaged around the front lawn for a bit (wombats are super cute when they run) before disappearing over into the cow paddock next door. I refused to go outside to take a photo so this is a wombat through the window. They are quite big ... it's called Chonky. 

Here's the creek beside our road into town. It runs behind the properties that sit behind ours, so our house isn't likely to be flooded but our only way out is the bridge just before town and it was sitting pretty close to the water for an hour or two. 

Sedimentary

This quilt is called "sedimentary" - it was only two weeks ago that I did the label but I've already forgotten why it's called that. Perhaps rock? Perhaps the layers of dirt/sand/mulch/rock that we're digging up in the garden? Perhaps I meant to call it "sedentary"? We will never know.

It's a log cabin done entirely because the 2.5" scrap strips were spilling out of their bag. I did 25 blocks, which limits the layout - a lot of log cabin layouts require an even number of blocks in each direction. So this is a deliberately asymmetrical design. It looks quite clear in the photo but in real life it's hard to see, and the colours are quite muddy. You can't go wrong with a log cabin though, it always look homely and very quilt-like.

Another quilt finish

Here is another little quilt finish. Tiktok made me sew it ... or at least the creator that I saw using the $4 IKEA fleece throw as batting. Batting is expensive, so I bought three $4 throws and thought that if it works it will be a good alternative! It's quite thin polar fleece, so could be OK or could be dreadful .. and it was really good. The main problem is it's only 120 x 160 cm, so you're limited to a small quilt, although I suppose there's no reason you couldn't join them? Hmmm, might think about that one some more.

It quilted up nicely and will probably wash as well as anything else I do. I might give it a wash and experiment, although I don't pre-wash any of my fabrics either, despite what the internet says, so it's likely to ruffle up. 

The fabric is largely from the scrap bin with some yardage to pull it together. It's very bright and cheerful and I like it. It's called "Rules for drinking" because I was listening to Annie Lou's song "Grandma's rules for drinking" while I did the binding, and I couldn't fit the word "grandma" on as well. Great song, ordinary quilt name.

Another quilt finish

I do not know when I pieced this top - or why - but there it was in the sewing room ... so I added a border quilted it up and bound it at Tuesday morning quilt meeting, and now it's a quilt. 

I tried to do artistic shots on the porch, with limited success. But it shows you the idea - brightly coloured squares. I'm not sure the border goes with the theme, but honestly I can't remember exactly what the theme was, and it looks fine to me now.

More arty shots. This was me spreading it over the rosemary bushes ... which are destined to be pulled out, they have gotten far too woody.

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!

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.