Quilts!

The Quilts 1700-1945 exhibit at QAG is so amazing.  There is no photography allowed in the show, but there is a great book with pictures of all the quilts, plus lots of extra information.

This is my favourite – the George III coverlet.  The piecing in the circles is so intricate, and the applique panels are also amazing.  It’s going on my to do list.

I also did a toy drop while we were at the gallery.   In keeping with the quilt theme for the day, I made a little quilt to go with this dolly.  Nothing fancy, just a fat quarter that I had on hand and quilted with loopies.  This was left in the sculpture courtyard before things were very busy, and I was lucky enough to see that it was collected by two little girls with their grandmother. 

 

Love Entwined progress:

I have redone the centre compass, because some of the points weren’t pointy enough and I wanted to adjust the colours slightly.  It meant I also had to redo the 32 surrounding dots but I am much happier with this version.  I’ve started preparing the next stage – many tiny diamonds to be appliqued next

New beginnings

Onto a new project.  And not just any project.  It’s the Love Entwined BOM by Esther Aliu.  I’m looking forward to this one – Esther describes it as an “intense applique” project, and it is definitely that.  I’ve been searching for fabric, and thought I was in luck when I found 6 metres of handkerchief linen in my stash (the receipt  on the bag was from the 90’s!).  It’s beautiful fabric, but I decided it was too sheer for a quilt top.  So I went out and bought some cream quilters muslin to use instead.

Colour wise for the applique, I’m going with scrappy in clear tones (they look murky in that picture, but they are much brighter in person).   I don’t plan on buying anything specific for the applique, and hopefully I can use fabric I already own for most of it.

 

Part 1 is the centre compass and ring of dots.  I chose foundation piecing for the compass, and appliqued the outer ring over the top.  And those dots are teeny, like 6mm across.  I’ve made my dots over a sequin, which is just crazy but it really works.  I’m not going to remove the sequins because it makes a bit of a mess on the back, and the shape of the sequin makes the dots sit up nicely. 

1 month down (almost), only 17 more to go.

RNA entries done

 

Entries for the RNA quilt show are finished, labeled and photographed at last.  I don’t have a wall big enough inside the house to do  the photos inside, so washing line it is.  It’s really difficult to hang a queen sized quilt and not let it touch the ground at some point, especially when you have a feeble arm from quilting.  This quilt is the main culprit for the “tennis” elbow, but I still think it was worthwhile.  I’ve called this one Cirque du Cercles.  It’s French.

I haven’t come up with a name for this dresden plate quilt yet.  I have a lot of left over petals from the small plates, so there will likely be another version of this at some stage.  This one was too big to hang without it touching the ground, even with the washing line as high as it goes.

I heard a bit of a commotion out in the back yard late yesterday and saw this:

About a dozen cockatoos feasting on every passion fruit they could get their little beaks on.  The passion fruit vine is in the corner of the yard and has grown along the fences as well as shooting up into the neighbor's shrub.  I had noticed some passion fruit ready to be picked that were up high in the shrub, and asked my son to grab them next time he was in the yard.  Too slow.  They picked every single one, as well as some green ones off the fence and also grabbed them off the ground.   I don’t begrudge wild birds a feed every now and then but there’s a limit to my generousity.

Blurry action shot:

That’s a ripe passion fruit in it’s beak – they were picking them and flying up to the top of the gum trees to enjoy their bounty.

Warwick retreat

A lovely weekend spent at Glenrose Patchwork in Warwick – lots of sewing finished and lots of ideas for finishing others. 

We didn’t spend much time in the garden, but I ventured out into the cold to get a few pictures:

Lots of roses, and an obliging bee:

I managed to complete the top for my dresden plates, and after overcoming some technical issues managed to pin it all together ready for quilting.  I’ll get started on the quilting this week. 

These triangles were a bit of problem for me – I had wanted to make hexagons out of the triangles, but due to my lack of mathematical knowledge (not realising that the height of an equilateral triangle is not the same as the length of the side) I only managed to get 5 matching triangles from a width of fabric.  So they were all put away in disgust while I tried to work out an alternative finish. 

I don’t have one of these design walls at home, but it made working out the layout so easy for this.  I think I’ll have to rig something up so I can do this at home too. 

I didn’t manage to sew this together, so I’m going to work from photos to reconstruct it

Cirque du Cercles

Almost finished, just the label and hanging sleeve to be completed and this quilt will be ready to enter the RNA show this year. 

The circles were all attached using free motion quilting, and to continue the circle theme I used a pebbly quilting pattern to add texture to the plain background fabric.  It has also shrunk the overall quilt size by about 3-4 inches over the width of the quilt, but I wanted the appliqued circles to look puffy so it has worked really well.  I also gave myself a good case of tennis elbow with this quilt – first with the days of cutting out a bajillion circles, and then with the tight pebble background quilting.

Next in line is this:

A few years ago I cut out all these dresden plate wedges, made a sample block and didn’t like the result – some of the fabrics I chose had a white background and they didn’t look good on the pale background I had picked out.  So I packed it all away and forgot about them until recently.  I unpicked and restitched, and I’m happier with this version.  I have 9 of these blocks finished, and another 30 small blocks for the border done.  I’m hoping to have this finished for the RNA show as well – I think I have about 6 weeks before entries are due so it should be do-able. 

Sunflowers

My garden obsession has moved on from raspberries to sunflowers.   This is a miniature sunflower.  I have planted some giant ones, but they are no where near flowering yet.

I was looking forward to watching this one mature and then giving the seeds to the chickens, but when I went down one day last week I found the stem snapped and the flower hanging down to the ground.  The culprit is a cockatoo that was spotted sitting on the washing line around the same time.  I don’t begrudge them food, but I wish they could have waited a bit longer.

I picked the flower and have it in a vase, I think the seeds are still developing, but I’m not sure.  It now looks like this:

The petals have fallen off, and someone keeps poking the seeds but I think they are still developing.  They are super sticky when you touch them.

And a new quilt – double wedding ring.  A traditional quilt in non traditional colours.  I love red and aqua together.  I think I have enough fabric to make it 7 rings by 7 rings, which is about queen sized according to the maths in my head.  It looks very wrinkly and not flat in this picture, but it is going together surprisingly fast.  (famous last words – I’ve done 4 rings out of the 49 needed to make the top.  My enthusiasm may end at any time.)

Acquisitions

Who knew you could grow raspberries in Queensland?  I’ve never seen a plant ever, but this one was at the nursery so hopefully that means it will grow here.  I’m obsessed with taking pictures of the developing fruit at the moment. 

Chickens!  These have been a while in the planning and yesterday was Chicken Day.  They have been given the highly original names of Blackie, Brownie and Whitie.  Fifi took one run at the fence and quickly realised that she wasn’t getting a chicken dinner.  She just sits and watches them now.  The chickens flipped out when they saw a cat the first time – lots of squawking and carrying on, but they quickly settled down.  There are plans for a couple of Silkies and a duck as well.  It’s probably a good thing that there is a limit of 6 birds.

And the best of all:

A knitting machine!  It took me 5 trips to get everything out of the car and carry it upstairs.  There’s a stand for it which I am pleased about because I don’t have a table that I can use for this. The colour catalogue has a price of $870  and the year 1982 written on it.  I paid $50 – couldn’t get the money out of my purse fast enough!  I had a Singer knitting machine many years ago but didn’t really know how to use it and got sick of dragging it around everytime I moved house, so I gave it away.  I’ve been wanting to get another one for a while now, can’t wait to get it set up so I can play with it.  It looks like all the bits are there.  What to make first?

Remedial quilting

I hate unpicking.  You can call it all the cute names in the world like reverse stitching, but I still hate it.  I only ever unpick stuff if it is critical.  If it’s just a little bit wonky and I can live with it and it doesn’t cause other problems, then it stays.   I’d rather try and do it right the first time, which might take a bit longer but it saves time if you don’t have to unpick stuff.

And if there’s anything I hate more than unpicking, it’s unpicking quilting.  I never unpick quilting.  I always do a test piece so tension and stuff is sorted out before I start on the real quilt. 

All of this works great on my quilts.  Not so much when I’m working on other peoples quilts.  Like this one:

 

This one was made by a friend and I am quilting it for her.  She had it pinned and ready to go. 

I knew I was in trouble when I looked at it -  the middle of the quilt is all on the bias, and there are 2 borders added – the narrow navy and the wider red floral.  The borders were wavy wavy wavy.  I undid and redid the pins and hoped I could quilt out a few little puckers.  No such luck – it all bunched up and there was no way I could quilt it flat.  Bugger.

So it ended like this:

More unpinning.  And the quickest way to unpick long straight seams?  Rotary cutter.  Not for the faint hearted, but easy enough if you are careful – you just press the blade against the stitches while you pull the fabric away. 

But wait, there’s more:

Yes, I had to pull the borders off too.  I starched the quilt middle, to help stabilise the bias and stop it stretching too much.  Starched all the border pieces and pressed the crap out of them so they wouldn’t stretch either.  I like that blade for unpicking – it just slices through the stiches.  All the fuzz on the navy is from the bamboo batting – it’s like velcro, sticks to everything.  It doesn’t beard through the fabric like some polyester battings.

I finally managed to get all the borders back on – on most of the pieces I have cut off an extra inch of fabric, so they were way to long to start with. 

So that’s where I’m up to.  Top is ready to be pinned.  Again.  I have to fix the back too – it’s not quite big enough so I have to add to it.  And add more batting.  I might just get people to give me their tops and pin them up myself – it might be quicker in the long run.

And the moral is:  It could all be avoided if it had been done properly the first time.  Sigh.

The process

 

From this:

to this:

then this:

more cutting and ironing and sewing:

and, finally, this:

It’s sort of a dresden plate.  I’m not in love with this yet, which makes it hard to keep sewing.  On the other hand, I have cut out enough pieces to make a whole quilt.   I might have to try some different layouts – it’s all a bit much as a circle I think.

Klutz

I’m not sure who was the klutz – the thrower of the gardenia, or me, the throwee of the gardenia.  It was a moment of sharing that resulted in a dead gardenia and a wasted cup of tea. 

It did smell lovely before it landed in my tea though.

Clucky

So it looks like we are getting some chickens.  And ducks.

We went to the local produce place to see what they had.  The answer was everything – I saw the biggest chicken ever, I swear it was the size of a labrador.  A fat labrador. 

We kind of worked out what we would get – some brown speck-eldy looking hens, maybe a Chinese silky one, and later on some ducklings.  I have vetoed a peacock, goose and turkey.  And a goat, although it would probably do a good job of keeping the grass down.  They had a tiny pony (miniature horse maybe?) that I would love to have except the council doesn’t allow it.  Not fair – I’ve seen bigger dogs and they’re allowed.

The progress so far.  The blue tarp is to stop the dogs over the back barking their heads off every time they see someone in the yard.  What they can’t see, they don’t bark at.  The little aviary shed has been cleaned out and just needs to be waterproofed a bit before it is habitable. 

The plan is for the area to be covered with wire, so we can keep them enclosed when we aren’t at home, but also let them roam the yard a bit if we’re supervising.  I wonder how high a chicken can jump? 

A little while ago I “planted” some sunflower seeds.  I was not very successful if this specimen is anything to go by – it’s about 20 centimeters tall instead of the 2 metres promised on the packet. 

Obligatory cat picture:

They won’t sit still and pose (unless they’re asleep) so my strategy is to point and click and hope I get a good one.  Sometimes I do, and sometimes I get this – a combination of moving cat and camera shake.

From the way back machine

Recently I’ve been toying with the idea of making a double wedding ring quilt. 

I bought a set of templates, and have a couple of friends keen to make their own versions as well.

Now this isn’t the first time I’ve attempted a DWR.  The first time would have been in about 1987.  Back then I didn’t have any idea about inches, having grown up with the metric system.  Quarter inch seam?  No idea what this should look like, but a quarter of anything would have to be tiny, surely.  Plus I didn’t want to waste any precious fabric in seams.  I looked at the top (still unfinished, naturally) and my 1/16th seams and marvel that I got it to go together at all.  Of course it does not lie flat, but that is the least of it’s problems.

See those holes?  I decided after I had managed to piece this together that I didn’t like one of the fabrics I had used.  The logical way to fix this of course was to unpick pieces out of the quilt top and then insert different (even uglier) fabric.  I was enthusiastic, if not skilful.  Coco is willing to use it as a bed, which is something I suppose.

My second attempt started in about 1998.  By this time I have a bit more idea of quilting and knew the importance of accurate seams.  This has come together better, I pieced the arcs on the machine (I drew the sewing line on each piece because this was before I had a quarter inch foot.  Or a good sewing machine).  I wasn’t brave enough to piece the arcs to the background by machine though – I did that by hand.  It worked pretty well, and this top is almost finished except for 2 curved seams. 

This was also before I had much practice at picking fabric.  I wanted pastel, but I don’t think a lot of these fabrics work now.  The do love this sock fabric though – I still find bits and pieces of these fabrics in my stash occasionally but I think the sock fabric is all gone. 

I’m still deciding on colours for the next DWR, maybe a dark or coloured background with brights this time.  I’ll be paper piecing the arcs and machine piecing the backgrounds.  I might finish this one so I can practice quilting ideas on it. 

Way to go quilt

I’ve made this quilt a couple of times – it’s from Hot Possum.  This version is cot sized – I left out a sky panel to make it a bit smaller.  I love how the VW looks careening off the road straight at you.    I try to find quirky bits and pieces from my stash for the applique.  I didn’t have to buy anything for this quilt except backing.  I knew that duck fabric would be perfect for something one day.  

Saturn and the rockets always looks good too – the background has silver glitter and the quilting is in silver metallic thread. 

More Mulberries

Confession:  I have not eaten a mulberry from my tree yet.  Haven’t tasted the jam I’ve been making, haven’t eaten a fresh berry from the tree. 

But I did try this:

Mulberry pie, made by my friend Margaret.  It was yummy and not as sweet as I expected.  Everything is better when it’s wrapped in pastry.

Mulberries

 

The mulberries continue to ripen, and the possum doesn’t seem to be eating very many.  There are flying foxes out there every night though.  There is still plenty of fruit on the tree, and I am picking about half a kilo a day.  I don’t actually like mulberries, so I am planning to make jam to give away. 

I’ve never really made jam before, but it doesn’t seem that hard.  I had a practice last week with strawberries, and worked out the basics.  One batch was like strawberry syrup, so I used Jamsetta for the next lot and it set really well.  All the fruit floats to the top of the jar though, and I’m not sure what causes that or how to prevent it.  I’ve decided to like my jam that way- you can have chunky or not chunky from the same jar.

 

1 kilo of mulberries, 1 kilo of sugar, juice from 2 lemons looks like this at the start:

It’s pretty interesting to watch as all the juice comes out of the fruit and it starts boiling up.  The instructions say use a big, deep saucepan and you really do need it.  The fruit and sugar boils up a long way.  I was surprised by the colour that the mulberries turned – a rich deep red.  I was expecting more of a purple-y colour.  The spoon is now red, it didn’t wash out.

I need to get more jars.  I’m not running out of mulberries any time soon. 

Mysteries

I have discovered the reason that I “ran out” of fabric for this quilt when I was so sure I had bought enough to finish the whole project.  I found 10 completed blocks that were not with all the other completed blocks.  The good new is now I only have to finish 3 full size blocks and half size fill ins and it will be finished.  (Plus put all the rows together and add a border, but let’s not quibble over details.)  It would have been nice to discover them before I went out and bought more white muslin and made another 250 pink ellipses though.  I think I’ll do a simpler machine version with the leftovers so it’s not a total loss.

All of a sudden it’s spring in my back yard – despite the lack of rain for most of July, the mulberry and nectarine trees and gone crazy and started fruiting already. 

Hopefully the possums won’t eat all of them.  (I wouldn’t mind them having some, but when they take a bite out each one and then leave it I get annoyed.  And they already ate my capsicums.)

I hope I can find someone who eats mulberries, because there are an awful lot of them on the tree this year and I don’t like them.  If only the possums would co-operate and just eat mulberries.

Vintage

I can’t resist a vintage Singer - they are so solid and reliable, as well as pretty.  This one needs a bit of cleaning, and the gold is a little worn but that just means it’s had a bit of use.  It’s a knee lever machine and seems to run pretty well.  I have four old Singers now, in varying states of repair.  According to the serial number, this one was made in Clyde Bank in Scotland in 1938. 

I’ve been sewing for a long time, and buying fabric for a long time.  Luckily I have the room to store it, but I think I really need to use things up instead of just keeping them.  So I went off to my sewing room and pulled down 4 plastic crates of scraps to see what was really in there.  The answer is this:

Leftovers and abandoned projects from the last 20 (!!) years.  I used to keep every scrap of fabric, for the simple reason that it was so expensive to buy.  It still is, but I’m a bit more realistic now about what I will actually end up using and I tend to throw  little scraps out these days.

I started sorting – I have heaps of blue and not much yellow/orange fabric.  Plus country colours, blacks and multi colour stuff.  It looks much better in separate zip lock bags.  I also threw out 2 shopping bags of unusable stuff (although I did go through them a second time and pulled a few more pieces out, but after that I really did throw them out).

I went through a William Morris phase, before deciding it was all a bit too hard and putting it away for 11 years.  This is actually not as ugly as I remembered it, but I’m not planning to finish it any time soon.

After sorting out all those scraps, my plan was to use them to do some string piecing.  I ended up with this so far:

Not sure if I like this either, I think it’s too much colour and I’m not confident that it will improve.  I was keen on the red centres but now I’m not so sure.  Maybe I need to only use one or two colours in the string bit (blue/green maybe?) or have the circles in different single colours.  Dunno.