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.