Avoidance Behaviour

I really should be writing my reports which are due in on Thursday, but somehow I couldn't resist joining my strip sets together. The result was too short for a bed quilt so I made two more sets, one for the top and one for the bottom. You can only see the top half of the top. It is about 2 metres long and only about 1.2m wide, so I am going to add really wide strips to the sides to make it wide enough for a single bed.* The sashing strips are a Christmas fabric I had 3 metres of (What was I thinking? Oh, that's right, long strips use up a heap of fabric, just as well I had 3 metres, eh?) Actually it is a nicer shade of green that in the photo.

*Confession time, I did have strips on the side the same width as the sashings but because it still wasn't wide enough I ripped them off last night while Frances and I watched a couple of episodes of Antiques Roadshow. I'll use them for the binding.

Oh, well, back to the reports . . .

And then I got carried away . . .

. . . making more strip sets. These ones are from pieces I got in some grab bags from Grandmother's Garden a few years ago. They are the selvage off cuts from 5" strips of fabric which they use to make 5" square fabric packs, so the length of each one was 5" (more or less, interestingly some weren't exactly 5") The widths of the strips varied depending on the width of the original fabric. I still find it amazing that quilt fabric is not a standard width and can vary by as much as 2"-3".
Mmmm.... there is enough here for a 'Chinese Coins' strip quilt, and it hasn't made one smidgeon of difference to the size of my scrap pile!

Stress-free Stitching

I have a lot of things I could be sewing but at the moment I'm trying to bring some order to my rather large collection of scraps which are dotted all over the place. So it has been tidying rather than creating, but the problem is when I pull out a container to sort through I find something that says "It just needs this and then it can be used for" to me. Shortish lengths of about 1 1/2" wide fabric scraps just needed to be made into this border (untrimmed as yet!) for a scrap quilt.

It is very relaxing not worrying about what goes with what, very stress-free stitching. I'll add it to my orphan block collection and someday it will find its way into a community quilt.

Eeek!

What is happening to bloglines? I don't check for a couple of days and I have 656 posts to read! When I look to see who of you has been so prolific I find that lots of posts are "repeated" (I don't know why bloglines does this). Whew, I can relax, you are all human after all and not super duper multi bloggers leaving me in the dust, like I thought!

I have been working away on one of the borders for our club raffle quilt. A friend came to visit the other night and while she sat on my sewing chair and chatted I spay starched the last of the leaves for appliqueing. It is really pleasant having someone to chat do while doing a job like this.
Yesterday I went out to Janice's to quilt a community quilt top that I had been given to finish. Took me 5 hours on her Swiftquilter from start to finish. Not bad I thought. Immediately after dinner I fell into bed and stayed there until morning. I was tired!! (but pleased with my efforts.)

PS: My 100th post is coming up soon. In the spirit of blogging celebration when I get around to making it and you leave a comment on it I will put you in the draw for a squishy packet. What will be in it I have yet to decide, but I have plenty of fabric to choose from! I will post a piccy of what is up for grabs when my batteries are recharged (yes, that is both kinds of batteries, the camera ones and my energy ones.)

Quilting In The Country (again!)

On Saturday I went out to Janice's to learn how to load the 3 layers of a quilt on her Swiftquilter frame. I had a ball and only made a bird's nest once from forgetting to put the presser foot down. You can see a picture of me fixing it here. (I won't tell you how many needles I broke - suffice to say I owe Janice a new packet!) Janice wasn't feeling the greatest and pottered about working on her raffle quilt blocks.

I used a quilt top I had pieced from a whole lot of 2 1/2" squares I had cut out, years ago, of furnishing fabric samples and off cuts. These squares were intended to make a colour wash jacket and I had most of them pinned out on a huge piece of newsprint. It was one of the many things I never got finished. I had pulled them off the paper and had sewn them together in random (not colourwash) pairs. There they sat. With our club doing the Community Quilts project I pulled them out a couple of months ago and sewed them into 16 patch units. I finally got them together in an attic window setting. Not the greatest quilt in the world (in fact I think it is pretty ugly) but perfect for practicing some meander quilting:

Janice tells me I had the backing rolled the wrong way around, but it didn't seem to cause too many problems. I managed the edge quilting better than last time. I didn't quite get the whole lot finished in one day so out I went again on Sunday to finish it off.

The last run:
The Juki (back view):

Pulling the quilt off the rails (what a great feeling):

The back:

And the coffee was great!

A friend is someone who lets you quilt 2 quilts on her brand new equipment when she has done only one! At the end of the month Janice is going away for 5 weeks and has given me a key to her quilting studio! Coincidentally I have 2 weeks holiday starting the day after she and Terry leave. I can go out and practice machine quilting to my heart's content. Thank you, Janice.

Community Quilts Stacked!

It was Community quilt hand-in day at club last Saturday. We got 52 quilts for distribution, which is an awesome effort. To see the quilts displayed around at the meeting visit our Cotton On Quilters blog here. You can also see the Show & Tell photos.

This is what 52 community Quilts look like stacked up on a bed. Don't they look great!

Today is a public holiday, Queen's Birthday (although it is not the Queen's actual birthday - very good of her to give us a day off though). I am having a sewing day at my house with some good friends. Which is great 'cos it made me do some tidying (how long will that last?). Janice has just arrived so I'm off to have some fun.

Cutting, cutting . . . and a little hand sewing

I am in charge of the construction of our club's next raffle quilt for our biennial exhibition in April of next year. We are making a quilt designed by Kim Diehl from her book Simple Traditions (used with permission.) I decided I would make up little packets of fabric, already cut, for people to take away and make into the blocks and to prepare some applique shapes for the border. Since I work much better to deadlines I decided I would have these packets ready for our next club meeting which is this coming Saturday. This is a really great idea (I thought), especially if a quilt is using a limited number of fabrics. But this one is a scrappy style of 100 plus blocks, each block has 25 pieces cut from 2 fabrics plus the background, and we are making no more than 2 blocks with the same fabric. Slows things down somewhat! I have done 20 of them, I will get there, I will get there, I will get there . . .

While I watched Close Up after dinner I did hand sew one side of binding down on the community quilt I quilted using Janice's Juki and Swiftquilter frame. 3 sides down and one to go. Then I was a good girl and started the cutting. So I can feel virtuous, but I'm sorry, no photo today.

Standing up to Quilt

Another perfect day in the country was had by me today. I went out to Janice's house to do some quilting on a community quilt and I was allowed to use her new Juki on the Swiftquilter frame! Boy oh boy was that fun! Janice sneakily took photos of me. She probably will put them on her blog sometime soon, so look here to see if they are up.

I had already pin-basted the quilt and I thought I was just going to free motion using her Juki on the sewing table. In my ignorance I hadn't realised that you could put an already basted quilt on the frame. So after a few false starts (including forgetting to put the presser foot down - 3! times) I was away (and I won't mention the fact that I quilted the top edge of the quilt to the leader fabric.) I wasn't too good at doing the sides so after a couple of winds of the quilt I gave up on that and just quilted the top and bottom border and the centre. I'll finish the side borders on my Singer. Actually now that I think about it we put the quilt on sideways so it is the top and bottom borders that didn't get done.

It took a while to get used to the somewhat limited quilting space. I kept reaching the limit of forwards/backwards movement and ended up with a definite line going across, but hey, not bad for a first attempt (moving the machine a little helped increase the available space and I got better at not doing it as I went along.)

I could really get used to this!


This quilt was pieced by Rosie from the pattern I taught at our half-nighter last year. It is the second one she had made and she decided she didn't want to quilt it so she donated it to our club's community quilts project.

I haven't quite finished the dragonfly wall hanging but all I have to do now is put the eyes on and sew the body to to the quilt. I might get more than one post done this week!

One is done!

I thought I would have both of my community quilts done by last Saturday but life (and work) got in the way. One is now done. This top was pieced by another member of Cotton On Quilters for her son, but she never finished it, decided she didn't want to finish it and donated it for a community quilt. I added the blue border, basted it and quilted it. I had hand stitched down all but about a metre of the binding and there it sat! For over 2 weeks! Kirsty over on two time leaves made a post this week titled "Drowning In Failure". That title pretty much summed it up for me, nothing done for ages!! (the story of my life?)

I had my Friday night group last night and I decided that this was the time to get it finished.

I also got the binding on one side of the second one done. I wonder how long it will sit? Better get it done by club next weekend. Which is Easter. Which is the start of the holidays. Yeah! Which is just as well because I have just realised I have booked myself up for just about every Saturday for the next couple of month! All for something quilty of course. The house work will just have to sit and sit and wait.

Today: Off to a sewing day with my friend Janice. She makes wonderful, innovative quilts, has won awards for them, and she now has her own blog, Quilts, Grandkids and Delphiniums. I invite you to go visit.

Next Saturday is Club day. We are having the Head of Art from the school I teach at to come and give us a basic colour theory lesson.

Saturday after that is a get together for members of my online yahoo group Kiwiquilters.

Saturday after that is a class with well known and international award-winning NZ quilter Anna Williams at the Cloth Shop printing photographic images of flowers onto fabric to make a wall hanging. This will be completely new to me!

Then I have one Saturday off.

First Saturday in May I am going to a big regional show and tell day organised by Rose City Quilters called "Tote & Gloat".

The Saturday after that our club is running a workshop by another well known NZ tutor Jacqui Karl (no link for Jacqui. I don't think she has an internet site).

So I am going to be a very busy bee and more stuff will sit unfinished! Oh well, never mind.