Remember this?

This quilt top had been hanging around for a long time. I had tried quilting it 3 times only to end up with puckering. We had a Chris Kenna workshop at our club last year and I was talking with her about the problem I was having. She suggested grid-basting it with soluble thread. So I did and it worked a treat. I was able to free-motion the whole thing with no puckering at all. It is weird, though how it looks so rippled when only parts of it are quilted. It is not until the quilting is finished that it lies flat. It is now called Left Over Tabasco Sauce
 

Here is a a close-up of the quilting:

Press and Seal

Hi
Long time, no blog, no real excuse except life has been really busy.

I had a lovely 'day in the country' sewing day with Janice yesterday. I took along "Tabasco Sauce", the top I made oh, was it a couple of years ago?, from the left-over blocks I made for the Cotton On Quilters Banner Janice and I made for our Club. I finally got around to basting it up and was trying to decide how to quilt it. Janice recommended using Press and Seal to cover the quilt. I could then draw all over the Press and Seal to get an idea of how I want to section the quilting:

This is a way cool idea to audition quilting designs. Janice says NOT to sew through the Press and Seal. She says to just cut it apart to reveal the section to be worked on. Here are some close-ups:

 

Janice also gave me a quick lesson on zentangle quilting and here is her quick plan for quilting "Tabasco Sauce":

My New Best Friend

Hello, My name is Helen and I am a Blogger. It has been 36 days since my last blog . . . Oh dear, I think I should rename myself as the Monthly Blogger!

During the summer holidays I have been having a nice and relaxed time. I have been spring cleaning and sewing and quilting and spring cleaning and moving furniture around and spring cleaning and sorting the stash and cleaning and tidying and cleaning and . . . you get the picture.

Anyway, I wanted to show you my new best friend (which I have had since May of last year but have only just got around to blog about) and it is my new Sew Ezi table. These little tables are just fantastic and I wish I had bought one years ago. I had seen them at the first Hamilton Quilt and Craft Fair but didn't think they looked all that sturdy and the price seemed expensive for a small table. Was I wrong? Way wrong!

You have to understand that I have an Elna 6005 which does not come with any kind of flat bed, just a little box that slips over the free- arm which holds attachments for the machine. For most purposes this is okay, except not for quilting. It is definitely not a flat surface. At Wellington Symposium last year I was in Gloria Loughman's class and she was using one. To see it being used as opposed to just looking at it convinced me to get one. Using the Symposium Special I got my Sew Ezi table with a free accessory tray.

Let me tell you it has been a life-defining moment sewing with this table. Now that I have my machine flush with the table the quilting is so much easier, and no, the table does not rock. It is very sturdy, very portable and worth every penny. It has even made piecing so much easier having more room at the sewing level. I love the clear perspex insert and I have put the accessories I use most often into a little box which sits underneath the insert. Because I can see it I am not loosing the quarter inch foot, the free motion foot, the walking foot or the screw driver (most important, that bit.) The little circular indent on the front right hand side holds a glass of wine perfectly (vbg) There is plenty of room underneath for my legs and feet and I can sit directly in front of the needle. You couldn't give me a Horn cabinet now if you tried (well, hang on a minute, I might have to think that one through.) But seriously, these tables are so great I bought my friend Frances one for Christmas. She had bought me my Featherweight machine and I thought a substantial gift in return seemed appropriate at some stage.

UPDATE: I forgot to say that the price compares very favourably with any Horn cabinet I have seen advertised, about a quarter of the price There are no doors to get in the way when hefting a quilt around and the table is light and easy to move if I need to pull it out to get to the stuff that is stored in underneath.

Here is my machine nestled in its new home. Look how much flat surface I have:
You know the best thing I like about this table? See the hole which is the carry handle on the left hand side? It is the perfect distance, an arm's length away, for dropping cut-off threads into*. So I put a plastic bucket underneath to catch the threads. Now I have a lot less mess to clean up.

In the next picture I'm quilting a quilt for my son to take flatting next month. I hope to have it finished by the end of the week. You can see the yellow bucket underneath. Way to go!



* these threads are called 'orts' according the Southern Cross Quilters Yahoo group postings, a word I have never heard of. So I looked it up in my trusty old Concise Oxford Dictionary. The word ort, usually used in the plural orts, means refuse or scraps or leavings and dates back to the 15th century. You learn something new every day.

Quilty Weekends

I have had two really great quilty weekends in a row. Last weekend was our club's mystery bus trip and this time I wasn't the organiser. So I got to sit back and enjoy (well, 'sit back' probably isn't quite the most accurate description since I was driving one of the mini buses and it was a manual gear change and the ladies started counting how many bunny hops I did!) The day was fantastic and the highlight was visiting Greit Lombard. She made us feel very welcome and gave us THE best afternoon tea. Thank you Greit, your generosity was awesome!

I didn't take my camera on the bus trip so I have no piccies - darn!

Today I visited the Taranaki P&Q annual show. I loved Sharon Duthie's quilt "Inner Peace Evolving to Chaotic Existence" which won first prize in the 'Log Cabin with a Twist (wall hanging section) challenge. It was beautifully, beautifully hand quilted. Here is a detail shot:
I thought is was a well-deserved winner. And, yes, I did remember my camera this time.

Back to the more mundane things. I have finally finished this scrappy strip pieced quilt which I started a couple of years ago. I am calling it God's Eye because it reminds me of the "woven on two sticks with any scraps of wool we could find" God's Eye's we used to make as children. I think they are American Indian in origin (but don't quote me. I've been known to be wrong before, vbg!)
Only a million more scraps to use up :-)

Still Back Blogging!

Here I am, blogging again - two posts in three days! Can I keep it up?
Hmmm . . .
Anyway, the club raffle quilt top is now finished (yeah!) and is ready to be sent away to the quilter. I am so glad I don't have to do that job :-)
I think this quilt will look great on someone's bed. I hope everyone we ask to buy a ticket does too.

It was our Mystery Bus Trip yesterday and we had a fantastic time. I'll post about it next time. Unfortunately yours truly forgot her camera so I am going to have to beg some photos from someone else, otherwise there will not be much eye candy.

Cheers!

Symposium classes

Now I have recovered from a full-on week at Symposium (well, not fully recovered - I still have some things to unpack from my bag - at least all the washing is now up to date) I thought I would show you the results of the two classes I did. The first is the 2 day Layer By Layer Landscape class with Gloria Loughman. Instead of doing one of the patterns she provided I decided to draw up my own design based on what I could see out of the window of the cricket pavilion at Wellington Girls College. With windows all along the front it was an excellent place to sew. I took the class because I thought I would be doing a more abstract landscape, like Gloria's class samples. I am no artist so it was with some surprise I found myself sketching out an 'original' design!
I didn't get as far as other students and there is still quite a bit of work to do to get it finished. There are 5 sections to this small quilt and I pinned them together so I could hang it up for the other students to see. The big blank space in front of the 3 town houses need some greenery and there is still a tree to put in and the Mt Victoria tower to add in the sky line piece. Gloria is an excellent teacher and I enjoyed the fact that there were a variety of techniques we could use to put in a 'layer'. The houses look like they are on a bit of a lean - windy Wellington :-) Actually the weather was great for the whole week, only one slightly yukky day.

The second class I did was also 2 days, with Dena Crain, called 'Darned Quilts'. The technique involved curve-piecing a graduated background, adding embellishments and then cutting shapes (circles were the easiest to start with) out and swapping them around and re-stitching them back in. Very interesting and a great way to try out all those fancy stitches on the machine that I normally never use.
I think I'll call this one 'Sunrise, Sunset'. It just needs basting up, quilting and binding. It will measure about 53 cm wide by 74 cm high (21" by 29"). I wonder if I can finish this one before the end of the holidays?

Night Metropolis

I tried to make this post last week but my internet connection and/or blogger was not playing nice. After waiting for ages I lost the post completely. Who knows why these things happen? I gave up and went to bed instead.
I've put the last stitches in the binding of "Night Metropolis" - apart from a label. I hope the picture is clickable so you get a better view. I quilted the 'windows' on Janice's Swiftquilter. I was pretty impressed with how straight I got the freehand stitching:
Bur I have to confess I was going to quilt the grey' window ledge' as well but it didn't go so well so I stopped and ripped out what I had done. Stitching lines on a 45 degree angle was much harder than going up and down. I did the 'in the ditch' quilting on my own machine after I did the windows. I found it too hard to keep the stitching next to the seam line on the Swiftquilter. After that I decided it didn't need any more quilting :-) Considering that I used scrap batting the quilt hangs reasonably straight.

I am impressing myself that this quilt has taken only a couple of months to finish. It is growing on me. I'm feeling an urge to make another one. I bet my scrap pile still won't look any smaller!

Scrap Useage

I have started to make inroads on the scrap collection. I've made this quilt top using crumb blocks which I cut to 4 1/2" and put in an attic window setting:
The quilt is quite large, 1.5 metres by 2 metres, and has 140 blocks (10 blocks by 14). I'm calling it "Night Metropolis". It is school holidays right now and I am going out to my good friend Janice's tomorrow. I will start quilting it on her Juki and Swiftquilter. I had better have a good think about how I want to quilt it in the next 12 hours.

I found the crumb blocks really relaxing to make and quite addictive. Sadly, the scrap collection doesn't look any smaller! I think I've got enough scraps to make about a million crumb blocks.

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.

How come I never knew??

How come I never knew you could make half square triangles from the same width strip of fabric that the matching whole squares get cut from? Last week (instead of blogging!) I was watching a video (is that the right word?) of Elisa Wilson of Back Porch Designs over on Quilters TV and she was showing this method of cutting them using a special ruler. The 45 degree tip has the "dog ear" marked on it and you put this above the strip of fabric and then cut on the diagonal. You get a half square triangle to sew with one dog ear already cut off. Then Janice came to club with this "Half and Quarter" ruler from Fons & Porter she had got in USA on her recent travels to do the same job. It also cuts quarter square triangles from the same width strip.

I have seen a picture of it in the Fons and Porter magazine, but they were only showing the half square triangle bit. They didn't show that the squares get cut from the same strip. I don't have this ruler and haven't seen them available in New Zealand. BUT I do have a triangle ruler for doing side setting triangles. I improvised with a bit of masking tape using Janice's ruler as a guide and had a go:

Two 3 1/2" strips of fabric right sides together:

My triangle ruler with the improvised bit of masking tape at the top:

Two half square triangle units cut and the matching 3 1/2" square. Notice how the left hand tip at the top of the first one, and the bottom right hand tip on the second one, is cut off:

Because I have 2 strips of fabric right sides together it is a snip to pick up these nits and sew without pinning. Here they are. Notice the dog ears in the top right hand corner but not in the bottom left:

The two half square triangle units and the two squares placed ready for sewing:

The finished unit. It is supposed to be 6 1/2" unfinished. Mine is a little on the small side so I guess I need to work on the tip and/or my 1/4" seam!

And four of them make this very nice block"


Now what I want to know is who thought this idea up and how come I haven't seen (noticed?) if before !! Do I need to get myself the Fons and Porter version or will my home grown version cut the mustard?

I feel a quilt coming on!

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.)