Bicycle Clips

Being a Gadget Girl I have, among a zillion other quilting gadgets, a set of bicycle-type clips for securing a rolled quilt when quilting on a domestic machine. I have to say I have not found them that useful and I usually scrunch the quilt up while I am quilting. Last week I was able to use Janice's Swiftquilter and Juki to quilt my "Night Metropolis" quilt. The Swiftquilter does not have a fourth roller for the batting and at the beginning of the quilting process the excess hangs on the ground. I had a bright idea! Roll it up over a spare curtain rood and secure it with the bicycle clips. It worked pretty good:
Yes, I confess, that batting is leftover pieces sewn together. Yes, I joined the pieces with the sewing machine. Yes, I realise the quilt may not be all that flat (in fact I will be very surprised if if is flat). Well, it is a scrap quilt!

I am heading out to Janice's again tomorrow to finish off the quilting on "Night Metropolis". I think I've got carried away with the amount of quilting on it. I've done all the 'windows' and I need to go back and quilt the 'attic' frame part. I'd better head off to bed early then. What? It's 11.41 pm already? Oh well, at least I still have one week of holidays to go :-)

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.)

More Country Quilting

Frances and I went out to Janice's yesterday so Frances could have a go on the quilting frame. We were going to take Lorraine with us but we couldn't get her to answer the door. We thought she must be having a really good sleep but it turned out she had ended up in hospital in the wee hours of the morning. What a bummer. She is home now but is awaiting surgery. I hope she doesn't have to wait too long.

Frances decided to quilt the top she made last year at our club's mystery half-nighter. She thinks it is too bright but I think it is just great. I think she is going to give it to her nephew.

Frances pinning on her quilt:

Still pinning the quilt!
Getting underway:
What happened here? Are there any technical-minded quilters out there who can explain how this happens?
The back of the quilting:
Finally finished:
Pretty good for a first effort I thought. I just lazed around while Frances did all the hard work. I was going to do some hand applique on the club raffle quilt but France's daughter Amy came out with baby Georgia Rose to see what we were getting up to. So I had a lovely time being a pretend grand mother giving her lots of cuddles and kisses and playing on the bed that Janice has in her studio (great idea having a bed in your studio!) In fact I might have fallen asleep if I hadn't had Georgia Rose to keep me entertained. We were joined by Kaz, the German Shepherd, who did a good job of barking when we arrived.

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.

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!

This looks better

I found some spotty blue fabric (in my stash!) to use as the border. Thanks for the suggestions folks. This looks much better:
Now I just need to sew another narrow red border and a wider yellow border and it will be ready to baste. So why aren't I doing this now instead of blogging??

I had a big quilty day today. I think I told you my friend Janice has bought a quilting frame ( A NZ produced one called a Swiftquilter) and a Juki machine to go with it. The frame arrived yesterday but the machine went by a different route and is not due until tomorrow. Today we went to visit Jill, a Kiwiquilter in Waikanae (about 2 hours drive from here), who has one of these frames and she very generously gave us a thorough demonstration of how it works and what to do. Boy is there a lot to learn!

Kiwiquilters Get Together

I had a great day today getting to know some lovely ladies from my yahoo group Kiwiquilters. We were a small, but select, group and we met in Palmerston North for the day. Here we are (minus me who is behind the camera) during Show & Tell. Going left around the circle (starting at the gap): Jill, Marion, Marina, Karen, Liz, Betty, Elizabeth (who is standing). Now that was pretty good remembering, wasn't it?

This is Marina showing her lovely queen size top. The pattern comes from an earlier issue of Australian Patchwork and Quilting. She has made a fantastic job of this quilt. I loved it and I am not an autumn person:
Betty is showing her lovely lilac and lemon quilt. I didn't get a close-up of the blocks but it has great stitcheries sprinkled throughout. Betty had another quilt to show which featured as a pattern in issue 58 of New Zealand Quilter, I didn't get a picture of this one but it is also a very pretty quilt:
And a close-up of the quilting. This was done by (I think) Colleen Burr of Stratford. Fantastic design on the border:
I had a good talk with Jill about the Swiftquilter frame which is available in New Zealand. Jill has one and my friend Janice has decided to purchase one, along with a Juki machine. Boy, am I GREEN!