The Show is Over

Yes, our biennial exhibition has come and gone. It has taken me a week and a half to catch up on my sleep. We had a great time capped off with a dinner to celebrate our 20th birthday. Guest Speaker Barbara Bilyard kept us very well entertained during the evening. We were thrilled that 3 of our 4 founding members, Cathy Owen, Thelma Dawes and Trish Souness were able to attend. Our fourth, Pat Britten, has not been enjoying good health and was unable to make the journey south.

Highlight of the weekend for me was selling two of my quilts. The first piece is a top I purchased a few years ago from Grandmother's Garden. Some of you will recognise the pattern. I finally got around to basting and quilting it and, finally(!), binding it. Someone really liked it.

The second quilt I sold is one I designed for our club's mystery half nighter. Well, the background was the mystery half nighter design. After I had done this version I decided it was a bit ho hum and needed more so I appliqued the flowers and leaves. Then I mucked up the quilting and had to unpick it after I got about three quarters of it quilted and start again. Needless to say I didn't finish it in time for the class, but I did finish another version in different colours without the applique. This is not such a great photo of the quilt that sold but you get the picture?

I also won a Judge's Merit for Steamy Summer Sunrise (which I see by my photo title I originally named Steaming Summer.) Oh how I do forget things.

This piece sat around for ages needing a hanging sleeve and label. I needed a way to make sure the top bits didn't flop over. I ended up hand sewing sewing some really stiff vilene which had been fused onto a piece of the backing fabric, cut to shape, onto the back of the quilt then I added the hanging sleeve.

Pat myself on the back

Since I started teaching beginner classes last year at a local fabric shop I have been busy thinking up quilts to make as class samples and writing the patterns for them. This has challenged me to make more use of my computer, including EQ6 (in which I still don't know how to draw a 6o degree triangle!) Tonight I finally learned (now don't laugh) how to scan a picture into a file and then insert the picture into my pattern document (okay, you can stop laughing now!)

I thought I would draw my own pictures of how to do double fold binding. These are just the illustrations.





Okay, I have to work on not getting the edge of the paper showing, but not bad for my first attempt.

It takes a long time . .

. . . to sew a 3 metre seam! Especially compared to piecing 4 inch blocks. I have been making bags to put the poles for our quilt stands in. The poles are 3 metres long so the bags had to be even longer than that, and I sewed french seams for extra strength, so that is twice times 3 metres for each one. I would get to the halfway point where the handle is and think "I'm only half way!".The bags are are not elegant, being made out of left over curtain fabric and curtain samples, but they will do the job. Here they are lined up at Frances' house, 20 poles in each bag.
And these are some of our new quilt stands that Murray, the husband of one of our members, has made for us. They have a slotted piece to go on the foot of each one so they are easy to pick up and put down. Murray also made us 8 "thingies" to lift the poles in position (anyone got a good name for these?) Frances and I had a trial "hanging" this afternoon. They work great. Thanks Murray!

Colour Challenge

Janice has just reminded me that she hasn't seen my entry for the colour challenge in our upcoming exhibition, so here it is:
We had to use analogous colours on the colour wheel. It is the size of an A3 piece of paper. This is a miniature of a bed sized quilt from (I think) Quiltmaker magazine. Does a challenge have to be totally original? The challenge for me was in having the analogous fabrics to be able to do it. Does that count? I was going to make the plum colours weave under the purple ones, to add my own variation to it, and had made extra blocks to do that, but when I put it together I forgot I had them and now it is too late. Never mind.

Getting Ready

Phew, a second post this month. Things must be improving!! Just so you know I have been a busy beaver, this is a pile of quilts which are going into our club exhibition next month:
Sadly, they are not mine, I just helped get them ready (but it looks impressive doesn't it?) Our exhibition is only 5 weeks away, yikes! You can check out our guest speaker Barbara Bilyard . I am looking forward to seeing some of her quilts close up. She has a reputation of being a "hard case" so it should be an entertaining evening. I get the honour of opening the formal part of the evening, so if anyone has a good speech they want to exchange for fabric you know what to do :-)

What happened to February?

It even had an extra day in it and I still didn't get any posts done! This is really bad. It's not like I don't have anything to blog about. I have plenty. I just seem to run out of day too soon. Soon, no one will visit me 'cos I've got nothing to say!!!

This is what I have been working on and got the letters fused last night.

This is the background:

These are the words:
And this is the fused top:
It is our Club's 20th Birthday this year and the committee thought we could do with an up date of the old banner. We are having our biennial exhibition next month and a celebratory dinner on the Saturday night. Barbara Bilyard from Auckland is our guest speaker. It is going to be a good night.

I must confess that this is not my design, my good quilt buddy Janice did that. She enlarged the letters to the right size for me to trace. We started some of the blocks at a club meeting and I finished it at home. It has been fun to work on it. Janice has very kindly agreed to quilt it, thanks, Janice!

This one is for Janice!

Here is the new shed, in all its glory :-)
The washing line to the left and back of the shed is now gone and a new one has been put up to the left and front of the shed. an unexpected bonus in getting a new clothesline was that it has 6 rounds of lines instead of the 4 my old one had. Yipee! More washing! Ha!

Never mind the quilt, where's the shed?

Janice wants to see a picture of the shed. Well the problem with that is that it is not finished yet. We had a problem with the skylight panel. It was damaged and we got a replacement. All good and fine, but the replacement is too long. One could be excused for thinking that a kit set shed means just that! Open the box and put everything together, no cutting to size involved. Well, apparently not. The shed person I spoke to on the phone was surprised to find that our kit set shed came with a skylight panel cut to the correct length. We are supposed to cut it ourselves! That's what saws are for right? Yes, true, except we don't have a suitable fine tooth saw and we don't want to crack the panel when cutting it to the correct length. Hey, it costs $75 for a replacement panel! Then the house guest went up-river for 3 days of R&R, so no progress has been made for the last few days. I do have a shed, it just doesn't have a whole roof yet.

And on the subject of my house guest, some of you want a clone of him sent to you. Just as soon as I figure out how to do that I will be selling to the highest bidder :-)

On the quilting side this is what happens when I don't watch where my hands are. Just as well I only caught the edge:

Something Finished - finally!

Oh no, another whole month goes by and I have been a bad blog writer! Only excuse is I have been really, really busy (yeah, right!)

I got sidetracked by my new home stay offering to build a garden shed for me. He is a young new teacher from England who will be teaching in the same department as me at school. He was looking for somewhere to stay until he gets himself sorted with more permanent accommodation. The first day he offered to paint my house. The second day he offered to do any handy-man jobs I needed doing. Then he asked if there was anywhere to store a push bike. I don't have a garden shed and my garage is tiny. So we agreed in return for some free rent I would purchase a kit set shed and he would put it up. He built a proper floor for it and put in a step (It is on sloping ground - no where else for it to go). The washing line needed moving so the shed can fit, so he is putting up a new rotary clothes line for me. He clears the table after dinner and unpacks the dishwasher without asking and has one quarter of the washing a 15 year old Japanese boy produces. Okay, it is costing me money rather than contributing to my cash flow but HE CAN STAY HERE! (Do you think he can hear me shouting?)

We also had a stall at the Bushy Park Festival last Sunday and I was madly getting things ready for that. We had fantastic weather:

Here is the Bright Irish Chain finished. Not a great photo but I am pleased with the quilt:

Now, no prizes for guessing how long it will be before I next make a post. (but I will send a fabric postcard to some lucky commentor on this post)

How Not To Join Binding!

I've had a break today from piecing the blocks on the new club banner and I decided to finish quilting the bright Irish Chain I started earlier in the year. A great day sewing, made heaps of progress and only fell at the last hurdle when joining the beginning and the end of the binding together:

Oops, time for a break, time for a Kit-Kat!

Mum, You've Got Coordinates!

Is what he, of Honey Bunch fame, exclaimed last night as he walked by my design wall. "See, maths is useful," says I. He was referring to the little sticky labels I have put on each block for the new club banner. I have added the green quadrilaterals to the centre of half the blocks. I need to get these blocks joined together because my design wall is not long enough to get the other half of the blocks up at the same time. Hence the labels, so they get put in the right place when I am stitching.


Hey, I'm quilting!!

Blogger's Block

O my, nearly a whole month since I last posted, how slack is that! I shall blame the busy end of school year and the fact that I have been spring cleaning my house - well parts of it! I am having a bedroom re-wallpapered so all of the stuff in that bedroom is dotted around the rest of the house until after Christmas. I have reorganised all my quilting magazines and I'm not going to tell you how many I have, auffice to say I have a dawning realisation that I need to STOP BUYING so much stuff! (And in the words of the Tui Beer ad - Yeah Right!)

Not much on the actual real-life quilting side:

I haven't finished my Lazygal Winter Class wall hanging :-(

I have made a few more blocks for the new Cotton On Quilters banner :-)

(the colour is not right, deeper and browner in real life)

Apart from that not much else is going on at the moment. maybe after Christmas I will feel more inspired.

Our Quilt is going to America!

Whoa, life has got a bit crazy lately and is unlikely to recover for a couple of weeks.

The quilt Janice and I made for the Human Rights Challenge, (which won one of 2 awards and which you can read about on this blog) is currently being exhibited in Parliament until the end of next week. I attended the opening reception on Monday evening, very nice (Bellamy's does a very nice line in nibbles, including a 'melt in the mouth' beef fillet steak bite.) I found out that the two winning quilts are being sent to the USA to the State University of Michigan Museum's upcoming exhibition called "Quilts and Human Rights" (Jan 15 to May 15, 2008.) What a lovely surprise for us! Apparently we were supposed to already know about this, but due to a glitch in an email addy the correspondence got sent into the ether, never to return! Now all I have to do is win Lotto on Saturday!!

I have my rookie quilt class to teach tomorrow night and I need to buy a new iron to replace the one that died last week.

It is Cotton On Quilters' end of year meeting on Saturday and I want to hunt out some decorations for the lunch.

I haven't done my junior reports which are due Friday.

I haven't done 2 lots of marking which are not urgent but need to be done by the end of this week (ahem maybe the beginning of next week - the reports have a higher priority!)

Saturday of next week I am travelling to Wellington again to meet up with Linda from Canada, who is visiting New Zealand and who I am taking on a quilty shopping trip. We have only 'met' on-line so it will be fun to meet up in person.

After that it will be the last week of term and Junior Prizegiving and then I need to give my house a cleaning blast. That'll take us up to Christmas.

Somewhere in there my son (he of honey bunch fame) needs to have a 17th birthday celebration of some kind.

As for quilting content, I have:

(a) finished the letters for my Lazy Gal Winter Class quilt:
(b) done a test block for Cotton On Quilters' new banner:
Isn't this a cool block? Janice designed it for us on EQ6. My test block doesn't look very square. I think its the way I smoothed it onto the design wall. One down, 47 to go!

(c) finished the third applique test block using the ladder stitch method. Can't show you a photo 'cos Im soaking it to try and get out the supposedly washable kids' felt pen - well, what do I expect with red I ask myself. I'll have to get the napisan out to see if that will help. As far as the method goes I found it took me twice as long as the freezer paper method. Maybe because the daisy flower shape has 8 inward curves. No hand applique method is going to be quick, I suspect.

Well, that is enough content for about 4 post's worth. You are getting it all at once 'cos I know I wont get blogging again until at least next week (see above!)

More on Applique

So, I still haven't got back to the hand applique. Got side-tracked onto the Lazy Gal class. But my friend Ruth got this book from USA (second hand)
It shows how to use a ladder stitch to applique. I'll give it a go and report back soon (or not so soon, as the case may be - I really don't know where the time goes to)

A rush of blood to the head!

Just because I have nothing to do (ahem!) I have joined an online class called Lazy Gal Winter Class. The challenge is to make a Christmas themed wall quilt. The only rules are you have to make the quilt up out of your own head using no templates, no patterns, no EQ6, not much measuring, just in a free-pieced, improvisational way. I think I'm allowed to use applique. It is being run by Tonya Ricucci of lazygalquilting.blogspot.com. It's called a winter class 'cos it's winter - in the northern hemisphere! I couldn't resist the challenge of adding a kiwi summer Christmas perspective to the group blog. I knew exactly what I want to do almost straight away. It will remain to be seen how far I get :-)

Here is my first effort for the words which will be on the quilt:
You can check out what the other members are doing by clicking on this link or the link in my side bar.

Wahoo! Here it is!

I got the binding on the raffle quilt finished so I was able to take it to club today. Pretty darn good even if I do say so myself. Still have to hand stitch down the hanging sleeve and do a label. When that is done we will get a better photo of it.

A big thank you goes to all the club members who worked on this quilt and to Bev Dyke from Nelson for her fantastic quilting, and many thanks to Kim Diehl for giving us permission to use her design for our raffle quilt. Tickets will go on sale towards the end of January next year.

Guess where the fabric was?

I knew the left over backing fabric for the club raffle quilt would be somewhere. I just needed help finding it. See this innocuous pile of left over batting all neatly tied up, sitting on top of a supermarket bag with boxes of Basics Nappy Liners - the kind that melt with heat and are used for art quilts and which are no longer available here in NZ- not that I'm skiting here, you understand, and not that I've done anything with them since I got them :-) Of course this pile is waiting to be put away, along with a myriad of other things of the quilting kind:

Guess what was tied up with the batting underneath?

Yep, the missing backing fabric. It took Frances to find it. I picked up that pile last night, I know I did, but I didn't look underneath did I? Did I remember that it was the left over batting from the raffle quilt? No I did not. I sometimes wonder where my brain is. Still, it was just as well I didn't put the pile away, otherwise we would never have found it!!

The hanging sleeve is machined on and I'm off to do some hand stitching and watch the first episode of Glenn Close in Damages. I hope it's good. It's about time there was something decent on the box.

Back from the Quilter

The raffle quilt for our club is back from the quilters, yippee! Bev has made a fabulous job of it:
I have machine stitched the binding on and it just needs a hanging sleeve put on before I hand stitch the binding down. Then it will be done. I just can't find what I did with the left-over backing fabric. I'm sure it is somewhere. . . around here. . . umm. . .

Hand Applique

Goodness knows, my hand stitching has never been anything to write home about but I am planning to make a quilt from a pattern I bought when I was at the Quilt & Craft Fair in Hamilton a couple of months ago. The pattern is a wall hanging with 16 fused daisy blocks. I want to double it in size to make a bed quilt and I don't like fused applique on bed quilts . What method of hand applique to use?

While I have done heaps of fused wall-hangings I haven't done a huge amount of hand applique and mostly it has been single layer. I've used freezer paper on the back, spray starch painted on the seam allowances and the iron to press them over. I then take the freezer paper out and hand stitch the applique piece on. I thought I would make a couple of samples to try the back basting method and compare it with my freezer paper method. Here are the results so far:

Can you guess which method is which? Which one looks best?

There is a circle to be attached to the middle and the background is cut out as a circle to be appliqued onto another background. Then there are the pieced blocks to do. This ain't gonna be a quick quilt!

Quilting Content - and about time too!

This blog has been bereft of actual real quilting content (as opposed to the fabric acquisition content) so I thought I would post a photo of a teaching sample I have made. Recently I was asked if I would teach some beginners quilting classes as a local fabric shop and this is what I came up with. It measures about 85 cm square and I am calling it the "Rookie Quilt"

I'm teaching it in 6 parts, both in an evening class for 6 weeks and a Saturday class for 3 weeks with double lessons. We have done the nine patch blocks and the inner border(the blue & red bit.) in the evening class and the Saturday class starts tomorrow. I have to say I wasn't totally happy with the design or my fabric choices but deadlines loom and sometimes you just have to go with what you've got.