Things I've done this year...

This blog is always way behind, because so much of what I do creatively ends up on the Fibrecircle blog. That's not all I create, of course, but managing two blogs does take rather more time than one.

So what have I done this year? I finished a blouse for my daughter but photos of clothes look nothing much lying flat and she hasn't posed for a photo (nor is likely to, really!) So you'll have to take my word for that one.

I finished all the blocks for my Dutchman's Puzzle quilt, including the half and quarter blocks for the sides, since the blocks will be laid out on point. This may not sound like a huge achievement, until you realise that that these blocks were from a swap with my library co-workers back in the 1990's. I blogged about here about twelve months ago. Here's where I mention that I hand piece my quilts these days, mostly as an end-of-day therapy, and hand quilt them too. I realised that one of the things I enjoy about quilting is the meditative process of putting a needle through cloth and that I wasn't enjoying spending all my time at the sewing machine. I sew clothes by machine, and machine embellish and assemble things I make, and that's plenty of time on the machine. 

My plan with these blocks is to sash them, so I'll make a template for the sashing and contemplate whether I want to use one fabric or many for the sashing. In the meantime, I'm making more 6in Prosperity blocks for my grandson's quilt. I have a nice pile of them but I think they'll be set on the square, so I'll need a lot more yet.

I've also made a pair of earrings  and have two other pairs in the making. I'm a real sucker for earrings and, while I don't yet have a different pair to wear every day of the year, I'm working on it! These ones are inspired by in a book called Making Vintage Accessories, using lace as an element. As I had some genuine elderly lace (if it isn't quite vintage), bought when my daughter was a baby, I thought I'd play with some of it.

I painted the lace elements to suit some feature beads I bought a couple of years ago.

I've assembled one pair and even worn them! Aren't they so girly? The lace is silver, which was hard to photograph well.

I also made a little bag. Helen from Fibrecircle gave each of us a kit of fabric and some instructions. I suspect a sinister plan on her part to be rid of some of her stash, an idea I have stored away myself! It's a cute little bag, with a ring closure.

I've been busy all the time this year, sometimes creatively and much more on administration for the new ATASDA travelling suitcase exhibition, which is now on the road. My friend Maz and I decorated one of the suitcases this time, and here it is drying on the floor.

The design was inspired by a desert flower called Apteranthes europaea, common in Morocco, and other parts of North Africa. It used to be known as Caralluma europaea, so the suitcase is called Cara for short. Both suitcases are now on the road and can be booked on marrakesh@atasda.org.au.

I've also made two postcards and I'm currently painting a couple more, played with transfer printing, done some shaving cream marbling, painted quite a lot of fabric in different ways, dyed fabric and done some serigraphy monotypes, also known as deconstructed screen printing or breakdown screen printing. Most of that is over on the Fibrecircle blog, and you'll have to wait for the rest!

Progress!

There's some progress to report on the tidying of the workroom, and quite a bit of progress on the orphan blocks quilt top. I now have twelve 12in blocks:

Looking good, isn't it? I'm amazed at how quickly they go together! I've started with the awkward sizes, 7 1/2in blocks and so on, and they are much quicker to make into 12in blocks than I'd ever imagined. I'm only working on them in the evenings, when I watch TV (not that often) and occasionally during the day. I still have a pile of 4in and 3in blocks to play with, as well as a number of the 6in blocks I pieced from 1 1/2in Half-Square Triangle units. You can see one of those in the bottom left hand corner. I added slightly oversize pink sashing triangles to two of them, to make them 8 1/2in finished, and then added the pieced border to this one. I am generally making them in pairs, so there is some continuity between the blocks. They'll probably have sashing between the blocks in the end.

The real challenge has been to keep it interesting. I got bored with piecing sashing for the 7 1/2in Nine Patches (top left and elsewhere) but I still have some of those blocks to use. I have a lot of different sized Log Cabin blocks too. Some may become a border, just as they are, but the odd-shaped ones need something to be added to them. Unless I get too bored.

I've cut out a couple more of the blue and white Bear's Paw blocks, for when that time comes! That's an old UFO, dating from 1998. The original blocks were a friendship swap from a group of quilters who were library staff at Kuring-gai Library, back when I was Turramurra Librarian. I think I received five or six in the swap and I've gradually made more over the years, so I now have 15, 14in blocks. It will be a quilt one day, and a lovely reminder of some very good people. Wonder how many more I need to make? I guess I should decide how big I want that quilt to be!

Early Christmas present

My quilt group had its Christmas party last week, and we gave each other our Christmas presents. Since October 2009, we've been making each other quilt blocks in our chosen colours, every month. You may remember we did the same thing back in 2008? This time, Karen chose red and white blocks, Lorinda chose blue and yellow blocks, and Sharon asked for shabby chic Birds in the Air blocks. I chose batiks on dark blue so I received these 39 gorgeous blocks from the girls. Here's how they looked laid out on my floor:

They're sitting on the paper bags they came in, so you don't really see them at their best, but I don't see myself taking better photos this coming week, on account of there's some small religious holiday happening soon. They really do look brilliant, and I've made some more blocks along the way, to bring them up to a more useful number. I'm not sure how I'll set them yet, but I'm thinking they need more dark blue background, to make the colours really pop out. I haven't actually quilted the last one, so there's no rush!

Here are the blocks for the others:

Sharon's Shabby Chic Birds in the Air blocks

Lorinda's Blue and yellow blocks

Karen's red and white blocks

Don't they all look great? The amazing thing is that we so rarely use the same fabrics, even though we all tend to shop locally. I guess it shows how much choice we have in patchwork fabrics these days!

And, gee, I've been quilting too!

Of course, I'm nearly always quilting, in some form or other. I don't always remember to put up what I've done. Remember those swap blocks I did with my quilt group back in... can it be 2007? I've finally put them together into a quilt top. I did say you wouldn't see it until it was a top, which was a pretty rash thing to say, considering I have unfinished quilt projects dating back to... um,  1996, I think. Maybe earlier. (Hangs head)

But here they are, together at last. Of course, it may need to have a border added yet. I'm still thinking about it. Well, that's my excuse for not immediately beginning the quilting. I'm planning to hand quilt it, on the basis that hand quilted projects get finished because they aren't fighting for their time on the machine, along with the garments I make and the machine embroidery and the bags and... well, you know, all that other stuff.

It's the first quilt I'll have that's made from all reproduction fabrics. I love the look of these modern-antique quilts, but when I make a quilt myself, I blend all those wonderful repro fabrics with other fabrics in my stash - whatever works together. So I've never actually made a quilt with all reproduction fabrics. It's also a fabulous reminder of a group of friends who've been meeting together now for more than a decade. And guess what? We're making swap blocks again this year. I've chosen batik fabrics and dark blue backgrounds, which should be striking! Why did I choose batiks? Well, I have this box of batik fabrics, many of which I bought.. yep, in the nineties! So as I make blocks for the girls, I'm making myself a block too, from my own fabrics. Of course, it's not making a dent in my batik fabric stash at all.

Which brings me to something I've been thinking about for a while. I suspect I'm not the only quilter who has an obscene amount of fabric. Somehow, even when you're on a Low-Fibre Diet, as I've been for some years now, fabrics still find their way to your door. I've just bought a bunch of fat quarters for the swap blocks we're making, because somehow it seems mean to use all fabrics from my stash, some of which were definitely not bought yesterday. Only new and glossy will do. And of course, people give you fabrics, because it's your birthday or Christmas, or they are cunningly downsizing at your expense... So my stash is increasing at a greater rate than I can use it. So far, so ordinary.

But really, isn't this just another example of what we women in the developed world do? We buy Stuff. We buy more Stuff than we ever have a hope of using, and we can't pass it on to our kids because they want their own new Stuff. We buy things to replace other things that work perfectly fine, because the one we just bought is new and shiny, because it has brag factor, because it shows we have a lot of money to spend on Stuff. I've thought for a long time that the rampant consumerism of the society I live in is obscene, when there are so many in the world who have almost nothing, and I consciously choose not to buy new things unless I really need them. But fabric is somehow different. It's as if I give myself permission to exempt the fabric I buy.

But fabric isn't neutral. I buy cotton fabrics, and cotton takes water and fertiliser to grow, and often has a significant effect on the physical environment (as any mass monoculture inevitably does). The processing of cotton is not environmentally neutral either, nor is the printing process. I'm not singling out cotton as being necessarily worse than anything else we might buy; it isn't.  But it's cotton fabric that we quilters buy and store away in boxes for the "one day" that will never come.

How can we justify buying all this "product", that we freely acknowledge we will probably never use? For some people, I know this simply isn't an issue. But I've started to think about it and, frankly, I don't like what I see myself doing. I'm not going to take the high moral ground and declare I'm never buying more fabric... I don't trust extreme points of view, even in myself. I just hope I can learn to be more discriminating, more able to resist the siren call of the new.

And do you know what? While I was writing this, I remembered that some friends gave me a box of fat quarters for my Significant Birthday a few years ago. And yes, I found it includes a whole lot more batiks. So I definitely won't be shopping for that quilt anytime soon!

The sashing looks like this:

Now, unless I change my mind and do something different, you won't see it again until it's a quilt top!

Quietly quilting

I've been quietly going on with a project I mentioned here quite a while ago. The members of the very small quilt group I belong to made blocks for each other, one a month for ten months, during 2007. So each of us ended up with thirty 6in blocks. I chose reproduction fabrics because, while I love them and buy them a lot, I generally use them all mixed in with other fabrics, rather than making a quilt in reproduction style.

I decided to sew triangles to the four sides of each block, which has the effect of setting them on point (an interesting layout) and making them bigger. I am not fond of small quilts in traditional style - I really prefer the traditional quilts I make to be big enough to snuggle under. I decided I wanted the quilt to be more blue than anything else, so I found a nice medium value blue fabric in my stash and sewed triangles to half the blocks. I wanted a different fabric for the other half, so I would get that interesting pattern happening where the triangles meet. But none of the fabrics I found worked well with my blue fabric. Even ones I bought specifically looked fine in the shop but just didn't sing when I got them home. So I decided that, instead of keeping on buying fabrics that didn't work, I would go back to my stash of reproduction fabrics and work with value, something that isn't always that important in reproduction quilts. I chose fifteen different dark blue fabrics and an assortment of light medium fabrics. These fabrics needed to be medium, to provide contrast with the blocks that had a light background, but still light enough to contrast with the dark blues. Over the past couple of weeks, I've ripped the original blue triangles and sewn the new triangles in place. Here is how it looked, laid out:
Apologies for the foreshortened look, my design wall is fuill of other stuff just now.

The next task is to add sashing between the blocks. I have this delicious stripe to use for that, but I'm still havering over which fabric to use as cornerstones.

And now some quilting

It just hit me that I haven't mentioned quilting here for quite a while. (Mostly because not much has been happening in that department lately!) But today I pinned one quarter section of the quilt for my son and daughter-in-law. I mentioned this project back here . This has been a project long in the making. I began planning it when Ben & Lee were engaged, but it was set aside because I was making another quilt for a friend's birthday, which was committed to before the engagement happened. I had decided to quilt that project in sections (Quilt As You Go), because I find handling really big bed quilts difficult these days, so it was a trial run for this quilt. (Why does everyone have such big beds nowadays? The mattress on our new bed is four inches thicker than the old one, because it has a layer of memory foam on it. I had to rethink the quilt I'm making for it.)

I made my friend's quilt in sections, and quilted them to about 2in away from the edges of the sections. Then I sewed the top layers together, trimmed the batting level with the seam so it butted together and then hand stitched one layer of the backing over the other. The problem was, I really hated that method. It was so hard to get everything lined up neatly on the back, because those sections weren't quilted and I still had to quilt over the areas where the sections joined. So each time I joined sections together, I had to quilt this little area, so it matched up with the existing quilting. Lots of stop starts. Who invented this dumb method?

All this put me off finishing this quilt for Ben and Lee. How was I going to quilt it? I love hand quilting with a passion, but not if it involves quilting through all those seams you get in a Log Cabin quilt. I am a happy machine quilter, especially with free motion quilting, but this is a very big quilt. Then last year, I discovered another method of quilting in sections. I'm sorry I can't credit it, because I don't remember now where I read about it. I suspect it isn't just one person's method anyway. But it's so much simpler than what I did before. You quilt each section right up to the seam line. Then you sew the sections together, right sides together, adding a sashing strip on the back. So you have section 1 face down, section 2 face up, then a narrow folded strip with the raw edges lined up with the other raw edges. After you have sewn them all together, you trim the batting on both sections back as close to the stitching as possible. (This is why you only quilt up to the seam line.) Then you lay the sections face down, and fold the folded strip over the raw edges on the back and slip stitch it down. This should be a lot easier than folding backing over itself, because everything is quilted and can't shift around. And I won't have to go back and quilt anywhere. I'm so hoping this is going work out! (Every large quilt I make from now on is going to be hand quilted. Period.)

Big update!

I haven't been idle lately, though nothing has reached the blog!

First of all, I made some more pants. I'm really on a roll with pants lately! The first pair was made from a navy blue wool-polyester blend, lined with polyester lining. They feel lovely to wear and very warm! The second pair was from grey polyester, lighter weight but very comfortable. These ones have dark grey contrast topstitching. I've since made a third pair from charcoal-coloured polyester, with a long half-belt waistband.

I also finished the jumper I've been knitting this winter. It was based on a jumper I once saw in a magazine from the eighties. I started with a basic jumper pattern, as I mostly do, and worked out the variation. I'm very happy with it! I also finished weaving a second scarf, which I haven't photographed yet. It taught me that, if you make a mistake in the warp, it really is better to start again, rather than try to fudge it! The scarf itself is nice, but it's a little too short because the warp problems were so annoying and I spent a lot of time unweaving to correct errors. Lesson learned! I've just finished a third project, a wrap, which I made from leftover baby wool. I wanted to try weaving with fine yarn, and I wanted to practise getting my selvedges nice and even. I also wanted to try out using a pattern stick, which was very interesting and worth exploring further. It's turned out very well, and I really like it. The colours are the ones I wear often.

I've also been preparing patchwork blocks to take on my travels. I did a test block, which looks like this: The fabrics are pretty florals, in pinks, yellows and blues, from a range called Amelia's Garden. I'm combining them with toning plains in a positive-negative layout. So one block will have flower baskets on a plain background, and the next plain baskets and a floral background. I'm not used to using plain fabrics - tone-on-tones are much more usual these days - but it's what seemed to work best with the soft florals. It will make a lovely quilt for my favourite little girl. It was going to be a pink and yellow quilt, but somehow those blues just sneaked in!

And also...

Here is one of the secret projects from last year. My quilt group decided we would make 6in blocks for each other last year, one for each person, every month from February to November. That wasn't too onerous as there are only four of us in the group! I forgot to take photos of the blocks I made (how silly!)but here are the ones made for me:
Aren't they lovely? I asked for my blocks to be in reproduction fabrics because I like those quilts but never end up making myself one. I laid them out on point on my design wall because I think I may use that layout, but with strip sashing, or a streak of lightning sashing. I haven't decided yet.

A new project... well, an old one

I've started working on another project. "Another?" I hear you say. "Does she ever actually finish anything?" Well yes, sometimes I do, but this is actually progressing a long term project.

Back in the nineties, I started making 12in blocks for a quilt for myself. At that stage I was making lots of quilts for other people, including ones for a local charity called The Shack, but I don't think I'd made one just for me. I bought a whole lot of several fabrics that I really liked, in colours that I knew David would also like. I made a couple of sample blocks - one called Memory and one called Best of All. All up, I made about a dozen blocks before it got set aside.

In March 2000, I decided that what this quilt needed was some needleturn applique. I worked out a design, based on some traditional motifs, some quilts I saw in magazines and inspired by the Jacobean Applique book. Here's what the applique looks like:

It's 20 1/2in finished.
It was a bit crumpled from being stored so I just gave it a cursory swipe with the iron for photography purposes (as one does).

The Best of All blocks looks like this:

and the one Memory block I'd made looked like this:

I decided it's a bit dark so I've changed the centre colour to apricot:

That looks better! (Sorry, it's a night time photo)

So now I'm hand piecing the rest of these blocks.
This is what the quilt will look like when it's finished(the blank areas will have applique, yet to be designed):

I'm actually working on this quilt now because, in March 2000, David expressed the intention of building us a bed. It would have chip carving decoration and deep drawers underneath to store quilts, and the deal was I would make the quilt to go on it. Yes, you're right; although he works almost as slowly as I do, he finished the bed early this year and he's very properly asking "where's our quilt?" It may take me a little time....

Happy happy....

Dianne on Like Minded Artist asked us "What's your definition of a perfect day?"
My answer was "Warm and sunny, so I can go out in the garden early.
David home, working in his workshop and calling me to look at what he is making. Then back into my workroom for a few hours of contented pottering with no deadlines.
A visit from another textile artist for an hour or so.
Then back out into the garden in the late afternoon.
Lazy dinner with friends at an Italian or Moroccan or French restaurant, or the local Thai."
I didn't quite achieve all that lately, but I have had some really great days! Yesterday, in particular, was very like my perfect day. New medication is making me a considerably happier camper, and I have been really storming along, in the garden and in the workroom. My veggie patch is almost cleared after a year's disuse due to the water restrictions. I left it a little late in the day to photograph it, sorry!


The quilt for my son Ben and daughter-in-law Lee is to top stage. I'd like to pretend I just whipped this up this week, but to be truthful, it's taken me six years to get it this far! It is a very big quilt! Doesn't it look good on the bed David made for us?

And here is a little teaser of the fabric book pages for the Like Minded Artist swap, which are all almost finished. We had to make 14 pages for the swap, on a flower theme. They are due to be posted on Friday.