The problem with blogging...

... is that you need to have something to blog about... This blog is about quilting, and it gets quite boring (at least to me) when I have nothing new to write about!

After our most recent move late February I set up my sewing room in Bedroom No. 4 (leaving only the small 'office' for youngest DS - sorry!) - you can see some pictures in this post. What I was missing was a design wall, and there wasn't really any space for it - except on the wardrobe doors:

I have since covered both doors.

Leftover cotton batting, a staple gun and lots of swear unkind words and I have an approx. 2x2m design wall! This is what it looks like right now:

Just one issue with it, you can't get into the wardrobe / cupboard while you have blocks going over the middle...

What you can see is the second half of middle DS' video game quilt I started earlier this year. I had run out of material, and it's not that easy to get a big range of Bella Solids locally. I had not been to Country Dawn in Whangarei before, but they were happy to order the majority of my fabrics in, and most, through not all, matched the old batches very well. The remaining half meters (or in this case half yards) came from the Fat Quarter Shop in the States, together with some 2 1/2" squares (which I can't show you because they are inside the cupboard!).

That's as far as I had gotten back in April

While the design wall is not wide enough to have all blocks up, I had a little play with photos to get an idea of how it might look all put together:

Some of you might be aware that digital technology and e-learning are an important part of my day job. Moving photos from iPhone or iPad to the laptop to insert into blog posts can be a pain. I use a free app called Flick (available here) to move photos between devices, which makes things much easier.

So what else have I been up to:

Aotearoa Quilters have organised two challenges for this spring - Yellow and Floral challenge. I have entered a quilt for each:

Winter Blossoms on the left, and Tree of Life on the right.

With a bit of luck I might make it to the Festival of Quilts in Auckland this weekend and get to see them again.

While the damask whole cloth quilt is still unnamed, it has been on my bed for several weeks now:

Damask wrinkles...

Pastellation would just be a little too small for my 2x2m bed without the damask one underneath.

I am still on and off  quilting Opal Essence, I think I might have about a third of the boxes done now:

Still quite a bit to go, though it isn't 'hard' work (except burying threads, I've fallen behind again!)

Suz and I have been working on our Vintage Quilt Revival Sampler Block Exchange (what a mouth full)! My blocks are safely inside the cupboard, so I am sneakily copying some of her photos from her blog:

Suz' version...

... and mine

Suz' version...

... and mine

I'm not exactly sure what our current count is, but somewhere in the 20s, definitely beyond half-way :)

Other than my sewing our family are enjoying spring, DH had done lots of chainsaw pruning through the overgrown garden that came with the house and we have started planting and mulching - I'll have to get some of his before and after photos for another post. My BiL made a start at acid-washing the concrete around the pool which makes a huge difference, and I have water blasted the majority of the decks. DH and our youngest DS have built a chicken run and last weekend these cuties moved in:

4 lavender and one black Araucana, hopefully all hens and no roosters! They will probably be joined soon by another hen and her chicks.

'Shady dude' aka youngest DS and one of his new friends

DH has been working since August now which is not only a great help financially, he enjoys being out and about again. Unfortunately last week on the way home from work someone crashed into the back of his car. He was fine, but the car has been at the panelbeater's since and we will hopefully today hear the verdict (looks like a write-off...).

My work situation has changed, sadly my school has decided not to employ me again next year... Onwards and upwards, as usual for this time of year it seems I am back hunting for jobs... well, there's always tonight's Lotto jackpot of course! My body seems to tell me that I have worked too hard lately, I was off work on Friday and then took my back out! I have a couple of days off again as well as enough painkillers to supply have a village. The upside is that I managed to complete this and an e-learning blog post.

The boys are doing well, oldest DS has turned 16 and has agreed to try and get his Learner's Licence as well as practising to drive! His last day at school is this Friday, he will still have 4 exams to complete but that is all until February. If it was up to him that would mean staying at home for the next 3 months playing computer but we'll see what we can do. The other two still have school until early December.

That's about all I can think off for now. Happy Sewing!

Heaps of lovely quilts and this and that

{Just a warning, this has turned out to be a looonng post so pour yourself another cuppa :D}

It's Sunday morning, the children are parked in front of the box, husband has gone to work. By the time "What Now" is over on telly, the sun will have disappeared I suppose, this seems to be our weather pattern at the moment, nice when you get up and then it turns grey and overcast and not very warm - it's (almost) enough to make you a global warming skeptic [not really, too much evidence here of the hole in the ozon layerwith skin cancers and the likes...]. We'll get one 'extra' (child) later on today but I am hopeful they will just entertain themselves (my experience is as long as you feed boys things are generally fine).

Suz and I had a lovely day on Friday - well, we agreed that even just leaving Okaihau without children feels like a holiday lol - took a leisurely drive to Auckland (250km from here) via Spotlight and No.1 Shoes. This was my first visit to the "Auckland Festival of Quilts" a far cry in size of venue and exhibition to our local guild's exhibition. What impressed me the most was the amount of classes and workshops the exhibiting quilters had taken as per the descriptions on their cards - well, their guild is slightly way bigger than our Patchwork Club :-). My main focus was 'wow' pieces and quilting, so here are some of the photos I took:

Wow!

After my DS' portraits I had to photograph this!

crooked photo, sorry!

Gustav Klimt's The Kiss - we have a whole calendar of his works at home, hmmm maybe I can try sth. with that....

Mum has been working on felting flowers for a wallhanging, I will have to show her this one!

On silk or satin (can't remember)

Another Wow!

A different kind of Wow!

More Wow!

The canopy of this Pohutukawa tree is made from NZ prints

Very wow!

Suz and I ended up with a bit of an overload in the end, I didn't even end up taken photos of their lovely colour challenge quilts at the entrance but please head over to Leeann's Quilt Whangarei blog to see them, they were stunning!

Next we headed over to Northart to catch up with Rona from Layer upon Layer for the opening of the Big Quilts Exhibition. I forgot to take a picture of us all three together sorry!!!!!! Wendy, the curator, had displayed the 17 quilts beautifully, it was really interesting to see them displayed against white walls with wonderful lighting. It is hard to photograph them all with people standing in front of them, but here are some of them:

Kaffe fasset fabrics (I think) are often to flowery for my taste but this was just stunning (and yes, you can see my To the Power of Four to the right of it)

I have seen a lot of modern quilting with freehand parallel lines today

Not fmq yet absolutely stunning with lots of NZ reference in it

And upon leaving we discovered that you can see this through the window

and what about this as a quilting or an applique pattern (on the fence right outside):

A few learnings from the gallery exhibition:

• Professional looking photos are important to be selected (the curator mentioned to us that a lot of the submitted photos were of really poor quality and quilters in comparison to painters really needed to up their act; now I didn't dare ask if mine were good enough, I had made a real effort...)
• The Gallery did not iron the quilts so mine still had some folds from transport - might have to investigate Leah Day's storing quilts suggestions. I hope the folds disappear over the next few weeks.
• Displaying them against white, firm walls with good lighting really showed them off well.
• Some of the quilts for sale their were more pricey than I expected - deservedly so, with all the material and time that goes into them on top of the creativity. If you imagine buying a painting of that size, you would expect to spend thousands also! (My quilt is marked NFS, I made it for our bed, some of the material is just Spotlight fabric and I don't think it's perfect enough to sell - and then our cats have left some now faint marks on it, too!)

So where - if anywhere - do I want to get with my quilting? I am getting a bit obsessed about it at the moment (or so I am told by my family!). I have three big (secret) quilts on the go, but my head is just overflowing with arty type ideas (they are going forth and multiplying, might have to investigate if there is any family planning advice for crazy ideas lol). Would I have enough time and money to make quilts to sell? (Like most of us I need to work to earn the money to make quilts which limits the time considerably lol). Well, for the moment there are two new challenges I have on my mind, let's see how I go with these...

If you are still with me, here are yet more pics for you from some of the stuff I did yesterday:

I am trying to make a chain link fence, zigzag stitching on wash-away stabiliser

Drying on a towel - one link didn't quite link but that wouldn't matter for the project I have in mind. It stretched, so will have to plan for this.

This is for a piece "Free" where I want to wind a creeper like morning glory around a chain link fence. I think this method could work, and I would stitch it to the backgound using tiny zigzag with invisible thread. I'm open to better suggestions though!

Here some different kind of 'paper piecing': I am working on the cartwheel pattern from Freshly Pieced but just the word paper piecing puts me off a bit so after contemplating and temporarily discarding stack and whack  I made myself some templates. I always struggle with how to cut triangle corners so my pieces will fit (despite Marti Mitchell's corner trimmer, but here you have got odd angles), so I worked with paper until I made it fit:

I have three blocks finished so far using Melka Dubrowsky's Stitch in Colour fqs and Kona steel, I am planning to set them in 5x6 rows with the steel as sashing, but I am intrigued by the secondary pattern you could get when you set them as below, so this pattern might get used again :-)

Working title 'Firework'

Well, an hour later and I haven't even put the dishes in the dishwasher - I hope you have a more productive Sunday morning!

Please don't forget to vote at the Blogger's Quilt Festival - #339 is my entry, the portrait of my lovely middle DS :D

Happy Sewing!