Cubes...

Are slowly multiplying after I decided to hand appliqué the circles. The most recent six (with solid dark diamond) were done on the plane and I'm not 100% happy with the curve of the circles but I'm not redoing them! This is what the project looks like to date - 18 blocks down, about another 24 to go:

Please excuse the quality, it's hard to photograph when you are short and the room is really small! Here they are laid out on Mstr(almost)15's double bed, I think 42 blocks would make a nice double size quilt. As you can see I have included some solids into the Malka Dubrowsky collection as several of you had suggested. I tried to find a selection of neutral fabrics for the circles but it remains very busy, so I'm thinking I'll put a similar weight cream around it as a border once all the blocks are joined rather than following the pattern with half blocks etc.

The rest of my sewing has been sorely neglected, work has been very busy with a week in Darwin, a trip to Sydney and 5 more nights away over the next fortnight. I even skipped the last sew-in as I had just gotten home but I plan to go to the next one.

Suz and I have settled on our feature fabric and will sort out details of our trans-Tasman block swap soon.

Hope life is treating you well! Happy Sewing!

Stitching the weekend away....

It's been a few weeks between posts, but I have kept myself busy:

• Giant Chevron: After I quilted all the inner, I started with the coloured parts of the quilt, adding very organic matchstick quilting to the black and the red - maybe chopstick quilting would be a better term for it as my lines are 1/8 - 3/8'' apart? (I will have to take a photograph to add here). For the blue and the yellow parts I've been thinking about Judi Madsen inspired quilting, parallel lines to fill in with different designs. I attempted to fmq my straight lines and fill the spaces in as I went along, but I was not happy with the result, so for the second blue side I used the walking foot and then went back to fill the spaces after - much happier with this look! While it is time consuming, at this stage in my quilting journey I might just stick to this method otherwise the result will forever annoy me.
• I have also worked on my Metro Rings (aka Double Wedding Ring made easier), I forgot to count how many blocks I was up to last night but I managed to cover most of the top of my California King Size bed and I have run out of the white homespun - but realistically I think I'm about half way. I am a little worried about the weight (or lack thereof) for that homespun, but I hope if I put a decent weight batting under it and a good quality backing, it will work. Megan from Canoe Ridge Creations recently posted how she is making a Double Wedding Ring Quilt for her upcoming wedding, so I think I will set myself a goal of having this quilt done and dusted by our 20th wedding anniversary in December :)

  

  I need to get smarter about taking photographs; our house is rather dark, and with the sun going down so early in QLD I forever show you these poorly lit photographs - sorry!

  Suzanne, nothing has changed, I have already worked out that if I do enough blocks (possibly intersperse these pieced block with the odd 'blank' one), I just need to add borders on three sides to make it fit my bed ;) While I see the rings in this pattern, all three of my sons told me they saw flowers - love a quilt with secondary patterns :)
• Then on Saturday, I went to the Opal essence class by Lorena Uriarte. She was a very cool person to work with, full of helpful tips and advice. While together we discovered an issue with the templates, Lorena did her very best to remedy this straight away. This is a selection of the blocks we completed in class:
  

  

  Obviously we were all taking pictures at the same time lol. Can you spot my block? One quilter from the Brisbane Modern Quilt Guild used different measurements that's why her block on the left is a bit bigger than the others.

  Lorena covered lots in her class - about colour values (everyone went off to get the red plastic thingies or used the greyscale function on their phones), about rules and breaking the rules, y seams, about applique by hand and piecing circles. I had been really worried about fabric choices, ended up buying some black, white and red charms for the circles but didn't use them lol. The Malka Dubrowsky fabrics seem to work fine for the tumbling blocks (though being fqs I need to be a bit careful about how I cut them as I get a fair bit of wastage), and while I started out with the Seville City map fqs for the circles, I have since added a collection of fabrics to that.

  

  My rug in the lounge doubling as a design wall - sort of...

  
  

  

  The colour value part of the workshop has been very interesting.

  Originally I had started out wanting to machine piece the circles - it worked ok for the large circle (I think that was bottom right), but I had a lot more trouble with the medium one and did not even attempt the small circle. After talking with some of the other ladies I have decided that this might be a good travel project so I should hand applique the circles. Last night I did two more and I think I could get used to this! Unlike my usual MO I have not sussed out yet what finished size this quilt will have and where it will go; I have been thinking with the geometric shapes this could be something for Mstr (almost) 15's double bed and while he was showing no particular interest, he wasn't totally against it either, so we'll see what happens...

So there are three projects on the go which is great, and while I find it annoying not to have my own sewing space, having all my stuff in the lounge has made me organise it better and tidy up after use, and I feel I'm a bit more part of what is going on than when I hide in my sewing room. In the long run, though, I would like my own space again.

A couple of Sundays ago I finally made it to the Sew Day of the Brisbane Modern Quilt Guild. They are a lovely bunch of people, all women when I visited ranging from early thirties to retirement age I would guess. They were very welcoming, people were working on all sorts of projects, modern and not so modern. I loved the company, I have signed up and will go back next month (if my family lets me lol). This little footstool especially appealed to me:

This quilter made this Minecraft cake footstool as a birthday present for her daughter - very cool!

Our life has been very busy lately, DH started work 2 weeks ago, so that means I get the boys ready in the mornings now. Mst15 has gotten extra chores like walking home from school without ditching his younger brothers, looking after them until the parents get home while avoiding physical violence lol Soon he will have to add 'getting all 3 ready and to school in time' to that list as I am traveling a lot over the next few weeks. In return he gets small monetary rewards towards the new computer he wants to build himself (don't ask...). He's been to the big Career Expo last week and has an idea what he wants to do when he is finished with school at the end of 2017 (guess what... it will involve computers...). As we are just in the process of inquiring about braces for all three boys, we better start playing lotto to afford all of this... We are also starting to think about the next place to move to, our lease will expire in September, so we are starting to check out the rentals to see what is becoming available. However, we are really enjoying the opportunities we have around us here - here are some photos of the boys rock climbing at the high school last month:

Mstr10

Mstr12

I will be talking Minecraft over the next couple of days at EduTECH - hope you get some sewing done while I do that! Happy Sewing!

Ideas galore

Another month gone bye, another repair of my machine done and dusted arrgghh The technician found that the knee lift problem was due a shattered pin; he observed that obviously the machine was well used, I wore out that pin and he put in a more substantial one now:0 Makes you wonder about the amount of use these machines are expected to have, my machine is 2.5y old and I had to have the tension thingy-ma-bob and the knee lift pin replaced already (and I'm obviously not quilting daily). My husband is getting rather suspicious of the quality of this Pfaff Quilt Expression 4.0, and as I still end up with the odd jumped stitch during fmq and some tension issues I'm starting to wonder, too.

With the Tokyo Subway Map finished, it has been well loved especially by the cats including been barfed on - great! Two washes later I can still see some faint stains on the light blue fabric (typical, couldn't have hit the red or orange?!) but at least the amount of cat fur on the quilt has reduced to previous blog post state after the washes and time outside on the washing line (would you believe that I found two more unburied threads while it was hanging on the line?!)

I have been working on the Giant Chevron; the inner of the white star in fmqed now, and I have begun the 'matchstick' quilting of the black and red parts on the next star. For the yellow and blue parts I plan to alternate dense quilting with parallel ribbons - I have been browsing Judi Madsen quilts and will try out if this fits with the overall quilt.

late yesterday afternoon on the washing line

and this afternoon on the dining table

close up

and another close up

It's already May and I'm still on the hunt for a suitable feature fabric for our trans-Tasman Vintage Quilt Revival sampler project! I have my heart set on Daydream by Moda (Kate Spain) and as my budget doesn't stretch to the cost at the local quilt shops, I might have to order from overseas...

From Pinterest

As an alternative, I bought this on special the other day, 

but Suz and I agree it's not quite going to work for what we have planned, so I have something else in mind for this material...

Image from Pinterest; I had bought the ruler last year and thanks to PDF patterns I got the Metro Rings pattern in an instant yesterday :)

What do you think about this combination?

Some homespun fqs, a white homespun and a green print from Spotlight as well as some solids from a  Jelly Roll (Moda?) I found in my stash

I have looked at the Double Wedding Ring patterns for a long time and this looks like a quicker and more simplified version of the traditional pattern. This afternoon I washed the fat quarters, the green print and the white homespun, and I was very disappointed to realise that I got 4m of the white while I paid for 5m! It was cheap (AUD7.99) but that's beyond the point. Not sure they will do anything about it after I took it home and washed it, but it's not really good enough - I had asked the sales assistant to measure what was left on the bolt and thought I had counted 4m but accepted her word for the 5m.

The closest local quilt shop Patches at Indooroopilly are putting on a number of classes, and I signed up for the Opal Essence workshop with Lorena Uriarte on 30 May! Really looking forward to learning some new techniques! I received my requirement list and started looking through my stash; this Melka Dubrowsky pile has been calling me for a while, and it's quite distinct so I'm not sure I can mix it with anything else I have got but I'm really not sure - what do you think?

I tried to split this pack of fqs up into light, medium and dark, and I have a few more fqs that could fit more than one category

I have lots of batiks I could use instead - would this be a better choice? Really value your advice! I pulled out some prints that could work for the applique circles (using my Seville city map prints amongst others), but I'm not often working out of one line of fabric, I'm really not sure what to do... I'm sure they will have lots of lovely fabrics at Patches I add to the project but realistically my stash should be large enough to make it work??

I'm happy to report that I spent more time in schools over the last few weeks, one trip led me to Roma, about 500km inland. I didn't take many photographs, but here is one of the bottle trees which lined most roads:

So I have lots of ideas - I just might need to find a few more hours in the day...

Happy Sewing!

Done

Tokyo Subway Map Quilt is done and dusted de-haired - though I can see already that the cats like it way too much that it ever would stay clean for long!

It's not easy to take decent photographs as our bedroom is not very big

Suz from All the Good Ones are Taken and I both started our quilts back in January 2013, we pieced a couple of blocks each month (I used 3" squares cut). I started quilting during 2014, first with lines 1/8th" from the coloured edges rather than SID (something I'm not very good at). I filled the coloured subway lines with different patterns and started filling the black background with echo swirls. The black on white subway stops were treated with a petal shape which reminds me of frangipani (I've said hibiscus in a previous post but that's wrong of course!).

With the move to Australia quilting went on the back burner for a while, and just before I was finished, my machine gave up! I'm glad that it's all finished now, though:) Below find some more close-ups of the quilting:

I think I need to practise better close-up pic taking!

I have had tension problems with the machine for a while, in fact ever since I was working on D4P. The lovely NZ technician had spent a lot of his own time trying to work it out, but he was not aware that there was an actual manufacturing problem which the AUS technician has now finally fixed. There are some tensions issues visible on the back, but I have decided not to go back and redo them - there has to be a point when you say it's done!

quick shot of the texture

The finished size is approx. 100"x100", the backing is a 108" Wide Spot On Wide Quilt Backing Circles Steel, batting is black cotton with a small percentage of polyester from my former LQS The Country Yard. The top is pieced from Kona black and the squares are a mixture from Suz' and my stashes and a few bits we have bought to supplement. The thread is mainly Aurifil 50w, the white used on the stops is 40w (and I'm finally able to tell them apart!). Here you can see Suz' finished quilt.

While lots of work trips are looming, I have basted as SID the Giant Chevron - will share more progress soon!

Happy Sewing!

What possessed me

to make a black quilt??? The cats obviously love it, though it's yet to be completely finished...

 

Giant Chevron

A flimsy ready to get sandwiched and quilted:

At approx. 86" I haven't found a suitable space to photograph all of it. The setting triangles were slightly larger than needed so I carefully mitered where the corners overlapped. The backing is pieced (two lengths of the fabric I showed you yesterday) and now top & backing are hanging over the line in the basement with the batting until I get time to baste it all together. Nice to be back in the swing of things:)

Yesterday I managed to finish all 400" of binding on the Tokyo Subway Map Quilt:

Back to work tomorrow...

Happy Sewing!

Binding and more threads:) for Easter

Happy Easter to you all! After a fun afternoon/ evening with friends yesterday today was a quiet at home day - perfect for sewing! The Subway Map Quilts has the binding on and I'm heading towards the half-way mark with hand stitching the binding to the back - love the skinny Millinery needles I bought back home in Kerikeri last year, makes handwork so much easier! I alternate this with burying threads, unbelievable how many threads are still left to do.

Hubby made the mistake of asking me what quilt I will work on next:)

(Can you see yet another furry helper?)
The setting triangles were cut ages ago, and I might even have the right size batting and suitable backing:

Hope you have a happy and productive Easter weekend, too:)