Challenge Teaser

Here’s a test piece which  I made to experiment with curved piecing to be able to do sharper curves.

This reminds me of an aerial photo of a landscape and can turn into a nice small piece.  It’s all in aid of the Wild, Wild West challenge for our Guild retreat in June although it’s different enough from the design I’m working on for that to not be revealing any big secrets.  All will be revealed in mid-June.

Learned a lot from this and will probably have to do another one to see if I can get a curve going more in a U shape.  This time the blue fabric I used for the second curve wasn’t big enough to be able to do that.  But no worries there’s more of both these fabrics so I can make a third block that continues the river meandering along.

Lessons learned:

1. don’t go so near the edge of the block with the curved piecing
2. mark the seam allowance on the back of the “river” and align the blocks with pins
3. square off the finished blocks

Note to self:

Make sure the next block is wider than the existing pieces so I don’t have to trim any more off the side of the existing block!

It’s amazing that the blue fabric was on sale at a very low price because it has much potential!

Log Cabin Blocks

Our Quilt Guild retreat is coming up in early June.

Part of the fun is a draw for blocks, either log cabin or bear`s paw in keeping with the Wild, Wild West theme.

These are supposed to be in earth colours with red centres and of course have the light and dark sides.

Hoping mine are sufficiently earth coloured enough to meet with approval.   If time permits (ha-ha!) I may make more.   There`s some slate blue fabric which to me is earthy but others might disagree.

The other unknown when making blocks for a group project is that others may interpret light differently than me.  I stuck with the palest fabrics and rejected others which could be light if all the blocks were being made either by one person or by a close-knit group who could agree they were light.

 

Be sure your sins will find you out …

there, THAT got your attention, right?

Quilter’s and crafter’s sins I now realize I’m guilty of:

Not cutting across the width of the fabric (WOF).  Silly me, I thought it made sense that if you have half a yard of fabric and you need a strip that’s 8″ by 2″ you would cut parallel to the selvedge, leaving 40″ of fabric wide by 18″ long.

2010 was the year in which I had the light bulb moment and realized it just doesn’t work like that.   I needed WOF for trading at our Guild’s retreat, and I needed WOF in significant quantities to make pillowcases for the million pillowcase challenge.

Several times I pored through my entire stash only to realize what I had been doing all those years, it finally caught up to me!  This led to a change in my evil ways, a gargantuan stash busting project, and (surprise!) fabric shopping for half-metre and bigger cuts.  Although for 2011 one of my watchwords is use what you have.

Have also resolved to be more attentive to thread.  Valdani is my favourite, and I do use what I have!  Actually had to buy a second spool of Gem Symphony when Andrea Hamilton was quilting my Shattered Angles quilt.  I look on Valdani as chocolate minus the calories.

Cindy Scraba is another amazing Island lady.  Her knowledge of threads is astounding.  Trivia:  Egyptian cotton is in the process of being protected legally, just like champagne in France.   It is so superior and they need to protect it.

Cindy sells Superior thread and I’ve started tracking in the catalogue what I have in the different lines.  The catalogue is great because it tells you which thread to use in every situation.

At the Guild retreat, I won a sample set of Wonderfil threads.

And I still have threads from my grandmother’s store that go back to the forties — on wooden spools with names for the colours.  They live in a case designed and built by my grandfather.  I use them for basting and minor embellishments.  After all this time I don’t trust them for anything that has to stay together.  But back then thread colours had names, not numbers, like Apple Green, Mauve, Primrose.

 

Teaser Tuesday

From East of the Sun by Julia Gregson, 2008, Orion Books

“But now she was feeling all wobbly and chameleonish again, which was annoying, only this time it was Frank, and to nutshell the problem, she had the most hideous crush on him.  When he’d asked her, in the most casual way possible, if Rose and she had any plans for Port Said, she’d been sitting in the bar chatting to Jitu Singh.”

Go to MizB’s Should Be Reading blog for more teasers in every genre!

Van Django at MusicFest Vancouver · CBC Radio 2 – Concerts On Demand

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via Van Django at MusicFest Vancouver · CBC Radio 2 – Concerts On Demand.

Is Two a Series?

This is a 12″ block I made for a swap in Arizona using indigo and hand-dyed fabric and following the theme of the first zigurat I made, which is the lower photo. This was made in a Cynthia Corbin workshop and the square blocks were cut with a rotary cutter but without a ruler. The dotted background and the brown dotted fabric used on the top block were originally gray but I hand-dyed those and the dots stayed white.

The Journal quilt class lesson this week includes several journal quilters talking about making things in series, which is something I find hard to do, maybe because I don’t have enough time/space to devote to quilting. I see a progression in my work but I tend to have pendulum swings or spiral (many pendulum swings really ARE a spiral motion, by the way!) and come back to something I’ve tried earlier but with some other creation in between.

I did sketch a zigzag-arat yesterday, just because the play on words is so irresistible!

FACTOID: The Hanging Gardens of Babylon, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, was a zigurat.

Hour last week: 33

Decluttering

Just added a link to Rhonda Ganz’s new blog Get Rid of One Thing a Day, which is pretty self-explanatory. Rhonda has set herself the goal of doing this for a year, blogging about it and showing a picture of everything.

She lives in Victoria so for local people there is extra interest in following because she will accept donations to a girls’ school in Africa for stuff she doesn’t have a home for.

Last year I just know my average must have been one thing a day at least, but it was all crammed into a three-week fling and pack frenzy in Mesa. No way could I have taken a photo of every item, let alone blogged about it!

What, if anything, have I learned from all of this?

1) Replacement costs here are higher than I expected, even figuring in the exchange rate

2) Rubber stamps are even more expensive than that

3) Despite all the purging I have still given stuff to the Sally Ann here

4) I discovered a man’s raincoat which I brought thinking it was a woman’s coat that I would need

5) Someone used a really ugly orange crochet cushion as packing material

6) I nearly lost a pack of old, old family photos and did not even miss them until someone mailed them to me

7) I truly believe in baraka and paying it forward — we have been blessed with more stuff including a baby activity car, a silk blouse in my colours, a Marilyn Brooks “Insane Clown Posse” tunic, really cute fuzzy non-slips socks, and just today some extra teaspoons that are similar to what we have

8) Am learning to minimize knickknacks and have NO, zip, zilch, nada fridge magnets. It would be nice to pretend that the fridge is pristine and elegant a la June Cheever but that would be fibbing. But it’s all done with masking tape now, no magnetic fields, no choking hazards, no scratches in the enamel!

Tomorrow is dedicated to creating (and perhaps even completing, who knows!) My camera is going out of town but will post pix early in the week I hope.

Testing, Testing!

My first ever curved seam, believe it or not!

Think this will give me many possibilities for future quilts as well as the current challenge.

Beginning of challenge piece

Here are the front and back of a piece of fabric Susan Purney Mark distributed at our last FAD meeting. The challenge is to create a piece using this fabric that is ready to be photographed by the next FAD meeting in February. Susan CLAIMED that this was originally a really ugly fabric until she did things to it, which is hard to believe.

I scanned both sides of my piece because they are so different. Of course due to all the processes Susan had tried out on the fabric, everyone’s piece was significantly different.

Also printed the side at the top on a piece of ExtravOrganza. This will be in the piece somehow, not quite sure exactly how yet.

Have pulled out a bunch of other mottled/dappled fabs (and have not yet been into the green and purple bins!).

My thoughts are running on curved seams so I’ve made a practice piece using other fabrics because I don’t want any flubs using the “good” fabric. Will post a photo or scan of that later.

Off to my green bin I go!

Journal Quilt

This is my first journal quilt that approximates the smaller size for these pieces. It was made as the first exercise in Lily Kerns’ Quilt University class on Journal Quilts.

I was trying to express the idea of inner space and outer space by using some of the same elements inside and outside the head.

Space IS the final frontier, and that includes the space inside of us!

The white dots are cut from a home-made brocade skirt I found at a thrift store. Both front and back of the fabric are showing as I fused the right side of some and the wrong side of others.

Other materials/techniques are broderie anglaise, metallic fabric and yarn couched using Super Solvy.

IN OTHER NEWS >>>>

Perhaps because of the helpful telephone coaching I received from Quinn McDonald last week, perhaps because I was out and about interacting more with people than I had for a while, perhaps because the class started and I was looking forward to it, but last week I clocked in an impressive 43 hours and 15 minutes of work, both the bread and butter kind and the fun and creative kind!