Wednesday update

 It has been a good week here as I have manged a fair amount of sewing time.

 365 Quilt Challenge:  I have all the 3.5-inch dark blocks complete and have started on the last of the 6.5-inch lighter blocks.  The outer dark border is to be assembled, and until that is done, I have a self-imposed  "no more 365 blocks" until this happens.   The next block will be the fourth corner, and I'm itching to start on that!  The bottom of the small dark blocks in the middle was the very last small one.  The other is the terrible first, and second better attempt, on a pinwheel with mitred corners from an October 3-inch one.

 

 

Three finishes in the past week!

The pink hand-pieced Kawandi, started when in the UK in July, it's lovely and soft. 

 

 

The first quilt on the new-to-me frame, bound and ready to go my sister's school.

 

I have an ecletic collection of yarn, no more than one or two balls of each one, and asked P if he would like a jersey, and to pick the colour.  No pattern, just winged it in a crazy-patch type of arrangement.  Learnt a new way to join shoulder seams with three needles, very neat, and easy to undo when I had to unpick the front to lower the neck-line. (Reminder to self to knit in ends when changing yarns...not wait until the end and have at least fifty to do!)

The second top quilted, this is the pieced back.  My daughter C was here to test drive the machine and frame.  She started it yesterday and I finished it today.  We both still need to work on starts and stops!  More pictures will be taken when it is trimmed and bound.

 

 

And today I was invited to join the rest of the Schools' staff at the year-end function at the Clay Cafe.   This is my glaze painted vase-shaped ceramic base.  This will get oven fired and we may collect all the works of art in a few weeks time.  Colours will change with firing.

 

Small progresses hopefully towards future finishes

I very thankfully read the quilt blogs listed on the left every day.  (It's just about the only reading I seem to get to these days!)  Appropriately I sometimes laugh and sometimes get tearywith your stories.  Sometimes I am inspired to jot down notes for future blocks, or how I might engage with the accumulated fabrics.  I date these notes, and it might be years before anything happens.  I really appreciate the people who take the time (whether daily, weekly, or occasionally) write these blogs, sharing their quilting passions and their lives.  And this is not the seemingly mad sharing that sometimes exists on the more popular social networks.

Although this leads to my embarassment/guilt of not finishing much or not writing anything, not sharing, not taking enough process photos, I still have been steadily stitching these past few months.  So far this year, five new starts and no finishes!

The highlight in this time was, back in September, attending an awesome two-day workshop of combined lino-printing (onto fabric) and embroidery with two very talented artists, Cynthia Edwards and Danielle Clough.  Of course my piece is not yet finished, but it's the bottom left one in this group photo at the end of the second day.

First a photo of non-sewing.  The first two pictures up on the walls.  These are daughter C's school works from 25 years ago, I just love their whimsical nature.  A few more up since, but lots more to go.

Progress pictures of Bramble Blooms ll.  The flowers are applique'd to the borders and possibly still need stems, and then the borders to be stitched to the centre.

 

 

One of my plans this year was to try and get the 365 Challenge Quilt to a flimsy stage.  A concerted effort (but not quite every day!!!) has me up to mid November!  Finally all the 3-inch blocks are done.   Have pulled out the reserved fabrics to finish up the final 50+ blocks.

 

 

My new-to-me third-hand HQ Frame and Sweet Sixteen machine were levelled about a month ago, after languishing waiting patiently since I got them in August 2023.  And because I was challenged to just get the first one quilted...here it is on the frame.  A nervous wobbly start, and still need to co-ordinate the starts and stops, but NO thread breaks!  - what JOY! 

EDIT:  that orange print was in the first quilt I designed and made when pregnant with my daugther T, 43 years ago!  Think it's last bits, but fabric definitely does not go off!

 

And these last few photos are from the Little Quilts of Love made by some of the many local quilters contributing to this comforting project.   All are about 24-inch square.

Small finishes

Last night I tidied up the sewing space so that today I could move all the stuff that had accumulated on the quilting frame into the said tidied space!  Not having used the frame since the beginning of the year there was a fair amount of stuff.  Chucked out some it and felt good (eg the old iron with fusing stuck on it, that was keeping just in case I used fusing again, empty cardboard boxes from the new iron and lamp!).

I needed to reacquaint myself with the frame and machine, so cleaned and oiled and new needle in, loaded up a small quilt top we had made at our group back in March.  Just the thing to practice on.  It is not a computerised machine, so it is my shaky version of free-motion quilting.  Backing is a sweet brushed cotton contributed by Lindsay.  Only one disaster, breaking the needle off in my finger - no pictures of that, too gruesome, but no blood on quilt!  Put in the second new needle!  After this, I'm ready for the three school quilts!

 

And here are some other small fun things, a pair of socks that turned out a bit bigger than expected.  It's the first pair (and maybe last pair) of socks that I will knit!  My adult son says he'll wear them!  Knitted all in one from the toe up. 

And because there was some wool left (and plenty more in different colours), I figured out how to knit a 2" hexagon, and this I might make more of.  It was knitted on four needles from the edge to the centre.

And one last picture of the handprints of my sister and one of the teachers in her school, to go on the back of their class quilts:

 

One sample 6" block done for Bonnie's year-long leader-ender project.  I have lots of triangles cut, and have stitched quite a few of the 2" half-square-triangle elements that run diagonally in this block, and plenty of 2.5" squares from cleaning up scraps. It's not a race, but am curious to see how many I can make of these over the next year - I hope to have a least enough to make one single-bed size quilt (I was going to work out how many that may be, but decided not to think about it!).

UFO Progress

Today I managed to have the fourth UFO finish, one day ahead of the self-imposed dead-line! It is one of two quilt tops made from panel fabric I received at my quilt group's Christmas in July party (southern hemisphere winter!).

 

This was the first time of using the quilt frame as it should be, each layer on a separate roller.  The 6" throat space is a bit limiting, especially as I like the quilting to be a bigger scale so that the quilt remains softer.  It's really nice to have these simple tops to practice using the frame.  And this time gave my daughter T a chance to use it as well.  No prizes for the quilting on this one, but finished it is!

Quilt frame continued

In between preparing (ie taking out the stored stuff) younger daughter's bedroom for her return and collecting her from the airport today, I managed to get the leader fabrics on the rails of the quilt frame.  I also tried out the "new" machine, it sews fine, slightly noisier than the older one.  Have placed it on the frame... just got to think what to use to test it, seeing it is now nearly 10 pm!

View of sewing room from front hallway through french doors

View of sewing room taken through glassed-up serving hatch into what used to be our dining room

The process of assembling the frame yesterday was a curious business.  It came with a DVD, but no installation manual, and seller said watch the DVD at least twice.  Ok....  the video presumes you have the manual, so I spent about 3 hours watching, stopping, making notes and photographing laptop screen, plug phone in and extract photo, add to own document, which worked brilliantly (could not take a Print Screen, and because I still use Win XP, no snipping tool, and a snipping tool I found on-line didn't work either).  I am a firm believer in reading manuals, so not having one was frustrating.

Here are some of the photos!

Did also cut out the corner and setting triangles for the pineapple block quilt, and started to stitch the blocks in rows.

And sweetheart daughter brought me a beautiful piece of Australian print fabric she bought in Cairns about six months ago, and has kept for me until she came home.

Oh dear, just remembered that the pictures were again just snapped and uploaded - will try to remember to edit first next time!

And one last picture of the frame with the leader fabrics (which took about 90 mins to fit!) and the machine in place.