Around and Around

I really need to get better at stopping for the night and going to bed. I was doing okay tonight - I trimmed my last quilt a bit after 1.30, and packed stuff up. But while I was doing that I put on some Mythbusters, so since then I've watched two episodes of that as well as another two of The Big Bang Theory. While standing in the kitchen eating celery and philly cheese.

But my lack of accomplishment, even at sleeping, in the last two hours is balanced out by the fact that yesterday and today, I did pretty well. I have attached the binding on one side to two quilts, done a little more quilting on the Autumn Nutmeg quilt (still debating whether to in the ditch the diagonals or not) and made a back for, and quilted, the Mingle Star quilt.

The only additional fabrics from the two original bundles are the two blue fat quarters from the blue, orange and brown colourway. The two purple, two green and two brown (cut into strips) fat quarters are what wasn't used from the bundles on the top, and the little bits are what was cut off the edge of the fat quarters to make them square. So pretty much the only scraps I had are what got trimmed to make everything straight and right-angled.

This quilt is, for me, a tough one to quilt. I usually stick with edge to edge straight lines because they're nice and easy to wrangle, but with this one I go over the seams with the wave stitch, around and around the points of the stars. First I go up and down over the quarter block seams (each point is in a quarter block) and then I go across on the rows where the two blocks join, so that there's pretty much the equivalent of sewing every half block. At that point it doesn't need pins anymore, which is jolly good because you have to turn it soooo much.

I've drawn that as badly as possible so you can get a good idea of my turns. The blue line was sewn first, that's the up and down edge to edge line. Then, starting from the right, I sew down the middle of the block to the bottom of the star, turn and go around the star, and then keep turning and do a square inside the star, before continuing on from the bottom. You just keep going round and around, and I wouldn't want to do it on a quilt any bigger than this one (it's about 130x150cm, approx 50"x60") - each row (there's four for this one) took me about 25 minutes, most of which was probably spent turning the quilt the right way and making sure it fitted under (and around) the machine. But I do love how it looks - the quilting fits the blocks exactly in a way the straight line quilting rarely can. I even like the back, I wasn't sure I would because in the past when I did this quilt I just used a solid which showed up all my quilting. I think it looks like a flag. The flag of Quiltonia.

Now I need to find something to bind it in. I'll probably go a brown, but I've already got 3 half bound quilts that need finishing, so I'm in no rush.

My parents are off on holiday.

11.10pm:
Okay, I've checked facebook and the blog roll, now to get into sewing. Quilt the Autumn Nutmeg some more or work on Anna's flopchair?

12.10am (facebook status): 
I think whoever wrote "the devil went down to Georgia" did so purely to piss off people in cover bands.

12.45am:
Crap. I wasted all my sewing motivation making a cover for a friends flop chair. Now I feel like getting drunk, but that's meant to be my plan for Saturday. How long do I have to wait till the urge to drink passes and the urge to sew returns? I can't give up and go to bed now. It's not even 1am. I could do some ironing I suppose. Though that's not high on my fun list, it does need doing.

1am:
The great thing about strawberries and cream is that after you've dunked all your strawberries in the cream and eaten them, you then get to eat half a bowl of cream!

1.15am:
...ergh... note to self: don't eat bowls of cream.

1.30am:
That ironing didn't take as long as I thought it would. But now I have to clear the mess left by making the flop chair so I can lay out my blocks. That sucks.

1.45am:
Yep, I like that layout. It's a shame I couldn't have decided that a fortnight ago, because now instead of my increasing squares method of joining my blocks together, I have to sew it together row by row.

2.45am:
Impartially, yes, it seems quicker. But it's also harder, less accurate and needs way more pins. I suppose people need to do something quick to make up the time they've lost trimming all their blocks. Oh well, very patterned fabric, you can barely see my messy points.

2.50am:
Please someone save me from myself... I'm grooving to Redneck Woman. I don't even like this song, so I keep telling myself. Can someone remind me of that please? It's possible that blasting music in the wee small hours isn't the best idea.

2.55am:
What should I make next?

3am:
Hey, deepfryers's still out on the bench. Homemade chips it is.

3.10am (facebook post): 
The main problem with my parents going away on holiday I think is that it gives me free reign to stay awake all night playing bad music at inappropriate (for 3am) volumes. And then random puts on Gretchen Wilson, and I start grooving to Redneck Woman, even though I find that song quite irritating. Still, as Garth Brooks is telling me right now, I ain't going down till the sun comes up.

 3.15am:
Deep fryer is taking too long. I even had to peel the potatoes Bear Grylls style because the actual peeler is in the sink, and it's still not even halfway hot.

3.30am:
Chips are in the deep fryer. Coke in fridge is probably flat - should I crack open one of Casey's Bundy Reds?

3.40am:
Chips are ready. Deep fryer has apparently raised the temperature in the kitchen by .1°C. Have decided to go with Jamesons instead - I'm thinking of it as getting myself warmed up for the weekend. Might also actually warm me up - temp is still only 17.6°C in here.

3.50am:
Is it hypocritical of me to like the song Dirt Track Cowboys while hating the Speedway?

3.55am:
I've had one drink and I'm bored. Also, I normally only have one drink per meal. Drinking with food doesn't seem like a very effective method.

4.am:
Do you think Casey will get cross if I leave my quilt hanging in the window? She left lots of dishes in the sink...

4.05am:
Pictures!

Anna's chair cover on the bitchin' chair. Upholstery fabric left flecks of blue fluff everywhere.

Curtain shot. It's staying there for tonight, I think.

4.15am:
Geoscience Australia website tells me sunrise is not till 6.52am. It would seem that Garth Brooks is a liar... I was thinking it would be about 5.30ish. Guess that shows how often I'm up in the early mornings - I don't think I'll be staying up for this one either.

Just so you know, I did really do this blog post in real time, or within 15 minutes or so. I selected 50 songs or so and had them on random all night. Mum and Dad have left with Maddy for two weeks, and Casey's sleeping up their end of the house because it makes the dog feel better, so I can be as loud as I want, and noone will come and tell me to go to bed. And now that the top of Quilt # 49 is done, I've only got 1.5 other quilts to quilt and bind plus 3 more to bind, and it's onto #50. It's also 11 days till my one year of quilting anniversary, or 3 weeks till the anniversary of me having completed a quilt. Do you think I can get my scheduled WiPs and #50 done before then?*

4.30am:
Publish Post.

*I don't, but then, I thought it was at least a month ago that I was trying to sort the layout for the mingle stars quilt, and it was actually only half that. I need to go and pick up my layby'd batting tomorrow too.

Silver Linings.

Tonight started well (after I had spent an hour or three on eBay and watching The Queen.) I got around to steam ironing my half-star blocks, and I was thinking about doing a bit of sewing, until I stopped for a minute to put movies onto the tablet. And then I hit that point, you know the one, where you don't know if you can be bothered with sewing. But then you think "...but I really should..."

So you do. And it all turns to shit.

Yesterday I finished for the night after doing a bit of straight line quilting, with a stitch length of 4. So today I started piecing... with a stitch length of 4. After about 6 blocks I noticed and put it down to the 2.75 I usually use, but it's okay, because my sewing at the start was so rubbish I needed to unpick and do-over anyway.

So, silver lining there.

Not enough to keep me going though. I'm blaming Kelsey; her Egg Hunt was lovely, but the whole getting up in "the morning" part of it kinda sucked. There's a reason I work nights.

The reason I work, period? To buy stuff like this, which will probably go higher than I want to pay. I really need to stop deciding I really like fabrics that got released a couple of years ago. Instead, I may end up buying this, or possibly this.

Why the sudden interest in Layer cakes? Well, I can make a crazy, lots of different fabric-d version of my star quilt with a layer cake. And these are my favourites.

I've never used precuts (not including fat quarters, obviously) before. Could be interesting.

For the full ranges: Arcadia, Hello Betty* and Oh My**.


*Shay wants this one. I can tell.
**I'll probably get this one. It's quite nice - a good mix of brightness and funkyness.

I was feeling good about all this...

Is it weird that I'm simultaneously reading the new issue of Fat Quarterly and the Balls in the Bush forums? On the one hand, pretty pictures and precuts, on the other, drunken debauchery and rootin' in the back of the ute...

I suspect it would be weird for anyone else, but that's okay. I like being the only one with a hand made quilt in my swag.

Tonight, after getting the gunnas out of my system with a couple of hours of vintage boot browsing on eBay, I pieced two points of each star block into pairs, and then, when I couldn't be bothered going out to press the seams, I quilted one sixth of the the straight line quilting on the blue, green and purple there never was a nine-patch quilt.

I like to call them that, well, I think of them as that, but in all of my notes to myself I refer to them as no9 patch quilts because that's easier to type. But at no point while doing any of them (there has been four: Kelsey's, The quilt with no name, Helen's and The blue, green and purple one) did I ever actually make a nine-patch block before chopping it up. I made three-patch chains and chopped them, and then made what were technically six-patch blocks which I chopped up, but never a nine patch.

My ruler was too short at the time to cut it. Sad but true.

What else is sad but true is that 1/6th is only 16.5ish%

My achievements don't seem as satisfying anymore. I was gunna do more, but then I got and email duhdonk, and after that I remembered that I'd got the new issue sent to me, and then something or the other reminded me to check the Balls in the Bush website, and now it's been an hour and I suppose I won't be getting any more sewing done tonight.


Still, it's better than nothing.

So old it feels new...

After so long piecing backings without much pre-planning, and before that mainly piecing quilts by cutting long strips and sewing them together, it was nice to get back into the swing of chain piecing for my third mingle quilt.

This is, sorta, what it's gunna look like. I'll keep shifting the fabrics till I'm happy: I worked my way through dozens of variations already tonight.

I think my problem is that I'm not quite sure which fabric print is the one that most needs the even spread. Instinct tells me that it's the one with the dark brown stripe, surely, but when I'm shuffling them about I'm most concerned with not having the brown circles and the purple and green stripe together, which makes it a bit silly that I put one of them inside the other. Whoops. And then, looking at this picture, it's the dark green that stands out the most, so I'm a bit confused.

And what do I do when I'm confused? CGI rendering of course.

The shading is way off in that, because I just chopped squares out of the above photo and it's always darker at the top of the shot. But I like the more random* seeming one. I'll try it in real life tomorrow. I didn't want to sew my start blocks yet because I wasn't sure which one might end up in half, but I'm 99% sure it will be the ones shown in half there, no matter where all the others are. So that's about 14% sorted then.

In other news, I bought pair #2 of yesterdays boots, and I'm still seriously considering #3 and 4. I think this kinda progress deserves many new shoes, since I paid about that much for these fabrics.

*the pattern is actually almost as regular as the top one, just 180 swiveled instead of duplicated as is, with the center ones swapped so it wasn't touching itself*


*because eww.

I should probably have split this into two posts...

Firstly, I'd like to apologise for any aneurisms had on Sunday morning. When I pressed the publish post button, blogger told me that it had been scheduled for 5 minutes away, and I was too lazy to go back and make it post straight away. Then I fell asleep, without checking it had uploaded, and got a bit sad the next day that noone had said anything, but I figured it was just because I was being a grumpy bum, and it probably didn't deserve commenting on anyway. Then, when I went in to correct a typo on last night's post, I realised it was still there, labeled as a draft. I backdated the post and made sure it actually uploaded, and went to bed. I'm very sorry Helen, it was Blogger's fault, I promise.

Anyway, tonight, having bought myself a new cutting mat, I got started on my next mingle quilt. I hadn't realised it, but it's been ages since I chopped fat quarters up into neat little squares as a precursor to making blocks one at a time.

I gotta say, it feels inefficient. And after all that time pondering as I tried to iron out a not quite flat bit of strip piecing if it was actually any faster, what with having to do more cutting afterwards and all, I'm thinking it doesn't matter. Cutting (fabric) for two hours is almost enough to make you start cutting (emo style)

Still, my initial squares are all done now, so at least from here on out everything is perfect and regular.

This quilt design is odd, by my standards, since it actually contains no maths. None. At all. You cut four squares, the biggest you can from a fat quarter - I've gone 22cm, but honestly, there's no reason even to conform to whole numbers. Then you pick a point a little way from one corner along an edge, say, 5cm or so. Then you cut from that point to the middle-ish of the opposite side. You remove the small bit of fabric and go from the ghost point that would have been the 5cm or so (same as last time) from the corner in the other direction, and you go to the middle-ish opposite again. The only hard part is your ghost corner, but if you get a piece of paper, draw both lines, then cut one, and then the other, wallah! Templates. Then all you've got to do is shuffle around your insides and your outsides until you've got a design you like and sew it all back together, kite shape to short wedge, then attaching the long wedge to the side, lining up the wide bit with the top of the kite so that your overhang is the narrow bit, which you can then chop off without much waste. Doesn't even matter what your seam allowance is, so long as it's constant. Pretty much a perfect first quilt.

But it's not my first, it's going to be my 50th. Because, dirty little secret, this one was #38.5 - the quilt with no number*.

That's Graham. He's like a ninja, and it's very rare for he and I to cross paths.

This is the quilt I made for the Two Tyred Tutorial, and I'm glad I finished it on the weekend we actually won (please forward your insults regarding our Round 1 performance via the comments box) The colours above are the colours of the Hawthorn Hawks, an Australian Rules Footy team. Any non-Autralian readers should declare their support before Shay tries to woo you to the Adelaide Crows.

Anyway, as well as posting the instruction for this one, here's a quick little thing on how I usually bind quilts, when I'm not boring myself silly with hand sewing them on. I usually call this double wide binding, and it looks best on quilts that are straight line quilted on the machine. Go read this, and then I'll explain my changes.


Firstly, cut your binding 1/2 an inch wider than she says, or 1/2 inch wider than you usually would. I like 9cm, but I also put my needle to the far left so I get a wider binding.

Instead of pinning from the back, put your pins in the front, right up against where the batting folds back on itself. Try to keep a fairly constant amount of excess binding beyond where your pin passes through to the back, you want it to be a quarter inch or so.

Use a zipper foot - one of the ones that has the metal in the middle and open sides. This lets you get really really close to the edge - you want to be stitching into the ditch. Once you've gone the whole way around, tie off your threads.

Flip the quilt over. There should be a quarter inch or so of overhang to your binding. In some places it might be less, in some places a little bit more. Now sew that down from the back - when it gets narrower, you go in so you don't miss any of it, which you might have if you were sewing it blind from the front. I tend to not go out too far even on the bits where it's a bit wider - it makes for a straighter finish on the front if you only veer off in one direction.

Once you've done your full loop, tie off your threads.

The quilt from the front will look like this, with a narrow binding and a second line of quilting about a quarter inch from the edge, just like all the actual quilted lines where the seams have been echoed.

The back will look like this - binding a quarter inch or so wider than it is on the front, double sewn.

That's not brilliant explaining, I know, but despite the fact that this is getting published at 2.45, my body clock still thinks it's nearly 4am.

Damn You Daylight Savings!


*So we're disregarding it with regards to both my "finish half the WIPs before #50" and "do that one you've been gunna-ing since the beginning as #50" pledges.