The quilts so far...

I just went through and re-tagged a heap of posts, since I stopped putting quilt numbers at around #6.

#1 is the big rainbow quilt.

#2 is Maddy's quilt.

#3 is Levi's (friend from work's baby) quilt.

#4 will be Mama Jan's quilt, which got a number when it was in planning stages - that's how long it's been on the gunna list.

#5 is the retro quilt

#6 is the BlueGreen quilt

#7 is the purple quilt (not yet completed)

#8 is Esther's quilt

#9 is Dad's quilt cover (quilted, but not assembled)

#10 is my wonky Mingle mini quilt.

#11 is what came to be known as the Bubble and Squeak mini quilt (which has also gone to live with Esther, not that it will ever get used because I tied a bow around it in matching fabric and Helen thinks it's too pretty to unwrap)

#12 is the Honeycomb quilt I finished today.

Now I need a way to put that somewhere I can remember it - on the sidewall or something.

Wooooo! Tax Cheque!

Got the BlueGreen finished late last night, but worked all afternoon and haven't had a chance to wash it yet.

Discovered that doing a smokeshop close is an excellent opportunity to get your Quiltmath done - just get some of yesterday's reports form the recycle bin and do your sketches and calculations on the back of them - you pass the time, look vaguely like you're doing something important (keep it all in code, then say its shelf layouts) and don't have to do at at home, when you could be doing something more important. Not the quilt though, (which is a test using the cheap cotton quilt you bought at target as batting and are hoping works well, so you can go back and buy a lot of, because they are $10 cheaper and a lot bigger than the regular quilting batting) cause it turns out you needed 1.25m of each fabric, not .75m.

But its not so bad, because my tax cheque is here! Why doesn't firefox want me to spell cheque like that? Ah, Wikipedia says that Americans spell it "check." Silly Americans.

So, I will be off to spotlight in the morning to redeem my $20 discount for spending $80, buying .5m more of each of my 4 purples, as well as .8m of something for binding, 2m of something for main backing and .6m of 2 contrast backings for the piecing. As I'm making it out of $4/m clearance fabrics, that will be waaaay not enough to make the $80 total, (it comes out a bit over $20) but I can fill out the other $60 with stuff I don't really need, because my tax cheque is here! And it's really big! And even after I spend $500 on my car's rego which I have timed brilliantly to take advantage of my tax cheque) its still heaps!

In other news, I discovered that the Jelly tots sold in specialty stores in Australia are different to the ones in England, ie. they taste shit, and I'm hugely bummed about this fact, especially as my sister just bought me 5 bags. Basically the difference is they they are all artificially favoured, and even though I may have said that 25% fruit juice is way fruitier than I remember, at least it is fruity, whereas the bag I opened last night tasted like plastic. Also a bummer is that the seller I bought the last lot off of says that the combined postage discount is a mere 20p (about 35c) per 8 bags, which is a bit of a rip off, so I have emailed the other seller of jelly tots on eBay, who have no Australian postage costs listed, to see what they can do for me. I've asked for 36 bags.

And I've just remembered that I have an Aunt (Liz) holidaying in England right now. Sweeeeet.

Okay, she's been facebooked. I believe it's late afternoon over there, so here's hoping.

In the meantime, it's a craftalong at one of my other Aunt (Helen's) house tomorrow afternoon. I'll take the retro (which is in dire need of a wash) and the blue/green (I'll put them in together in the morning while I go shopping) as well as the make life bundle, and we can work out how big she wants her baby quilt.

Finally, as well as my nice big tax cheque, I got a 4 fat quarter bundle in the mail today, not much compared to what I'm waiting on, but at least it tided me over for the day and stopped me dashing down to spotlight before I'd done my math.

FML.

Finished the quilting, and liking it very much. It's so much more ripple-y than the others, and that's totally what I wanted. It hasn't even been washed yet.


Even close up, where you can see than not every line has the same tautness, or wave length, and that some of the seams have been pulled off line a bit my the machine, I'm loving it. I wish they were all a bit baggy, instead of just some of them.


So I got it all trimmed and started pinning the binding to it...


Fuck my life.

And a real post too...

I did some free motion tests. They didn't go well. If I had to pinpoint a reason, I would say the foot does not go down far enough to get a good hold, making my movements super jerky. If there was more loft, this wouldn't be a problem, but it is.

Also put the walking foot back on, and I'm not a huge fan of that either. I just don't see the point, when my pull feed method works fine for me, it's way less bulky and I don't strain a muscle lifting the foot up. But my second test makes me fairly sure I'm going to wavy line straight quilt the blue/green quilt. I did an around and around with the regular foot and it bunched up a bit at the tight corners, but on the top, not the bottom, which was annoying, as it would mean quilting upside down for a nice finish. So monodirectional it is, and real binding also.

But not tonight. Despite my day off, and lack of any real achievement (basted and tests done, when I was hoping to have at least started to quilt) I'm beat. I did get an entire book read today, as well as about 20 CDs copied for my father though, so it's been a big day mentally, if not physically.

Time for bed... was 2 hours ago...

It's nearly 4 am and I have run out of pins, halfway through my basting. I'm sure I've got another magnet full of them somewhere, but I do believe it's time to call it a night.

I did a cute bit of piecing for the back - the fabric is a (mainly) green with a (little bit of) blue stripe which I've put going up and down. I did 3 little lines across about 20cm from the bottom about 5 cm high each, 2 cut horizontal strips of the blue section of the stripes on top and below a strip of the fabric I'm using for the binding, and then one column about 25cm wide with the lines going horizontal instead of vertical and 4 short strips of the binding fabric in it.

I took a picture, but the camera is on the other side of the room, and I'm half in bed.

I also downloaded the Fat Quarterly today, that online magazine thingie that varies in price every time, because even though I get the impression that it's Australian, it's sold in US dollars. Weird. But anyway, they were talking about beginning free motioning, and said pretty much exactly what I said last night - that you need to do it on an actual project otherwise you wont try and it'll look terrible and you'll give up. So, after I sleep, and get up, and find my pins, and finish basting, I'll be rolling the quilt back up again, and re-discovering my laptop sleeves. They were what I quilted before I quilted quilts, but I did them with wool wadding, and in straight lines. I still have some cuts of wool wadding, and even though it feels very different to the bamboo, (it's stiffer, and the bamboo has way more static cling) it's a good place to start.

And now it's attacking it's mother. Again...

The blue/green quilt top is all finished, and next up it's designing and piecing the back before I get to my big freak out about the quilting. I have decided, for no obvious reason, that I would like to free motion this one. I'm sure that I could talk myself out of it without too much effort, but I would need an alternative. I want:

-evenly spaced quilting
-no big gaps (aiming for not more than 2" apart)
-no/very few line crossovers

Stippling remains the obvious choice, but thus far, I have sucked. I am a regular person, (in that I like regularity, not that I am normal,) and I struggle with the forced aimlessness of a meandering line. Ive downloaded a whole heap of examples, and I'm considering printing them out and pinning them on, but it seems like an awfully large amount of work.

What I really should do is come up with some sort of practice piece that I could work on, but I struggle to develop skills on practice pieces. I tend to not bother trying to hard, because it doesn't matter anyway. The only way for me to learn how to do something is to actually do it, for real, with the expensive fabrics on the almost completed projects.

And, for obvious reasons, I don't want to do that. Practices so far have yielded many sharp corners and stitches of varying lengths, as my free motion foot seems quite light, almost as if it's a bit too high up after the nice firm pressure of the regular foot. I just feel much more confident when the fabric is being fed through for me, and that means my normal foot, and that means the gorgeous wave stitch. I could probably come up with some kind of big, nestled wave thing done in it, that might look nice. Maybe if I did say 6 of them in a grid across the whole thing, something like this...


That's 3 lengths of stitching, and the little wave stitch on my machine will make it look less structured than it is. The only problem will be the sheer amount of turning I will have to do.

Oh well. Baby steps.

In other news, I just spent $60 on mainly Odyssea fabrics on eBay, to do a quilt for my dad's new boat. Quilt Bribery - it's my way of getting to keep Babycat. Though I'm not sure why I want to, as it's taken fully fifteen minutes to type this last paragraph due to the vicious furball sitting on the keys and attacking my fingers.

Ungrateful little shit.

Yes, or nu, nu, nuh, No? (it's a Meatloaf reference)

The dollar is still improving, and that makes me happy.

There was no fabric in the mail today and that made me sad.

But Lincraft had 50% off fabric today.

But it was 1 metre minimum cut, so I only got 2 fabrics (a rainbow to stash and a green and blue stripe for backing)

So I guess that's a draw then.

In other news, I've done the quarter blocks for the bluegreen quilt (which is number 6, due to Mama Jan's barely started quilt already having gotten a number) and I'm trying to sort out the design. I originally had a regular repeating one that looked very nice in my blue and green paint document, but in the real world, in 15 different fabrics, it wasn't so good.

So I'm trying to sort out a randomized pattern, but randomness has never been a strong point. I fluked it with my first quilt, but a) there were hundreds of squares left over and b) there's parts of it where I wish I'd done stuff different, to the point where I'm not even fond of looking at it too closely.

Here's how it is so far, out on the lino.


Not a great photo, since in real life it's way brighter, and for some reason, the green is way more prominent, so prominent that Casey has referred to it as "snotty".

I've shifted bits here and there for the two hours, but I'm still not entirely happy. There's one fabric that's used twice as much as the rest, and it's hard to not get it next to itself. I've got it down to one touching corner, but the blocks aren't the same, and that's the main thing. Every time I decide to move one bit I end up moving a whole heap, so at some point I'll have to suck it up and just go with where its at now.

In other news, I'd kill for some apple juice. But I wouldn't drive into town and go to the servo for some. Why is that?

Actually, maybe I will. I'm not working tomorrow. I can do what I want. I'm not 27 anymore (that's a psych reference, it being Thursday and me having a new episode and all) so maybe I will.