#NotDead (Sherlock Style)

First up, Hi, #NotDead :)

Next up, don't worry that you've missed out on a sea of epic quilts during my hiatus - I have made like, 3. One I made while drunk. The other I gave to its recipient before I remembered to take a photo and the other one is the reason for the "like" earlier on in that it's still in bits, the nephew it was being made for turning one in a fortnight. But whatever.

Because I am a crazy person, as well as still working 30 hours a week and doing foundation studies full time online at uni this year, I've just committed to making THREE 1200 piece pixel art quilts. Like I said, crazy person. They need to be in Georgia, USA, by mid September. I have done the design work on one so far in an epic, 7 hour, hate filled flurry that resulted in me getting 4 hours of sleep last night. I need to move quick, because this is the kind of project that will make me uuuurrrrrggggghhhhIgiveup if I don't see actual results soon. And I have a wedding and a 10 day honeymoon (bride and groom not invited) and school and work and a social life and at least two large scale scavenger hunts* between now and then.

Tonight I will do the counts for the first one and order the Kona. Prelim maths suggests a need for at least four and a half metres for the top alone, with a final size of 1.35x1.8m. Thank fuck it's in solids - even at $8 a metre these will probably cost me around $100 each, and that's before long arming. 

All this being said, I'm thinking I might actually just Beyoncé the damn things. Of course, saying that I'm doing them means they aren't a true Beyoncé, but then again, this isn't an album that will go multi-platinum with no advertising whatsoever. This is just some quilts. But I'll try and at least do some write ups for me to drop after the fact, including a tute on the actual design of the quilts, since that's the bit that is actually difficult. Y'know, if it doesn't make me smash myself over the head with a laptop before then.

*I've just remembered that I also made a quilt out of socks for a scavenger hunt last year but technically it wasn't a quilt, it was just socks sewn together (the definition of a quilt being batting sandwiched between two layers of fabric and sewn through) but I don't think the people running it really knew that much about quilting because we got the points even though it was technically only a sock quilt top. I slept under it at Longy BnS last year. Good times.

I hereby declare Wednesday to be non sequitur day!

Today I decided I would sit outside for an hour. I did, I finished a book, and I made a point of breathing in and out quite hard. It didn't really help with anything, but I felt better for having done it. Having asthma and a nose that doesn't really work very well I don't consider myself to be particularly good at breathing, and I'm an inside/nighttime person too so I don't get much fresh air either. By Mt Gambian winter standards the weather today was quite nice, and since I'm still off work, I figured I'd go for it.

The nice doctor man made me wait for 40 minutes and pay him $60 so that he could tell me that I do actually have laryngitis, and to give me a piece of paper that made a giant robot pharmacist poop out a little bottle of pills for me. Apparently my voice should be back by Saturday, which means I have to go back to work on Saturday.

I'll probably be crazy by then. Weirdly, even my inner monologue appears to have lost it's voice. I'm talking to myself, mentally, soooo much less than I normally do. I'm freaking myself out with the awkward silences between me and me.

I appear to be quite badly allergic to shar-pei fur. A friend had hers out tonight and I ended up with a rash all up my forearms when I carried it to the car. Sucks, cause it's cute as.

Mixed Berry Mini-Wheats are a huge disappointment. I lived on the Strawberry ones in year 12, but they got discontinued and I had to switch to blackberry. The mixed berry ones only just showed up at our store, and I was toats excited, but the flavour is a bit too... If I say warm, that makes no sense. The blackberry flavour is sharper and stronger. The mixed berry one reminds me of juice that's been out of the fridge too long. It let me down.

It's hard to find graph paper this time of year, and Maddy "borrowed" most of my stash, leaving me none with which to design a nicely balanced wrapped-candy block, or calculate sweet, sweet maths to make it.

I had a go with some lined paper and a pencil, but I think the centre box needs to be a bit bigger - I don't want it to go all the way to the edge though, possibly if I had half sized squares I'd go to the next one out. And I don't know how to assemble it yet, or what colours to use. Graph paper is magical, and it would have the answers for me.

I need to find some graph paper.

Naw, damn...

I've been in a bit of a quilting rut lately, and since even though Comic Con's over, the internet is still getting fuller every day with interesting new videos and articles, any attempts at having a play around at designing something new in Paint got repeatedly sidetracked by my "maybe I'll just check google's new video feed..." attitude.

So I broke out the graph paper and textas. After a couple of goes with nothing lining up I got the sizes of the rectangles sorted so that the edges of any potential quilt would be fairly level, and went to colour it in, and was doing the very bottom right hand corner...

And fucked up the colouring. On Paint I could just ctrl+z and then make the bottom corner rectangle pink, and then colour in the white square green, but in real life, I don't even have wite-out...

Also, to make it without doing T seams, you'd need to put a seam through the centre of the rectangles, and I don't want to do that (nor do I want to do T seams) so unfortunately, I can't actually make it either.

Still, it's kinda pretty.

Huh...

Kindly, in lieu of absolutely nothing, blogger has started working on the desktop again. Which is lovely. It might be to do with the new version of firefox. I'm not sure how I feel about it; the new tabs bringing up old tabs is a bit weird, but it pales in comparison to the changes on firefox for android, which left it pretty much unuseable to me today until I worked out that tabs were now at the top.

I'm dumb sometimes. Of course tabs are at the top. It was weird when they were on the side. This makes more sense. But it took me ages to figure out.

Still, it was easier than working out the maths for the whole HSTs-at-the-end-of-rectangles thing. But I've got it down pat now. For centimetres at least. When it comes to inches, I'm as useless as I was when it came to finding a new tab.

Even I don't know...

Forgive me if I come off sounding bonkers, but tonight I had a theory:

I'm pretty good at getting nice matching points. That's not my theory, it's just a background statement. As is this - I also don't quilt in inches.

Now, I know correlation doesn't imply causation. But the fact remains, I use sketchy maths, usually done my me either at 3am or sneakily at work, and an inconstant seam, that may or may not be about 7.5mm (since I've never actually measured it) and there's often a bit of seam that ends up sticking out further or less than the one on the other side. And yet, I still, without trimming, usually end up with pretty neat points.

Granted, I do pin all my seams, and there's often a bit of ease stitching going on, but I'm thinking (here's the actual theory) that since I've never been beholden to the idea of the accurate or scant quarter inch seam, I've never been ashamed to have my seams be wider or narrower, if it means having a nicely matching point. My HSTs in particular - the back of the top, if you were to look at it before it were quilted, is often really haphazard looking, with seams that appear to be very uneven. But from the front, so long as the seams are wide enough to not fray (and with a start seam over a millimetre wider than a standard imperial seam, I'm usually fairly confident that they'll hold even if they're a bit under) it'll look better from the front that it would have had I been focused solely on my seams maintaining that accurate quarter inch.

I'm not sure what the point to this theory is, other than to point out, as I occasionally like to do, that metric is the measurement of the future, and that while a base 12 may be divisible neatly by 4, maybe the creative abandon that comes from the uncertainty inherent in a decimal place can be an obviously beneficial part of the artistic process. That one sometimes has to be wrong to be right.

Or maybe it's just that I'm drunk*.


*clearly, I'm not drunk. Drunk people don't write sentences like that second-to-last one, which I'm proud to say is probably the most pontificational bullshit I've written since high school. Maybe someone should slap me?

A sad, sad day.

Is it possible that there is some kind of peak physical quilting condition? That we are like athletes in training, only without commentators, or sponsors, but that we end up with something prettier than a medal at the end?

I only ask because tonight I did about 2 hours quilting, and was going to do more, but I was starting to ache. The ironing, the cutting, the chain piecing, it was all just making me sore, so I stopped half-done. It would appear that lounging around for the last week watching True Blood has left me badly out of quilting-shape.

Granted, it's one of the most complicated designs I've ever done, in terms of having quiltmaths even I struggle to understand and some very odd points, but I have to admit it. I got lazy. I lost my edge.

Either that, or I'm right about the new fridge being evil and sending out gamma rays to weaken my super-quilting-powers.

I don't trust that fridge. It's too white.

R.I.P. old fridge. I miss you.

Yay.

I have a disappointing lack of yellow in my stash. I didn't realise it till tonight, when I needed some. I found two nice yellows, that worked okay in my bundle, but I only had a fat quarter of one, and 30cm of the other. I chopped and changed my bundles, trying to make it work with one of the brighter yellows that I had enough of, but they all looked weird. I needed a dusky yellow, that wasn't too lemon-y. And I needed to be able to get sixteen 10cm squares and eight 15x17cm rectangles from it.

Eventually I found two matching straggly bits in my corner pile of random bits, and - Yay. It took a diagram for me to work it out, but you can get the bits I need from a 50cm square and a slightly-more-than-15cm strip. Hurrah for the quiltmaths :)

Is there a word for wrinking your nose up at something?

Sometimes, you come up with a nice pattern, and you pick a nice bundle of fabric, and you sew it all together, and it looks like shit.

We were discussing at work how it would be expected that if you had two people working, twice as much work would get done, when actually, two people are going to be too busy having fun, resulting in half as much work being done. I don't know if that's how it is with what I'm trying at the moment, but so far, it's a psychadelic mess.

Still, I'm learning the tricky quiltmaths of a HST at the end of a rectangle. So I'm quilting for Science!

And sometimes, Science isn't pretty.

Babies, Trucks, Crappy Poetry and Head-Devouring-Moss.

Meagan had her baby (around 4.30pm, Thomas James, 8 pounds 1, 51.5cm) and cause he's a boy, I'm getting started on my "if it's a boy" quilt - based on this pattern called On The Road Again, since her fiancee is a truck driver. It needs a fair few changes though - the bonnet is too long (trucks have shorter heads here - many have no bonnets at all) and the gap between the truck and the trailer is too big and in Australia semi-trailers need to have at least 3 axles, so there's not enough wheels for it to be road legal.

And that led to this:

Scanned copies, so I can draw all over them.

Which led to this:

Trucks are big,

Quiltmath is hard,

If you expect a rhyme,

You'll be disappointed.

Having done the basic math, if not the cutting layout, I spent the rest of the night sitting in front of the fire crocheting. I even finished a beanie.

Unintentional crimes of fashion. Whatcha gunna do?

It looks horrible - like a killer moss is eating my head. Still, it helped me get a good idea of how much decreasing to do to get a nice curve, and since the next one I've started is using a fluro-pink and white 8-ply, I have somewhat higher hopes. I mean, you've gotta love a fluro and white combo.

Because I haven't done anything exciting tonight, either.

The Blue and Grey HST quilt, bound and washed, chilling out in our incredibly photogenic woodshed. I'm thinking I might photograph all the quilts I still have out here over the next few weeks.

Detail section of the back of the math quiltlet - I sewed the first night's work with white cotton, because the only black thread I had was poly and I didn't want to risk it melting, knowing how much ironing I had to do on it.

What I've been doing tonight: crocheting in my unique, cackhanded way. Clarification: I'm not a lefty, instead, I'm SOOO righty that I can't even have the thread wrapped around the fingers of my left hand, because it all gets tangled and stuck. I'm going to try make myself a beanie, when I get to the point of decreasing, I'll just skip a stitch occasionally.

I've had a fairly big day:

I bought some fabric.

Half price, and then another $40 off of a $100 spend meant this $200 pile cost me $60

I bound a quilt.

I realised last night that it's easier to try out tricky stuff If you use boring stuff as a run up. I'd already made the binding, so it just needed attaching.

And I finished piecing the math quilt.

I quilted it too, but it didn't photograph well.

I also did some other shopping, ate quite a lot of food, had some spontaneous visitors, took about 1000 photos (I'm gunna write up properly how I do my binding) and, as I said above, I've quilted the math quiltlet - just boring, evenly spaced vertical lines. I've cut the remaining rainbow fabric into strips to bind it, and a bit of fabric to make a hanging tube.

I'm pretty happy with my efforts.

Bravery

Do other people write their blog posts in their heads while they're doing the sewing, only to get to the computer an hour or so later and find that it's all gone?

I had some brilliant thing going about throwing off the shackles of fear, and I was going to lead us all into a mighty revolution of zip setting, curved piecing and working with stretch fabrics. It was going to be a brave new world, but maybe some other day.

It came from an honest place though - tonight, I was brave. But first I finished the top of the Every Which Way quilt.

I ended up getting a slightly bigger bit of batting anyway, since I like to pull my tops pretty taught over the batting.

And once that was done, I decided to get into something I've been thinking about doing for a while, but have been too scared to have a go at.

It's not paper pieced. For that, you press to the sides, and I like my seams split. So I drew all my shapes on some paper, cut them out, traced them onto another piece of paper with .75cm seam allowances and then sewed them together freehand. There's currently 42 pieces there, and it still needs the brackets and the radical sign (The √ square root symbol) and the borders and such.


In case you were wondering, it's going to be the equation you use to work out how big your squares are if all you know is c - the length of the long side of your half square triangle.



I can highly recommend being brave though. After all, it's only fabric, and you might do a really good job with it.

Favourite Things Everywhere

A couple of nights ago I paired together a four-patch block with a quarter-square-triangle block (is that its actual name?) and quite liked the results. And today before work I picked 4 colours on my Kona Card (Pear, Mango, Peacock and Taupe) and did some very basic preliminary maths, figuring that I could get a baby quilt from 50cm of each and a decent lap quilt from 75cm of each. And then, because it was Thursday late night shopping, I went to Spotlight in my meal break. And they had 50% off all their quilting fabric (till Sunday, apparently).

I'm putting favourite things in bold. It's 5am Friday now, and that seems Friday enough for me.

I only got 50cm each of the solids I picked, and the green is the only one that comes close to it's Kona counterpart. The orange is more melon-y, the blue more aqua-y and the grey - well, taupe is a light brown.

Back at work tonight, and I got some huge angst going on over my quilt math. How do you calculate how much bigger you need to make a square if you're going to make it into quarter square triangles and sew them back together? Is it two lots of your diagonal seam width (because if you did a half square triangle, and then did it again in the opposite direction, wouldn't it get the same amount smaller both times?) or is it only one (because each seam is measured one way, just like they are with the regular four patch?)

Turns out it's only once (yay knowledge!) but I only found that out by actually doing it, and having all my blocks be 1.8cm too big. But I took a pretty picture of my trimmings with Instagram.

Doesn't it look like delicious, rainbow linguine?

Because I got held up trimming, (and also with reliving the music of 1999 on youtube) I didn't get all my blocks sewn together, which is why in this photo, none of the points appear to match up. My batting should fit exactly to the top once it's all joined together, but at the moment, it needs 6cm of overlapping.

I'm calling it Every Which Way because even though they're not technically arrows, they kinda look like them. And once I see one of them as an arrow, I start seeing them all as arrows, pointing in every direction. I just don't know what good stuff they're telling me to pay attention to next.

Based upon the position of this on the floor in the lounge, the green is pointing to the kitchen, where today I ate some delicious chicken rice, the grey is pointing to the couch, where tonight after work I had garlic bread and watched the season final of New Girl, and the blue points to my bedroom, where I'm currently sitting on my bed eating some cadbury fingers.

Maddy (little sister) claims the white ones "changed her life" which is probably a bit superlative, but I will admit, they make my tongue very happy.

And there's a slew of things to keep the rest of me happy while my tongue's occupied, from books on my phone to clicky pens to nail clippers to funny, funny tumblrs.

The Lattice Quilt - Cutting and Assembly Instructions

Having now done this quilt 3 times, I'm fairly confident that it's all sorted. The first one I was hacking up my fabric randomly, making it up as I went along, the second time was a bit better, and the third time it all came together flawlessly. The instructions for a quilt cut from yardage come to approximately 135cm, one made using a layer cake will be approximately 155cm, with a narrower border than shown.

If you are cutting all the fabrics yourself, first you will need 36 rectangles measuring 20x10cm (4x8") I cut these from 18 fabrics, and used the rest of the width of the fabric to cut a strip to make a scrappy binding, but it could be done with less fabrics - if you have twelve prints cut three of each, if you have nine, cut four from each.

From 1.8m (2 yards) of solid background fabric, first cut across the width of the fabric five strips 20cm (8") wide, then cut these strips into 25 squares, five across the width of the fabric.

Next, cut 2 strips 30cm (12") wide, then cut these into 6 squares, 3 across the width of the fabric. From the edges of the strips, cut six 10cm (4") squares.

From the remainder of the fabric, cut four squares of 16cm (6.5") and six more 10cm (4") squares.

Finally, cut your 30cm (12") squares and your 16cm (6.5") squares into HSTs.

If you are using layer cakes, you will need at least 18 squares of print (cut in half) and 34 squares of solid - 25 remain whole, six are cut in half into twelve HSTs and three are quartered into 5" squares.

Lay your prints out or up on your design wall to get a layout you like. I just put mine randomly.

Add the little squares in the corners.

Add the big squares in the gaps, as well as one at the outside of every print.

Sew the pieces together into diagonal rows and press the seams. There will be two pieces at either edge that wont be sewn yet.

Sew the rows into pairs with their neighbour of the same length. The centre row will remain on it's own. Press the seams

Attach a large HST to the ends of each row, with the right angle matching the edge of the printed fabric. There will be a slight overhang on the edge of the solid fabric. Trim this off after pressing. If you are using Layer Cakes, the opposite will happen - the triangle will not reach to the edge of the strip. The jagged edges left over by the original squares will be trimmed down after the top is completed.

Sew all your rows together and press the seams. If you are using Layer Cakes, trim the points from the edges - the squares in the corners should contain enough fabric to be trimmed to right angles at the same line as the low edges of the HSTs.

Sew the remaining four HSTs to the corners.

Tada! Very simple, Very quick quilt top.

I haven't yet made a back or quilted mine, but I'll update with some photos when I do.

Working with what I've got.

It turns out, there's a lot of rainbow stripes in my stash - two thirds of this bundle were just sitting there waiting, and there were 6 more that got taken out and replaced for a variety of reasons.

I'm thinking of doing the Lattice quilt with rainbow stripes and a blue background, just because I'd like to see what it would look like. I'm also thinking of doing it with 4 repeating solids, on a very dark grey, but I'm very slowly writing up a list of solids that I need next time I do a fabric shack order, and frankly, it's not urgent. The light blue of the background is a Prima from Spotlight, and it's a near perfect match to Kona Aqua.

Oh, and if you thought yesterday's maths was hard to understand, this is how it was actually worked out - on the bottom of a cardboard jewellery box, 2 square inches, because I couldn't find any paper handy.

And no, I didn't get any binding done...

Everybody, feel free to ignore this post. It's just the math for the Lattice quilt, in a place where I won't lose it, and can access it from my phone.

To make smaller quilt (as per blue and green) Approx 145cm square.

In prints:
cut rectangles 20cm x 10cm. Total of 36 (18 prints cut 2, 12 prints cut 3, 9 prints cut 4)

From 2 yards (1.8m) of solid:
cut 25 squares 20cm x 20cm (5 across width of fabric)
cut 6 squares 30cm x 30cm (3 across width of fabric) then into 12 HST
cut 2 squares 16cm x 16cm, then into 4 HST
cut 12 squares 10cm x 10cm (from rest of previous strip, and offcuts of 30cm squares)

Sew diagonal rows of squares and rectangles in pairs, except for centre row, which stays on it's own. Add large HSTs to ends of paired rows. Join all rows into top. Add small HSTs to corners. Wallah.

Oh, and for future reference, to calculate the length of a side when all you know is the hypotenuse of a HST; √(c²÷2)

Meagan: Don't look.

Have you seen those surveys that the big quilting websites occasionally do? The ones where they ask you what type of quilter you are, how experienced you are, what fabrics you like.

I'd like to add a couple of questions to the bottom of that, because I think we'd all like some insight into how anal we are compared to all the other quilters.

Firstly: how far off does a point have to be before you will unpick it and do it again? This question needs to be asked twice too I think, since it's different for prints and solids. Prints I'm usually cool with anything up to 3 or 4mm, but solids it's less than 2mm. I think that's reasonable. 4mm is surprisingly large.

Secondly: how many times are you willing to unpick a seam before you just set the whole damn thing on fire? And does this number start off small and get bigger (as you've put in more effort and therefore care about finishing it) of start big and rapidly shrink (as you lose patience and your head explodes)?

I ask because tonight, everything turned to shit. My maths was wrong (shame), my very first piece I cut was 5mm too small, I did the HSTs perfectly but then as soon as it came time to sew together the squares, I sewed along the wrong side, realised, unpicked them, sewed them again, pressed them, discovered the aforementioned wrongness in the maths (each small block was 3.75mm too big), unpicked it again, trimmed them all down, sewed them all back together again, pressed them, realised I really shouldn't have trimmed the medium sized blocks too, unpicked them, sewed them with a narrower seam allowance to make up a few spare milimetres, pressed them and ease sewed them to the now only 2.5mm too big large squares. At this point, the universe clearly realised that it had taken the joke a little bit too far, and let me finish the rest of the quilt in peace.

Thank god it's a) really pretty and b) what should be a really quick quilt. Had I not screwed up pretty much every single thing it was possible to screw up, I think I could have almost had it done in a bit over an hour - as it was it still took under 3, and there was a lot of unpicking to be done.

It's pretty small, about 1m by 1.1m. Baby sized.

Tomorrow I have to come up with a back for it. There's still quite a bit of the green and both blues (maybe a fat sixth?) and there's the half metre of purple I decided to not use. I might do all cool colours on the back, and I'm going with grey for binding.

Ow

Do other people get pin finger? Or are they smart enough to own and use a thimble?

Anyway, I obviously pinned too much last night (shoes get kinda thick) and now the tip of my index finger is all sore and it hurts too much to pin anything.

So, naturally, to ease my sorrow, I went shopping. I was looking for a red and white stripe to add to a potential bundle and found a nice one at Stitch and Knit.

That solid is an off-white. It looks yellow. Anyway, once I'd added the red stripe, I had to take out a blue and a green, because they didn't look right anymore. So I made them into a new bundle, which coordinates very nicely with some John Deere fabric I bought for a backing.

But it seems a bit boy-ish. As does this bundle of Groove fabrics I bought at Stitch and Knit - They were $10p/m with a 30cm minimum cut.

But really, I've got 5 days to make a gender neutral baby quilt and a sea of fabric-choice-indecision. So after I'd given up on making bundles and auditioning maths, I packed up for the night, before spontaneously deciding to sew together some of the HSTs that have been hanging about since I cut waay too many making the big pinwheel quilt. 

I've done some tentative maths, and I need more white. Which means I'll probably accidently buy lots yet again.

Indecicively definite.

It's very rare for me to have a go at a non-repeating quilt design, but that's what I did tonight.

First I did some scribbling on paper. This is rare for me, but it's back-to-school season, so I had some graph paper.

Then I put it into the computer for the colours. I had EQ on my old laptop but I never used it. I'm a bit unused to old-style MS Paint (mainly the fact that you have to go through menus to zoom) but it's still nice and uncomplicated.

Shift colours and diagonal lines on little squares for about 3 hours.

Write colours on little diagram.

Finally, work out maths. This is, as always, the easiest part. After 3 hours of colour indecision, it was so nice to get into the bit that had definite right answers.

You know what else is definatelly right? Day off tomorrow! Yay!

Maths. So much maths.

If it's hard knowing at what point a scrap is big enough to keep, it's even harder working out at what size a scrap is worth going to extra effort to make.

The quilt that I'm currently mathing out is for Meagan's unborn baby. Today I went to Spotlight and added 3 more solids to the pile, making a total of 15. Two blocks of each colour makes 30 blocks (a number I like because it's 5x6)

More to the point though, each of these blocks will generate a scrap piece measuring 3x7cm, but, if I cut the two blocks of each fabric at once, I can make a combined scrap of 6x7cm, and that seems like a useable size. But is it useable enough to have to warrant measuring out a 64cm long piece of fabric, and then cutting it into strips, when I only have a 57cm long cutting board and a 60cm ruler? At what price effort?

Well, actually at this price effort:

91x110 (aproximate number of square cm of fabric in a yard) = 10,010

6 (dollars, rough price of a yard of fabric) ÷ 10,010 = 0.0006 (dollars per square cm)

0.0006x6x7=0.0252 (price per scrap, each will be 6x7cm)

0.0252x15 (number of scraps) =0.378

Less than 40 cents? That's the value of the fabric I'm saving by going to all that extra cutting effort? I was wrong. That decision isn't hard at all. 

Want to have a go at working out the value of some of your scraps? I've forgotten how to use visual basic (sad face) but instacalc works fine too. Just change the numbers in rows 1, 3 and 4, and remember that number 3 needs to be in centimetres.