First world rainbows?

It's been an odd day. After my bottle of bad rosé last night, I was awake before my hangover was when the grandparents came to visit before lunch, but it had caught up with me by 12.30, only to be severely quashed by some homemade chips and lots and lots of tomato sauce.

I went to Spotlight and bought myself a pile of 10cm cuts of drill; I like it better for quilts that get taken on holidays because it's tougher than quilting cotton. Also, at this moment in time, the colour range is better in drill than it is in Prima.

I went to see a friend for an hour or so, then I got started with my actual plans for the night: First world problems night.

I organised it with one of the girls from work earlier, when we decided that first world-ing your problems, as long as you did it with a suitable amount of self awareness, was the best way to realise your life is actually pretty good. I started about 7pm, posting them on the hour...

I feel like going to the gym, but there's too many people there in the early evening.

Two computers running next to one another, with two mice and two keyboards. I keep getting confused.

Massive pimple on my neck, so I look like I've been bitten by a redneck vampire with only one buck fang.

My DVD box set doesn't have enough commentaries. Sixteen episodes and only three commentaries :( all done in 2 hours...

I'd really really like some fairy bread, but I make it with the sprinkles that are like little sticks of candy, and all we have in the house are 100s and 1000s, and it's just not the same.

Just had a massive freak out that there was some kind of hulking monster just outside the back door, but it turned out to be my 9-year-old sister's 4 wheeler.

I can't type an é - I have to google the word Nestlé and copy and paste it off the end.

One pillow is not high enough, two pillows is too high.

I actually cheated and came up with a whole heap of them ahead of time, but in the end, I didn't use any of them, instead thinking to myself each hour what was annoying me most. And clearly, yeah, my life's pretty good.

It would be cooler though, if I could rock this hair. And if I could just put the actual picture here, instead of having to link it.

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.

Favourite things 5am Saturday

I had hoped to be able to get the tutorial for the Lattice quilt up tonight, but after I finished it, about an hour ago, I got a bit distracted by the all important staring-at-the-quilt-top-thinking step. It's still my favourite thing this week, but without a tutorial to go with it. Tomorrow night, hopefully.

I'm also loving Instagram, since it's hard to take nice photos of quilts at night in the kitchen. But I don't see why it can't just upload the pictures to Picasa - I know that one's owned by Facebook and the other by Google, but I think we should just all be friends.

I love it when I work out the maths well enough that there's very little wastage from my cutting. The pale blue of the background fabric started as a 1.8 metre (2 yards) cut, and that little pile was all the scrap leftover, including (mainly, in fact) selvedges and squaring up.

I love, partway through the pinning, realising, without intending to, exactly how much you would need to make this quilt using layer cakes. Answer - not much (34 neutral squares, 18 prints. The border would be narrower and the whole thing scaled up, obviously, but the only cutting would be the printed fabrics in half, 3 neutrals into quarters and 6 neutrals into HSTs, and then trimming it all square.)

I love a stripy binding.

I love now knowing how to crochet, even if, honestly, I don't find myself loving the crochet itself.

I love peppermint hedgehog logs, even if they make my arms hurt to roll them, and they look like poo.

I love the way the hands on my watch glow in the dark.

I love boiled potato with chicken salt. And a cold coke.

I love my electric blanket.

I love other stuff too, but I'm too tired to remember it.

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.

Spontaneous Wholecloth

Tonight I got home and the idea of having to either start on bindings or finish the awkward quilting on the falling pinwheels quilt didn't exactly fill me with joy. Nor did I really want to do anything with fussy back and forthing from the kitchen to the sewing machine, so that ruled out either making a bag or starting a new quilt. I probably should have just gone to bed, but having not sat at my machine in 3 days, I was feeling a need to sew something.

So I got an about 1m square scrap of batting, a couple of metres of Kona Black and spool each of rainbow variegated Guterman Sulky in 12 and 30.  I basted in 10cm squares with dressmaking pins, and I sewed a consistent wave, with a left and a right between each pin. Then I sewed the same wave between the two, and reversed it between them.

I probably should have done a pillow before committing to an entire quilt, but really, it only took me a couple of hours. I'm not sure what I'll do with it, since it's a baby sized quilt in the least baby-ish of colours, but I like being able to say I've now done a wholecloth quilt.

Unfortunately, it's another thing now that needs binding, and even more unfortunately, it will have to be done by hand. I got all guilty about the fact that I'd caused myself to have to do more binding without having done any work on the other bindings, so I got the binding for the blue and grey quilt, which had been sewn but not pressed or folded, and did that with the black binding of the new one.

I've made the black binding very narrow (cut to 5.5cm, sewn .75cm wide) but I'm not in any hurry to get it finished. It's only small, so I'll do it over the next couple of weeks as new TV shows come out.

Question:

When the back of your quilt has more pieces than the front of your quilt, are you doing it all wrong?

Apart from the solid (Prima Natural Unseeded - I stocked up on 10metres today because it was 40% off) there's only one fabric in there that's not from a DS line - the one in the bottom right corner of the back and also near the top middle is from the Flourish line I made Kelsey's quilt from.

This back is for the Green Pavement quilt, and I'm hoping I can manage a fold over bindng for this one, because it's starting to dawn on me how very, very many bindings I need to do.

Wholecloth Stubby Holder

It took a depressingly long time, but I finally worked out a way to get a nice finish on a stubby holder with the cross stitch cottons.

The trick it seems is to do it with one piece of insulbrite twice the length, and to just quilt with the fancy thread through the half that will become the outside, and then do plain quilting through the other half - quilting through two layers makes it incredibly boofy, and boof both feels odd in your hand, and means there are flat bits that the cold will penetrate through.

Tragically, I used all my velcro on my 4 goes at doing this. Will need to get some more, I guess.

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.

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!

Aww, pretty...

Packages from fabricshack are great just becasue there's so much in them. They squish in 9 yards for you, so there'll usually be a couple of quilts worth in each package. Mine today had: This bundle of gender neutral solids for Meagan's baby.

Four of the solids in this pile (supplemented with a couple of stash - It seems that the pink/orange/yellow combo is something I'm really feeling right now)

A half yard each of these Spirit fabrics.

And a few randoms. I got 2 yards of the wonky check, but I wish I'd bought more than just 1 yard of the blue tye-dye. It was clearance and they don't have any more :(

Anyway, after I'd pawed over them for a bit, I decided I'd try a new zipper pouch design, just because my brain was quite insistent that it would work and I wanted to check. It did, but of course I made the turning hole a bit small and trying to get it right side out was like it was giving birth to itself. And when it was out, the doctor said "congratulations... it's...

...an ipad cover..." and everyone was like, well, this is awkward, since we don't own an ipad. So we don't know if it actually fits an ipad, only that it's 26cm tall and 19cm wide, and that's how big wikipedia says an ipad is.

More importantly, the opening is 19cm wide, because I used one bit of zipper looped around instead of two sides, and I curved down the other ends (this was the bit I wasn't sure about but it's come up great) so it doesn't have the tabs at the ends that so many tutorials insist on. Which stop the ipad from getting in, even if the rest does fit perfectly.

On tomorrow's to-do-list: hunt down an ipad, ask if I can borrow it for about 35 seconds.

Sunsets. It looks like sunsets.

So today I went into Spotlight with the handy $10 off vouchers that Helen got but I didn't, and bought myslef some more pinks, purples and oranges. Unfortunately, despite giving me $10 to spend on whatever, they didn't give me that much in the way of whatever (by which I mean solids) so I had to get a couple of tonal prints. Still, they're pretty good at reading as solids, so one must forgive.

I also bought needles, because since I'm not spending actual money, I figure it should be spent on stuff I don't want to have to spend money on. I'm okay with spending money on fabric - that's what money is for. But spending money on machine needles and pins is almost a waste of it - if it was up to me, the government would subsidise my new stepp-nadels. Or at least let me claim it back on tax.

Tonight I got home and a got chop happy. This is probably the biggest variation between the metric and imperial maths I've ever worked out, simply because I did it backwards this time - instead of doing myself a lovely bit of number-crunching and then adapting it for the internet, I did the imperial math first (because I liked the idea of having the "scraps" be exactly the same size as half a charm square*) and then pretty much just picked random numbers for mine, since I would be cutting up actual fabrics for the scrap pieces anyway. I don't think I've really ever used 13 as an important number in a quilt before, but mine is all 13s and 6s and there's a 29 thrown in there for good measure too. But it all fit when I did it with my numbers and I'm fairly confident that the inches will fit too. It consistently comes out to 42 inches, and that's not quite as wide as fabric is.

Anyway, since this pattern is laid out by eye rather than by design, I got my nice neat little 6cm squares and laid them all out in a six by six grid and shuffled them about till I liked them. When I was fairly happy I squished them all up on top of one another so they made a tiny tiny version of the quilt.

 And once I'd taken myself a layout photo,

I remebered I had macro focus.

And a damn good one at that.

Of course, since I had something I was happy with, I figured I'd play around with the 6x13cm rectangles, and had a go at a more graduated layout.

And now I'm really not sure which I prefer.

Thoughts? (keep in mind that the random layout shows a 1cm square of the fabric whereas the graduated one shows about 6x4cm. They will be rectangular, and have a small rectangle of contrasting print in the off-centre)


*I have very few scraps. I can't be the only one. I also like things to coordinate.

Solids

So today in my luchbreak I went to Sotlight cause I suddenly remebered my best friend is having a baby in 4 months. And while that may seem like a long time away, lets not forget the trauma of the last quilt we had to rush to finish before the baby got cut out, or, for that matter, the late nights of last week making Casey's quilt. Not to mention the fact that the due date has already been moved forward two weeks, and she doesn't even want to know herself what she's having, let alone tell those of us who have, let's say, been asked to make it it's first quilt.

I think, if there was a chance there was a tiny penis growing in my belly, I'd want to know. And I'd want to tell people. Everybody. I'd just go up to random strangers on the street and go "tee-hee, I'm making a penis, right now," But then, I can be a tad immature. That's why I make quilts instead of penises babies.

Anyways. I went and bought some solids, cause solids are a) easy and b) cheap. Or well, most of them are. This is the pile I picked, and I should point out that they're actually a lot more muted than they look - more like intense pastels than actual brights.

But two of these fabrics are not like the others, and two of these fabrics just don't belong (on the shelf with all the other $6.95p/m fabrics.)

The brown, it turns out, is a "tea dyed linen" which means it's $7.99p/m. That's not too bad, though I'm a tad worried it's either dyed with actual tea, and therefore going to stain everything when I wash it, or going to shrink way more than the cottons.

And the yellow, which looks and feels just like all the others (but was the only solid yellow quilting fabric they had) was grown organically, and therefore costs a whopping $14.95p/m.

As for what I'm actually going to do with it all... I've no idea. I've handily re-worked the math I did for Casey's quilt so I can do it much more efficiently by using printed scraps in the middle, but I think that it works best with a tonal range as opposed to a spectral one. I've picked some purples/pinks/oranges to have a test run with tomorrow night.

Whoops.

Not only did I not mean to stay out all of last night, I had my laptop and an emergency internet connection with me anyway, and I still didn't get around to blogging.

Basically, I'm campaigning for the award of bestest bestfriend ever, and it's hard work, at odd hours, and involves driving people places, yelling at boys, cuddles, making jelly shots, sitting on bedroom floors till 5am, movie marathons during power outages and cutting letters out of Lifestyle1 magazines at maccas to make ransom notes. If it becomes official, not only will I have a small trophy declaring me the bestest bestfriend in the world, I will also have a very impressive CV.

On the crafting front, I have chopped up all the strips to make the extra blocks to expand this quilt. And I'm kinda wishing I paid a bit more attention to how long it took me to strip piece the other half, because every time I strip piece a quilt I find myself wondering how much time I've actually saved. It feels like it's taking longer, since there's cutting and sewing and an extra thing of cutting again, but I suppose the time is saved in lining up the bits as you feed them into the sewing machine. I'd like some kind of mathematical proof though, so if anyone out there's willing to strip piece half a quilt and chain piece the other in the name of science, let me know.

Hmmm...

I have bought more fabric and I have enough to enlarge it one of two ways - to a 10 block by 13 block rectangle (140x182cm) or a more square(ish) 11 blocks by 12 blocks (154x168cm)

The question is, which do people think would be a more practical size? A bit longer and narrower, or almost the same in both directions?

Sorry.

Couldn't do it. Thought about unrolling it, and laying it out, and shuffling it round, and decided to play with some fabrics instead*.

Another package arrived from fabricshack.com today and just so you all know, meringue is pale yellow, not off-white. Snow seems pretty much perfect as a one-shade-off-of white, but the lighting in the house (actually, in the whole of the south east today) is a bit crappy, so more comparing will need to be done. Also, I didn't buy natural or white, so I'm gunna get them and compare.

I now have all but one of the Central Park fabrics I wanted - I've ordered the purple colourway of the big flowers but I had to get them from a different seller, so they haven't arrived yet.

Fabricshack is out of all the colours of the big flower now - just as well really, or I'd have bought another couple of yards of each - they're definitely my favourite.

Instead (like I don't have enough already) I've gone for a variety of kona blues, some greens, the aforementioned white and natural, and 3 yards of black. Even though I haven't quilted the rainbow zigzag one yet, I'm getting a strong urge to do something else with that stack of rainbow goodness, and I want all the fabrics ready. I've sent a polite note asking them to pop a postit on the different colours so I know what they are, but I really do need a colour chart. It seems I fluked the first rainbow, since I'm really not sure about the colour optins for a wonky solid quilt I want to do in three colours.

The photo with the crappiest lighting (because this is the edge of the central park photo above) is the one where the colours are sorta-halfway accurate. The pink is cerise, the green is chartreuse, then there's emerald, lagoon, royal and magenta. I want the chartreuse to be more yellow, the emerald to be more green, and a blue that's directly between the two there. Here's hoping.

The crazy thing is though, if you fill your envelope, it's cheaper than buying the base quality double blocked homespun from Spotlight. Not just cause the dollar's good - it was that way even before we reached parity. And the designer fabrics at $9 and $10 a yard are not only less than half the price you'd pay in a specialist quilt shop here, but still cheaper than the inhouse, dubiously woven $12.95p/m prints at Spotlight. Really the main reason to go there these days is thread and batting.

When I worked there I would see the wholesale prices of fabric (usually between $2 and $4) and get quite depressed that I had to pay five or ten times that. I like this way better.

*it's okay, I have the next 3 days off work to get it done.