Stitch in the ditch

Also known as SITD…. This was the request from my latest very brave client.  She only needed me to SITD around her blocks as she plans to hand quilt the detail…. Some quilters are SO courageous!  Anyway, her wish, my command and off I went.  It was fun, fast and easy.

I used YLI Wonder Invisible thread on the top and a 60 weight fill-tech pre-wound in the bobbin.

I so hope she will come to show me the quilt once the hand quilting has been done as I can only imagine a masterpiece.

As for now, I will disappear from the quilting scene for a while as it not only is Roland Garros but also ICC, way too many buttons on the remote control to press to find time for quilting.

Phew! I’m bushed!

Almost 4 hours of travelling, with the odd stop and missed off-ramps my daughter and I, arrived in Sin City (anywhere near Johannesburg) and immediately went to the Magic Mama baby show.  Now regarding myself as a pro with quilt festivals, I had a plan of action.  Day one would consist only of looking, taking notes of what looked worthwhile and marking stall numbers of what we liked most.  Day 2 would be a major shopping day.

However taking brand new expecting mom along, trying to explain that tomorrow is another day, is almost hopeless.  Some things she just needed NOW or TODAY but the foundation was laid.  Even only mostly looking on day 1, we were dead tired that evening but we had the quaintest guesthouse and a lovely hostess.

We were in our PJ’s and in bed at 18:30 that evening.  Now my kids can’t understand why I am up at 3:30 or at least before 4 am each morning and I think my daughter now understands.  With us being literally asleep by 8 pm, I woke up before 4 am the next morning to find this young lady already awake and on her phone.  Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.

Day 2, after a lovely fruit salad and flapjack breakfast we arrived at the venue exactly at the time they opened and then major shopping happened.  We had our list of needs and wants and my daughter even attended a lecture on breastfeeding after she was totally freaked out by a demonstration on breast pumps.  Now she is much more relaxed about that issue.

Another 4 hours’ drive back, we could proudly display our purchases packing it from my car to hers. Needless to say, another extra-early bedtime, that evening.

As for my Handy Dandy scrap quilt, it is done and I will purchase the batting somewhere in next week and then can start the quilting.

A Handy Dandy Scrap quilt – The top

I have plenty of other activities happening on my side but I do try and get an odd couple of minutes of quilting per day between it all and it was a great feeling to have half of the top sewn together and pinned to the design wall. I was also pleasantly surprised to see how many of my lines lined up perfectly (not all though) as I’ve found this to be almost the hardest part of a scrappy quilt. I think in this quilt the cornerstones in the sashing having to align with the blocks, made it easier.

The first border is a scrappy one too and I had to do a little more cutting, again making it easy on myself by using the Go.

The final border was a wide background border and easy on the cutting but I had a hair appointment and as much as I love being without grey hair, I hate sitting in a salon for two hours.  I am really not into making small talk and I think people sense that and simply stay away from me.  So these sessions are really boring.  Luckily one of my favourite restaurants are opposite the salon and when I park and show the signal, they know to wait for 15 minutes and then deliver a carafe dry white wine to the salon.  When sipping on the ice cold wine while playing a game on my phone the time pass somewhat faster.

With both, the borders attached my quilting activities stopped for a while.

While posting this I am packed to go to a Baby Show in Randburg (some 3 hours’ drive from us) with my daughter.  It is her first baby, so she goes big and mom has to tag along.  This reminds me of the picture doing the rounds on Facebook.

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Miraculous koi escape customer quilt

On Saturday my daughter had her gender reveal party, so now we are looking forward to our second granddaughter which will be the third grandchild.

A quilter sent me a picture of a quilt, she wanted me to do.  Now not being very arty or creative, I looked at it and didn’t have the foggiest as to what one should do with this, even though she told me what the quilt was called.  Guess I was just too eager to look at the picture; I never bothered to read the message properly.

As usual, I printed the picture and thought I’d start planning and only on about day 3, upon walking into my sewing room with the printed picture on the table, I suddenly got it.  A massive Koi (in fact several) is hiding behind all these colours.  That ‘aha’-moment!

When the quilter finally brought me the quilt, I double checked with her to see if she too saw what I saw and we were in agreement.  Then the fun started.

Scales on the Koi done and I was satisfied.  This was the first time I used 40 weight thread in the bobbin and it took some time getting used to.  I am used to ‘feel’ my tension at the bottom and this thread is so fine, I hardly feel a thing.  So my ‘Angie mirror’ and table light had to be taken out to see what was happening at the bottom.  

My enlarging mirror is called Angie as my friend Karin’s daughter, Angie, gave me this one year for my birthday to pluck eyebrows – needless to say, it nowadays is used for other fun stuff.

Satisfied with the tension, the scales of the most prominent Koi got done.

Then I simply did rather straight lines on the fins.

The water was added to the background.

With the border done, I have yet another finished client quilt.

A Handy Dandy Scrap quilt – Starting to assemble the main body of the top

Phew! I’ve been cooking venison off the bones for days now but I refuse to simply discard these as this finely cooked meat works great in pies, in ‘vetkoek’ (non-South Africans can simply google the word and go to images to see what these look like) or simply instead of ground beef as curry with rice.

This is actually still part of Clue 4 but all the blocks are placed on-point and I chose to piece my rows at an angle to make joining these easier (I think?)

Row 1 done and I still like it a lot.

A new delivery arrived at the office and all South Africans will agree with me that we tolerate bad service like no one else can.  After all, it is all we have.

However a couple of months ago I discovered the Handi Quilter South African website and this must surely be the best service ever.  I am as happy as a cat with cream (wondering if my cats liked cream??)

I made the first batch of venison curry and invited friends Karin and André over for supper one evening and it was extremely good curry.  I got this recipe from a co-worker and it has never disappointed me.

In the meanwhile, I got a rather interesting arty quilt from a customer, so the progress on my scrap quilt is once again interrupted.

A Handy Dandy Scrap quilt – Clue 4

Ah crap…. I printed out Clue 4 and realised it started with a step I haven’t seen before just to notice that what I thought was Clue 3 completed, had a second page and I never did that!

Well the customer quilt has been loaded so the clues had to wait; I’d much rather free motion than piecing.

Unbelievable to me, I too fell into the trap of cutting through the tip of my finger and nail with a rotary cutter after, for years, I refused to understand how any quilter can be that dumb if it happened to them. Now this was taken roughly 4 days after it happened and it is healing nicely but you wouldn’t believe how, most everything, gets into that little cut, my hair, thread, pet hair and what not.  I therefore still keep a plaster on most of the time.

Much later, about a week or so and the customer quilt is off the frame, knowing that the grandkids will come over later on Saturday, I got going with the missing step from clue 3

Grandkids gone and I finished this up as us, old people, were dead tired and we hit the sack early that evening.

Went shopping one day and upon my return, walking into my sewing room, I realised what a hot mess Clue 4 caused and with this one I had to have my wits about me.  It really took some concentrating.

With the main blocks of this clue done, this time I did see the second page.  Assembling to begin, this might take a while.

Clue 4 can be found HERE

Burgundy and old gold customer quilt

Last week was a rather confusing one for me.  On Tuesdays, I only work until 10 am and this is fairly routine but then Wednesday, being our national voting day, was a public holiday.  So by not being at the office long enough on a Tuesday, I usually know I’d catch up whatever didn’t get done that day on Wednesday.  Then Wednesday disappeared, so I had to make sure everything and a little more got done in the short space of time at the office.  

To top it all the builders, appointed by our insurance, phoned to say they are coming to fix the ceiling – after a burst geyser – on Thursday at 9 am.  MIL had to be taken to the hospital to get her monthly prescription, so had to fetch her at 06:30, drop her off at the hospital, drive to work to get there at 06:45, tried to do as much as possible before having to return home to await the builders at 08:30.  Fetched MIL later that day, took her to lunch and then finally back home to make yet another trip to the post office during the afternoon.

I haven’t done a quilt for a customer since February and it was refreshing to work on something that I didn’t, by the time I got to quilt it, knew every mistake, flaw and colour.  When I do a quilt for a customer I anyway don’t inspect it to pass judgement, I only see shapes and then this little old head starts working overtime to find just the right motif for the right shape.

The first step is to take a picture of the top, then layer a plastic sheet on top of the picture and then playtime starts.

While working on finding something to do in the largest blocks I noticed that I will get this secondary circle design and my mind was made up.  This would be the way to go and the rest should be planned around it.

The nice part of the disruptive week was that I got to be at home more so had a little extra time to work on this quilt.

Early morning, before work one day, I could zip the quilt off to turn it.  I don’t have one of these massive machines with a huge throat space.  When I get a quilt with big blocks (over 8 inches) I prefer to do half a block at a time and sometimes, especially when I did a directional design on a border, it is just so much easier to take the quilt off, turn it and do the other halves or sides.  This is the quilt halfway done, ready to be turned.

Then I got distracted….. I ordered my second panel from Honest Fabric and just over 2 months later, I received it!  Just look at this!  Designed by Judi Madsen called Celebrate and this colour is Summer White. This was what came from my trip to the post office on Thursday last week.

Once a quilt is turned it is downhill all the way as most of the first stitching stabilised the quilt and one has to worry less about puckers in the backing of having the quilt kept taught with the side clamps.

So 215 920 stitches later I could phone the customer to fetch her quilt.

At least I ended the week with a divine lunch booking at a restaurant organised by our kids.

A Handy Dandy Scrap quilt – Clue 3

My setup became rather messy when doing this clue as I had to steal every little time I had before and after work and getting the daily household chores done in between.  With Socks, the sick and vomiting cat, unable to jump on my table anymore, I now can safely leave my bits on top of the table and not fear I’d come home to vomit all over my fabric.

For anyone stressed about us, seemingly not worrying about Socks, this is not true at all.  He has been to a vet and she couldn’t find anything wrong, even did blood works and all we suspect now is that it is mere old age as he arrived by us as an adult cat and we’ve had him for 7 years now.  He still eats very well, small amounts at a time and preferably human grade meat with chicken and pork being his favourite.

Working on this clue, I had one of my 80 pieces missing.  So the best thing to do was to then cut one set extra, join, iron and go through the whole bloody process of reading both the previous clues and cutting instructions once more.  Done and then I noticed this…..

As they say wealth (as with beauty) is in the eye of the beholder and in my case, I think any quilter not having to share their sewing room with any pets, is a rich quilter.

With clue 4 done I will quickly have to make space on my table to sew zippers to a customer quilt in order to get it loaded onto the frame.

This is my clue 3 done and it can be found HERE.

A Handy Dandy Scrap quilt – Clue 1 and 2

When done with clue 1 I already liked it.  I only now realise that I do like scrappy quilts but then they must have at least one colour running across the whole quilt to calm things down.  In this case it is the backing fabric.

Happily sewing along and not paying too much attention to the pictures (printed in colour I can add) I screwed it up.  Smaller sashings had to meet up with the small 4 patches and I easily did 18 the wrong way around.  Time to unpick.

Just before I was ready to take a long warm relaxing bath I finished up Clue 2.

Clue 2 can be found HERE

A Handy Dandy Scrap quilt – Cutting and getting ready to start

While searching through my scrap drawers to find the right colour fabric for the applique I did on the Woodland Animals quilt it again hit me just how much scraps I have.  Worst of all is that not all of these are mere 2 or 3-inch pieces, some are easily the size of a long or fat quarter and I gave myself a friendly reminder of one of my New Years’ resolutions which were to use my scraps in quilts.

In January I already started downloading the clues to a mystery quilt by Charlotte Hawkes but I just had too many other things already going.  So I could watch everyone’s progress and by now had a vague idea of what the quilt would look like once completed.

Whenever I take this container out is can only mean plenty of scrappy cuts that I need to keep track of.  So the container came into play and I got cutting.

Pretty soon after the cutting started it dawned on me that I can make life so much easier if I just used my Accuquilt Go cutter.

Even with this, and it may not look like much but it still took up most of a full day.

The cutting instructions and Clue 1 can be found HERE.

Then I too could finally start with clue 1 – months later than the other participants!

Woodland Animals – All done

The very first quilt made for my daughter’s very first baby (sex still unknown) due end October of this year.  At least this grandma won’t be caught with her pants around her ankles.

I received my first order of purchases I made for this month and there is just a different kind of excitement receiving quilty goodies.

We have a public holiday today, so I have all day ahead of me to work on something brand new.