Yet another Christmas is done and dusted but we are grateful we had no fatalities due to Covid and could spend another year together as a family.
As mentioned, I’ve now finished 3 courses by Adria Good on edge-to-edge designs. The last course started mid-November and I’ve finished all my practise sessions on paper and on scrap fabric and now the time came to actually stitch these out on neat fabric to bind together as part of my portfolio.
With a
break in customer quilts, I loaded my decent fabric to start stitching out the
different designs but then our house was sold.
Even though planned, this was a shocker as I’ve honestly believed we’d
have to wait a year or more or at least a couple of months before it would sell
but this all happened in 3 weeks.
Nervous tension, I need boxes, I need to start a spreadsheet keeping
track of what I packed from which room and number these so nothing will get
lost in the move. I am totally confused,
not quite knowing where to start and what can be packed already and what needs
to be kept out for use until the actual move and the worst part…… we don’t have
the foggiest idea of where we would be moving to. Yes, we look at houses constantly but from
what we’ve seen up to now, I’ll have to lower my standards massively and I am
not sure I’ll manage.
The first
design was GEARS, somewhat of a spin to the ordinary meander and it stitches
out fast which will make it one of the cheaper all-over designs.
I found one large box and decided to take an easy route by washing all the extra bathroom towels to start packing these. I only kept out one towel per bath, basin or shower and these will have to be washed and re-used as I am not unpacking again. The short of the story is I have at least one (small) cupboard empty.
The next design
up was the SNOWFLAKE. Now, this can be
combined with loops or swirls but I preferred the meander as this showed up the
snowflake better. The other motifs tend
to take away from the main design.
The next design reminds me so much of one of my favourites called 3’s and E’s but this is called C’s. What happens here is you start with a C shape and then veer off to make an S, even though it may be upside down or the wrong way around as long as you stick to the rhythm C and S.
Another fun design was HEARTS and again this design can be combined with loops or meandering but I liked the look of the curl where one added an extra curl inside the heart. Now in the past, I couldn’t really see a difference between my hearts or leaves but with Adria’s instructions, I now know the secret.
I moved on to the pointed flower and with all the flower practise we did in part 2 of the course, this one was easy and again the flower is surrounded by loops and leaves.
This geometric design is ideal for quilts for men or boys or if you have plenty of one shape in your quilt, to draw the eye in different directions. The problem I had with this during my practice sessions was that I was taught to look ahead of my needle when free-motion quilting and if I did it with this design, my lines went skew as the line followed where my eyes looked.
Okay, I removed the curtains in one guest bathroom (the others have blinds, which will stay behind) and washed these to pack in the box with the towels. A little more progress was made. I however had to scrub and clean the strips in the old bird room as these were a major mess covered with bird droppings but nothing trusted old laminate floor cleaner, could not soften to make the cleaning process easier.
By the look
at my attempt at HOLLY leaves with berries and ribbon, one can clearly see that
holly leaves aren’t much of a thing in South Africa. Again, this can be combined with many other
designs but I chose the ribbon as ribbons are also associated with Christmas
and gifts. I don’t think the mottled
fabric I used helped to make this design look any better.
The last motif was the PANSY and again this one came easy.
I received a customer quilt midst stitching these designs but the young lady was not in a hurry and I decided to finish up my portfolio first. If I had all the bindings stitched to the front, I had something to keep my hands busy by stitching the backs by hand while the kids and grandkids spend time in the pool.
With these done, I marked the customer quilt early morning and can now load it somewhere during the day to start the quilting.
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