Honey Bunch Quilting

Bicycle Clips

2008-07-13T23:26:00.003+12:00

Being a Gadget Girl I have, among a zillion other quilting gadgets, a set of bicycle-type clips for securing a rolled quilt when quilting on a domestic machine. I have to say I have not found them that useful and I usually scrunch the quilt up while I am quilting. Last week I was able to use Janice's Swiftquilter and Juki to quilt my "Night Metropolis" quilt. The Swiftquilter does not have a fourth roller for the batting and at the beginning of the quilting process the excess hangs on the ground. I had a bright idea! Roll it up over a spare curtain rood and secure it with the bicycle clips. It worked pretty good:
Yes, I confess, that batting is leftover pieces sewn together. Yes, I joined the pieces with the sewing machine. Yes, I realise the quilt may not be all that flat (in fact I will be very surprised if if is flat). Well, it is a scrap quilt!

I am heading out to Janice's again tomorrow to finish off the quilting on "Night Metropolis". I think I've got carried away with the amount of quilting on it. I've done all the 'windows' and I need to go back and quilt the 'attic' frame part. I'd better head off to bed early then. What? It's 11.41 pm already? Oh well, at least I still have one week of holidays to go :-)

See what I mean?

2008-07-10T23:17:00.003+12:00

I made a few of these string blocks a while back (like about over a year ago - see April 13 post. One day when I am not too tired I'll learn how to do that link thingy with the time stamp)
I have finally got around to trimming them all and here they are, up all stacked up and ready to go:
Guess what?
Yep,
More scraps!

See what I mean?

I was really, really strong, I moved them from the cutting table to a plastic bag. The plastic bag hasn't made it to the bin yet, but it's a start, right? I haven't yet retrieved a single piece - emphasis on yet :-)

Scrap Useage

2008-07-07T18:37:00.004+12:00

I have started to make inroads on the scrap collection. I've made this quilt top using crumb blocks which I cut to 4 1/2" and put in an attic window setting:
The quilt is quite large, 1.5 metres by 2 metres, and has 140 blocks (10 blocks by 14). I'm calling it "Night Metropolis". It is school holidays right now and I am going out to my good friend Janice's tomorrow. I will start quilting it on her Juki and Swiftquilter. I had better have a good think about how I want to quilt it in the next 12 hours.

I found the crumb blocks really relaxing to make and quite addictive. Sadly, the scrap collection doesn't look any smaller! I think I've got enough scraps to make about a million crumb blocks.

Drowning in Scraps

2008-07-06T20:34:00.003+12:00

I guess I am no different from most quilters, I have HEAPS of scraps. This is my scrap corner:
Everything you see here is scraps. Everything on the shelves are scraps, in the white plastic ice cream containers, in the orange photocopy paper box lids, in the boxes on the floor. They have been starting to overwhelm me. I cannot bring myself to throw any of them out. I hear my father's voice echoing in my head "waste not, want not". I have been keeping pieces as little as 1" by 1/2" for goodness sake! One of my friends says I have 'scrap-a-philia' and I need therapy. Another asked one of her on-line groups what they did with their scraps. Thankfully (for me), of everyone who replied, only one threw out her scraps. the others are like me, they keep them. It is reassuring to know I am not alone :-)

Honey Bunch Hair

2008-06-28T22:44:00.003+12:00

He, of Honey Bunch fame, isn't too fussed about having his hair cut. I think he last had it cut at least 6 months ago, maybe even 9 months. Last week the back view looked like this:
I have fine, straight, brown (well, it used to be brown) hair. I would have given an arm and a leg to have hair like this. How did my child end up with thick, curly, blonde hair? (I blame his dad, who had flaming red hair as a child)

It is such a shame we can't inherit our kids genes.

Alas, the hair is gone. Mowed down by a 'number3' head shave. I suppose it will be back in 6 or 9 months or so.

I didn't even break the needle!

2008-06-22T21:03:00.002+12:00

I was busy sewing the binding onto a quilt the other day. I don't pin the binding on, I just line it up as I sew and do the continuous corner thingy. As I was sewing along I felt a 'bump'. Hmmm I thought, what was that? Well, this is what 'it' was. I has sewn straight over a safety pin which was close to the edge of the quilt- and I didn't even break the needle! Clever me! I thought I had taken out all the pins but there was still one left (well - obviously.)

This is what it looks like with the binding folded away from the top of the quilt:
This is what it looks like with the binding folded back up:
I took these two photos at the same time. I don't know why the colours are so different. I'm such a total klutz at photos. The second photo is more true to life colour.

Now all I have to do is unpick it! It has been sitting, looking at me for a week. I have hand sewn the binding down around 3/4 of the quilt. I feel kind of reluctant to undo my really clever achievement :-)

Avoidance Behaviour

2008-05-18T20:51:00.005+12:00

I really should be writing my reports which are due in on Thursday, but somehow I couldn't resist joining my strip sets together. The result was too short for a bed quilt so I made two more sets, one for the top and one for the bottom. You can only see the top half of the top. It is about 2 metres long and only about 1.2m wide, so I am going to add really wide strips to the sides to make it wide enough for a single bed.* The sashing strips are a Christmas fabric I had 3 metres of (What was I thinking? Oh, that's right, long strips use up a heap of fabric, just as well I had 3 metres, eh?) Actually it is a nicer shade of green that in the photo.

*Confession time, I did have strips on the side the same width as the sashings but because it still wasn't wide enough I ripped them off last night while Frances and I watched a couple of episodes of Antiques Roadshow. I'll use them for the binding.

Oh, well, back to the reports . . .

And then I got carried away . . .

2008-05-17T00:24:00.005+12:00

. . . making more strip sets. These ones are from pieces I got in some grab bags from Grandmother's Garden a few years ago. They are the selvage off cuts from 5" strips of fabric which they use to make 5" square fabric packs, so the length of each one was 5" (more or less, interestingly some weren't exactly 5") The widths of the strips varied depending on the width of the original fabric. I still find it amazing that quilt fabric is not a standard width and can vary by as much as 2"-3".
Mmmm.... there is enough here for a 'Chinese Coins' strip quilt, and it hasn't made one smidgeon of difference to the size of my scrap pile!

Stress-free Stitching

2008-05-10T22:31:00.005+12:00

I have a lot of things I could be sewing but at the moment I'm trying to bring some order to my rather large collection of scraps which are dotted all over the place. So it has been tidying rather than creating, but the problem is when I pull out a container to sort through I find something that says "It just needs this and then it can be used for" to me. Shortish lengths of about 1 1/2" wide fabric scraps just needed to be made into this border (untrimmed as yet!) for a scrap quilt.

It is very relaxing not worrying about what goes with what, very stress-free stitching. I'll add it to my orphan block collection and someday it will find its way into a community quilt.

In New Zealand We Call It Tinny. . .

2008-05-01T19:33:00.004+12:00

. . . when things are lucky or work out just right, and so it was for the latest rookie quilt I have made for my beginner lessons. I had just a tad over the right amount of binding to overlap to do the diagonal join. The border fabric is quilte busy so I decided to join all the off cuts to use for the binding. I did a rough measure and this is how much overlap I had. Just right for trimming to the 2 1/2 inches overlap required for 2 1/2 inch double-fold binding.

This is the finished piece. I've called it 'A Touch of France' because of the colours used. It measures about 74 cm by 80 cm.

My old coffee table . . .

2008-04-29T13:05:00.006+12:00

. . . is now my new ironing board! Last year I went on a quilt retreat to Karen Bird's at Kimbolton and was very impressed by her very large chest freezer being put to good use as a large ironing surface. Way better than my normal ironing board, an old Suzy brand which is great for clothes but fabric has a tendency to slide off the pointy end. I hardly ever iron clothes. I subscribe to the 'if it needs ironing don't buy it' philosophy of clothing purchases. I'd rather be quilting!

I thought you might like to see how I made my new 'ironing centre". First I pinched a chest of drawers from my spare room. I had these drawers for my clothes when I was a kid, so that makes them 'almost antique'. Funny how they look quite modern even though they are over 40 years old.

The drawers have proved to be a very useful storage space for reels of thread and rolls of fusible webbing, baking paper, lunch paper for tracing, Glad Press 'n' Seal which is now available in New Zealand supermarkets. (when is the freezer paper arriving?)

The old coffee table minus its legs, which were broken from teenage boys standing on the table(!!), sits on the top. I haven't fixed it in place yet so leaning heavily on one end will result in a bit of a surprise.
I covered it first with a layer of thermaldrape lining
Then 2 layers of wool flannel. This is the type that used to be used for babies overnaps. I bought some when 'he of honey bunch fame' was little and never got around to making them. I did use cloth nappies with cloth liners though and I had a few pairs of hand knitted 'bunnies", as the overnaps were called, given to me which I used. So it didn't really matter that I never got around to sewing overnaps using the wool flannel. Much better to use it for padding on the ironing surface :-)
Then a cover of cotton decorator fabric. This is an old Laura Ashley fabric.
The iron cord sits nicely into a holder that came with a second hand ironing board I bought a few years ago so I would have a second iron and board. It holds the cord out of the way and when I unplus I don't have to drop any cords on the fl00r. Saves all that 'using your back like a crane' bending down when plugging and unplugging
Not quite as large as the 'big boards' from USA, but pretty useful all the same.

The Show is Over

2008-04-23T07:38:00.004+12:00

Yes, our biennial exhibition has come and gone. It has taken me a week and a half to catch up on my sleep. We had a great time capped off with a dinner to celebrate our 20th birthday. Guest Speaker Barbara Bilyard kept us very well entertained during the evening. We were thrilled that 3 of our 4 founding members, Cathy Owen, Thelma Dawes and Trish Souness were able to attend. Our fourth, Pat Britten, has not been enjoying good health and was unable to make the journey south.

Highlight of the weekend for me was selling two of my quilts. The first piece is a top I purchased a few years ago from Grandmother's Garden. Some of you will recognise the pattern. I finally got around to basting and quilting it and, finally(!), binding it. Someone really liked it.

The second quilt I sold is one I designed for our club's mystery half nighter. Well, the background was the mystery half nighter design. After I had done this version I decided it was a bit ho hum and needed more so I appliqued the flowers and leaves. Then I mucked up the quilting and had to unpick it after I got about three quarters of it quilted and start again. Needless to say I didn't finish it in time for the class, but I did finish another version in different colours without the applique. This is not such a great photo of the quilt that sold but you get the picture?

I also won a Judge's Merit for Steamy Summer Sunrise (which I see by my photo title I originally named Steaming Summer.) Oh how I do forget things.

This piece sat around for ages needing a hanging sleeve and label. I needed a way to make sure the top bits didn't flop over. I ended up hand sewing sewing some really stiff vilene which had been fused onto a piece of the backing fabric, cut to shape, onto the back of the quilt then I added the hanging sleeve.

Pat myself on the back

2008-03-26T22:00:00.004+13:00

Since I started teaching beginner classes last year at a local fabric shop I have been busy thinking up quilts to make as class samples and writing the patterns for them. This has challenged me to make more use of my computer, including EQ6 (in which I still don't know how to draw a 6o degree triangle!) Tonight I finally learned (now don't laugh) how to scan a picture into a file and then insert the picture into my pattern document (okay, you can stop laughing now!)

I thought I would draw my own pictures of how to do double fold binding. These are just the illustrations.

Okay, I have to work on not getting the edge of the paper showing, but not bad for my first attempt.

It takes a long time . .

2008-03-23T22:21:00.002+13:00

. . . to sew a 3 metre seam! Especially compared to piecing 4 inch blocks. I have been making bags to put the poles for our quilt stands in. The poles are 3 metres long so the bags had to be even longer than that, and I sewed french seams for extra strength, so that is twice times 3 metres for each one. I would get to the halfway point where the handle is and think "I'm only half way!".The bags are are not elegant, being made out of left over curtain fabric and curtain samples, but they will do the job. Here they are lined up at Frances' house, 20 poles in each bag.
And these are some of our new quilt stands that Murray, the husband of one of our members, has made for us. They have a slotted piece to go on the foot of each one so they are easy to pick up and put down. Murray also made us 8 "thingies" to lift the poles in position (anyone got a good name for these?) Frances and I had a trial "hanging" this afternoon. They work great. Thanks Murray!

Colour Challenge

2008-03-12T21:53:00.005+13:00

Janice has just reminded me that she hasn't seen my entry for the colour challenge in our upcoming exhibition, so here it is:
We had to use analogous colours on the colour wheel. It is the size of an A3 piece of paper. This is a miniature of a bed sized quilt from (I think) Quiltmaker magazine. Does a challenge have to be totally original? The challenge for me was in having the analogous fabrics to be able to do it. Does that count? I was going to make the plum colours weave under the purple ones, to add my own variation to it, and had made extra blocks to do that, but when I put it together I forgot I had them and now it is too late. Never mind.

Getting Ready

2008-03-11T00:08:00.005+13:00

Phew, a second post this month. Things must be improving!! Just so you know I have been a busy beaver, this is a pile of quilts which are going into our club exhibition next month:
Sadly, they are not mine, I just helped get them ready (but it looks impressive doesn't it?) Our exhibition is only 5 weeks away, yikes! You can check out our guest speaker Barbara Bilyard . I am looking forward to seeing some of her quilts close up. She has a reputation of being a "hard case" so it should be an entertaining evening. I get the honour of opening the formal part of the evening, so if anyone has a good speech they want to exchange for fabric you know what to do :-)

What happened to February?

2008-03-01T16:18:00.005+13:00

It even had an extra day in it and I still didn't get any posts done! This is really bad. It's not like I don't have anything to blog about. I have plenty. I just seem to run out of day too soon. Soon, no one will visit me 'cos I've got nothing to say!!!

This is what I have been working on and got the letters fused last night.

This is the background:

These are the words:
And this is the fused top:
It is our Club's 20th Birthday this year and the committee thought we could do with an up date of the old banner. We are having our biennial exhibition next month and a celebratory dinner on the Saturday night. Barbara Bilyard from Auckland is our guest speaker. It is going to be a good night.

I must confess that this is not my design, my good quilt buddy Janice did that. She enlarged the letters to the right size for me to trace. We started some of the blocks at a club meeting and I finished it at home. It has been fun to work on it. Janice has very kindly agreed to quilt it, thanks, Janice!

This one is for Janice!

2008-01-30T09:54:00.001+13:00

Here is the new shed, in all its glory :-)
The washing line to the left and back of the shed is now gone and a new one has been put up to the left and front of the shed. an unexpected bonus in getting a new clothesline was that it has 6 rounds of lines instead of the 4 my old one had. Yipee! More washing! Ha!

Never mind the quilt, where's the shed?

2008-01-26T09:22:00.001+13:00

Janice wants to see a picture of the shed. Well the problem with that is that it is not finished yet. We had a problem with the skylight panel. It was damaged and we got a replacement. All good and fine, but the replacement is too long. One could be excused for thinking that a kit set shed means just that! Open the box and put everything together, no cutting to size involved. Well, apparently not. The shed person I spoke to on the phone was surprised to find that our kit set shed came with a skylight panel cut to the correct length. We are supposed to cut it ourselves! That's what saws are for right? Yes, true, except we don't have a suitable fine tooth saw and we don't want to crack the panel when cutting it to the correct length. Hey, it costs $75 for a replacement panel! Then the house guest went up-river for 3 days of R&R, so no progress has been made for the last few days. I do have a shed, it just doesn't have a whole roof yet.

And on the subject of my house guest, some of you want a clone of him sent to you. Just as soon as I figure out how to do that I will be selling to the highest bidder :-)

On the quilting side this is what happens when I don't watch where my hands are. Just as well I only caught the edge:

Something Finished - finally!

2008-01-25T09:25:00.000+13:00

Oh no, another whole month goes by and I have been a bad blog writer! Only excuse is I have been really, really busy (yeah, right!)

I got sidetracked by my new home stay offering to build a garden shed for me. He is a young new teacher from England who will be teaching in the same department as me at school. He was looking for somewhere to stay until he gets himself sorted with more permanent accommodation. The first day he offered to paint my house. The second day he offered to do any handy-man jobs I needed doing. Then he asked if there was anywhere to store a push bike. I don't have a garden shed and my garage is tiny. So we agreed in return for some free rent I would purchase a kit set shed and he would put it up. He built a proper floor for it and put in a step (It is on sloping ground - no where else for it to go). The washing line needed moving so the shed can fit, so he is putting up a new rotary clothes line for me. He clears the table after dinner and unpacks the dishwasher without asking and has one quarter of the washing a 15 year old Japanese boy produces. Okay, it is costing me money rather than contributing to my cash flow but HE CAN STAY HERE! (Do you think he can hear me shouting?)

We also had a stall at the Bushy Park Festival last Sunday and I was madly getting things ready for that. We had fantastic weather:

Here is the Bright Irish Chain finished. Not a great photo but I am pleased with the quilt:

Now, no prizes for guessing how long it will be before I next make a post. (but I will send a fabric postcard to some lucky commentor on this post)

How Not To Join Binding!

2007-12-28T21:08:00.000+13:00

I've had a break today from piecing the blocks on the new club banner and I decided to finish quilting the bright Irish Chain I started earlier in the year. A great day sewing, made heaps of progress and only fell at the last hurdle when joining the beginning and the end of the binding together:

Oops, time for a break, time for a Kit-Kat!

Mum, You've Got Coordinates!

2007-12-28T08:22:00.000+13:00

Is what he, of Honey Bunch fame, exclaimed last night as he walked by my design wall. "See, maths is useful," says I. He was referring to the little sticky labels I have put on each block for the new club banner. I have added the green quadrilaterals to the centre of half the blocks. I need to get these blocks joined together because my design wall is not long enough to get the other half of the blocks up at the same time. Hence the labels, so they get put in the right place when I am stitching.

Hey, I'm quilting!!

Blogger's Block

2007-12-24T14:32:00.001+13:00

O my, nearly a whole month since I last posted, how slack is that! I shall blame the busy end of school year and the fact that I have been spring cleaning my house - well parts of it! I am having a bedroom re-wallpapered so all of the stuff in that bedroom is dotted around the rest of the house until after Christmas. I have reorganised all my quilting magazines and I'm not going to tell you how many I have, auffice to say I have a dawning realisation that I need to STOP BUYING so much stuff! (And in the words of the Tui Beer ad - Yeah Right!)

Not much on the actual real-life quilting side:

I haven't finished my Lazygal Winter Class wall hanging :-(

I have made a few more blocks for the new Cotton On Quilters banner :-)

(the colour is not right, deeper and browner in real life)

Apart from that not much else is going on at the moment. maybe after Christmas I will feel more inspired.

Our Quilt is going to America!

2007-11-28T22:52:00.000+13:00

Whoa, life has got a bit crazy lately and is unlikely to recover for a couple of weeks.

The quilt Janice and I made for the Human Rights Challenge, (which won one of 2 awards and which you can read about on this blog) is currently being exhibited in Parliament until the end of next week. I attended the opening reception on Monday evening, very nice (Bellamy's does a very nice line in nibbles, including a 'melt in the mouth' beef fillet steak bite.) I found out that the two winning quilts are being sent to the USA to the State University of Michigan Museum's upcoming exhibition called "Quilts and Human Rights" (Jan 15 to May 15, 2008.) What a lovely surprise for us! Apparently we were supposed to already know about this, but due to a glitch in an email addy the correspondence got sent into the ether, never to return! Now all I have to do is win Lotto on Saturday!!

I have my rookie quilt class to teach tomorrow night and I need to buy a new iron to replace the one that died last week.

It is Cotton On Quilters' end of year meeting on Saturday and I want to hunt out some decorations for the lunch.

I haven't done my junior reports which are due Friday.

I haven't done 2 lots of marking which are not urgent but need to be done by the end of this week (ahem maybe the beginning of next week - the reports have a higher priority!)

Saturday of next week I am travelling to Wellington again to meet up with Linda from Canada, who is visiting New Zealand and who I am taking on a quilty shopping trip. We have only 'met' on-line so it will be fun to meet up in person.

After that it will be the last week of term and Junior Prizegiving and then I need to give my house a cleaning blast. That'll take us up to Christmas.

Somewhere in there my son (he of honey bunch fame) needs to have a 17th birthday celebration of some kind.

As for quilting content, I have:

(a) finished the letters for my Lazy Gal Winter Class quilt:
(b) done a test block for Cotton On Quilters' new banner:
Isn't this a cool block? Janice designed it for us on EQ6. My test block doesn't look very square. I think its the way I smoothed it onto the design wall. One down, 47 to go!

(c) finished the third applique test block using the ladder stitch method. Can't show you a photo 'cos Im soaking it to try and get out the supposedly washable kids' felt pen - well, what do I expect with red I ask myself. I'll have to get the napisan out to see if that will help. As far as the method goes I found it took me twice as long as the freezer paper method. Maybe because the daisy flower shape has 8 inward curves. No hand applique method is going to be quick, I suspect.

Well, that is enough content for about 4 post's worth. You are getting it all at once 'cos I know I wont get blogging again until at least next week (see above!)

More on Applique

2007-11-22T23:16:00.000+13:00

So, I still haven't got back to the hand applique. Got side-tracked onto the Lazy Gal class. But my friend Ruth got this book from USA (second hand)
It shows how to use a ladder stitch to applique. I'll give it a go and report back soon (or not so soon, as the case may be - I really don't know where the time goes to)