I'm back!

Hey!

I'm here!

I'm still on wireless but I have been told that I can now get broadband so in a coupla days, I'll be cruising the information superhighway like I haven't in years!  When will I quilt?  There's too much internet to see with so much gig download allowable!  Movies!  Songs!  Podcasts!  Ebooks!  All the treasures of the universe are out there for me now!

I've been sewing a lot while I've been away from the blog, and have a couple of finishes for you.  They are all rather boring, I admit.  I've started so many things over the last twenty years and I think the reason they have stayed UFO's for so long is because they are pretty average and boring to do, and even more average and boring to look at.  I am eager to get as many of them done, so that I can can begin the business of creation and start to do some really pretty things.  One day....

But for now...

Blah. 

This is something I'm not immensely proud of, I don't like it and it's toooooooo much but it started as a design for the shop and it just didn't work.  So it got bundled up and chucked in the 'don't wanna work on it' pile for YEARS.  But now it's done.  I'm thinking that border is too wide so I'll probably cut that back before it gets quilted.  If it ever gets quilted.

Now for number two:

This was another design we had done for the shop.  It was based around the border print, a most delicious design by Jennifer Sampou called Rainforest.  The original shop design had taken parts of the border, like the fish and the birds and we'd appliqued them randomly over the log cabins.  It looked so pretty.  But we didn't have enough fabric to finish this one that way, and so it remains a little bare.  But this is another one of those twenty year old UFO's and therefore I am very proud it's done.

Finally, the oldest UFO I have in my cupboard.  And I love this one.  I'm emotionally attached to it. 

My apologies for the crap photo but I don't have anywhere to hang it.  This was begun before I was married, before we had the shop, before I'd ever quilted before.  It's got the hair of old dogs and cats long since gone on it.  My dad was alive.  When I pulled it out of the bag, it smelt like his cigarette smoke.  He's been gone nearly as long as this quilt has been started. 

It was a design from a Family Circle magazine, and it was all template based, and done in centimetres.  Now, Australia is a metric country but for the last how ever many years, we have done our quilting with inches, just like the rest of the world.  I put this design away because at the time, I didn't know how to adapt a pattern to inches, and it was all too hard.  After twenty years of designing and quilting, I know now how easy it is to fudge a bit here, make a border a bit wider to fit the flying geese in, all of those little tricks. 

This one will definitely be quilted soon.  It's supposed to have a further border on it, but I've run out of so many of the fabrics that were in it.  They were those lovely Joan Kessler florals from Concord that were EVERYWHERE a decade ago.  Now it's all trendy and modern and not my style at all and poor old Joan Kessler fabrics, I don't know where you would find them these days.  I think it looks fine.

So that's my show and tell for today.  I hope you liked it, and I shall see you tomorrow.

Suzie

p.s. I haven't forgotton about the block of the month instructions.  I'm still waiting for my Nancy Halvorsen fabric to arrive from America.  It's taking a lot longer than it usually does.  I'm so terribly spoiled with your American postal system.  Sooooo much faster than the Australian one.