Eye Spy Quilts

I’ve always been a structured quilter.  I like things to be balanced. Wreaths to be curved and in a circle.  Borders not random, but evenly placed.  I do not like this style of quilting:

http://www.dsquilts.com/

and I apologise in advance if I offend Denyse Schmidt but I’m sure my little opinion matters not so much to her.  I appreciate the quality of work and the not wanting to redo old ground, but it’s not me. 

This is me, by the way:

 

http://themarmaladecatpatchworkdesigns.blogspot.com/2008/10/double-wedding-ring-at-ballarat.html

 

Totally delicious.  I adore it.

 

Back in 2000, I (like many readers, I assume) joined in lots of millenium swaps for 3” squares.  I had a wonderful time and met (at least in cyberspace) lots of lovely people from all over the world. 

 

But I could never find the right Millenium Quilt pattern, no matter how hard I tried.  They all seemed to be too … messy for want of a better word.  Not structured enough.  So I left the box of squares.  And in the great mouse-capade episode of last week (dead mouse in the ceiling, smelly dead mouse smell in the most precious room of the entire house, the sewing room), I unearthed them again.

 

Now I’m a more experienced quilter, I’ve realised that 3” squares are tricky little suckers to use.  But that was 11 years ago (Oh. My. God.) and I know stuff now.

 

Purely by chance, I was browsing on quilter blogs and found a wonderful eye spy quilt.  The eye spy quilt was another on my bucket list that one day, I’d like to start.

 

So in the interest of not starting any new projects till I finished the one before it…. I started a new project.

 

This one is so easy.  You stitch fifteen three inch square (or whatever size takes your fancy), stitch them together into five rows of five, border them with a plain homespun, and there you go:

 

I think that’s a fabulous idea to use up some of those three inch squares.  I do sincerely apologise for the original quilter of this design.  I tried for far too long to find your website.  I’ll happily give you credit if you let me know.

 

So that’s tomorrow’s job.  Let’s see how we go.

Till then, happy quilting!

When the world gets too much...

Today has been one of those days.  It shouldn't have been, it started out fine.  Child one at school, child two at a rare morning of daycare.  Free time for me. 

And my free time was lovely, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.  I even pushed the boat out and brought two lattes in the one morning - what a splurge!

But then I picked child two up from daycare at lunch time and for whatever reason it went down hill from there.  It began with me breaking my tooth and now having only half what was there originally, and it ended ten minutes ago with child one having a rare lapse and peeing her child seat on the way home from school.  But not in my daggy old car that doesn't really matter.  Oh no, in my husband's spick and span work car that he is very, VERY precious about.  I'm surprised he even lets us mere mortals in his work car.

And there was a whole lot of boring crapola in between that didn't go my way.  Pout.

So I'm supposed to be helping child one with her homework and instead, I'm stealing ten minutes to myself. 

I find when the world all gets too much, like today - all I want to do is escape into my sewing room and shut the door.  I don't want music, movies, distractions.  I want to just put my head down, bum up and sew all afternoon.  Those times are so few now.  I love my family to pieces but I do find the older they get, the more they demand of my time.  There are parties to go to, ballet lessons to drive to, netball lessons to attend.  And I know it will only get worse. 

Anyway.  Big deep breath, happy face on.  Tomorrow I'll try and unearth the digital camera from underneath the mountain of crap that it's hiding in and show you some quilt eye candy.  Or Quilt Porn, if you're naughty.  I'm not naughty, of course. 

:)

Happy quilting!

Coming Clean

I spent a large amount of time over the past month organising.  Mainly my sewing room, but some other things as well.  It's my aim to have a clean sewing room, with everything in its place.  It's also very important to me to have a photographic record of all that I have done.  I started making photos of all my quilts years ago, and mostly I have been faithful to that.  Consequently, I have many photo albums filled with quilts, and bags, and cross stitches, and so much more. 

I think there's a touch of the hoarder in me and I find it hard to settle if I can't finish things.  But I'm also  great starter, and I have so many UFO's in my cupboard, and PIGS (which I learned yesterday meant Projects In Grocery Sacks), and magazines and patterns that I feel I will never settle in my sewing room, which is meant to be the one room I can totally relax in. 

So I have a quandary, a dirty little secret.  I don't know if I should just Ebay the lot of it and declutter, or if I will regret it forever. 

As I said, all a bit of a quandary.

Been gone long time...

I've been meaning to post, really truly I have.  And suddenly I look and it's three months since I last updated. 

A lot happened in that time.  Mostly my beloved lap top has gone bung.  Bung is a technical term for *&^54 itself.  I've had it into the computer doctor and whilst it now opens okay, which it wasn't doing before, I am now forced to type like a beginner and go niccceeeee annnnnnnndddd slooooooooow.  If I go too fast the computer falls over in a dead faint after an attack of the vapours.  Which is rather frustrating. 

There's also a dead mouse in the ceiling over my sewing room. Yes, we've looked for it.  No, we can't find it.  So all my sewing room stuff is now in my spare room so that the smell doesn't go through everything and meanwhile my mother in law is coming to stay this weekend and I'm going to have to sort through everything and put it back into the smelly sewing room so that she has someplace to sleep and I'm not at all angry/stressed about that situation AT ALL.

So between the dead mouse thing and the computer gone bung thing, I've not been a good blogger.  Sorry about that.

But the plans for the freebie block of the month are progressing well.  As in, I've taken the folder out of its box and put it on the table.  That's a start.

So, hopefully tomorrow I'll post a little more, if the fading wallflower of a computer will let me.  If not, I'll see you again in three months!



Free Block Of The Month

Coming soon!

Because I have discovered how clever I can be at making my own PDF's, I have decided to join the ranks of other more worthy quilt designers and offer to you a free row by row block of the month.  This pattern comes from one we used when we owned a quilt shop and was designed by me, and as there is no longer a quilt shop, there's no reason that I can't offer it to you, my enormous readership (hi mum!) for nothing!

But I haven't made it into a PDF yet, so check back real soon!  And tell your friends.  It's a mix of piecing and applique (you could either buttonhole or needleturn), and it's a row by row.  And it's delicious.

See you soon!

What would you grab?

Like most of Australia, I've been confronted with violent footage of the deadly earthquake in Christchurch.  I've never been to Christchurch, having only visited the North Island of New Zealand, but my heart breaks for them.  There's been much talk this year, perhaps too much talk, about what you would take in the event of an emergency.  Australia has been swamped with emergencies, it seems, and each time I tell myself I really MUST get myself organised.  We have floods and fires to worry about, and they seem to happen with deadly regularity.  Who only knows when the next big 'unexpected thing' would be? 

I'd take the obvious - family, pets, drinking water, my backup information containing all 25 years of the diaries I have kept.  Precious photos.  You know.  That bit is easy.  But then, it gets more difficult.

Do I keep the old books I've collected over the years?  Do I save my two daughters' heirloom knitted blankets?  Do I make room for the many old treasures I've stashed away?  Their christening dress?  My wedding dress? 

Don't even get me started on the quilts.  Do I keep the hand pieced double wedding ring quilt?  Or the one that is on my bed that has comforted me through good times and bad?  Each one is filled with memories that make it 'the' one I would need to keep.

I wouldn't worry about the UFO's and the stash, and the quilting books.  That's just all stuff.  But the other things, the quilts and the baby clothes and wedding dresses and antique books - they are memories.  Yeah, at the end of the day it is just stuff, like all the other stuff, but it is so much more than that. 

I can't imagine losing all of that in one day, one hour.  Add to that the trauma of losing your job, or your pets, or your precious, precious family - well, it's all just too much to bear.

And if you've gone through that in the last week, or year, or lifetime - my heart breaks for you.

Technology is messing with my head

So yesterday I wrote that I wanted to learn how to make my own PDF files.  I did that with blinding success (yay me!!) so soon, when I tidy up the loose ends, I'll post my own free block of the month.  When we were in business, in the olden days, I did a lovely block of the month that would translate really well through the internet.  So stay tuned.

And of course, because I had such blinding success on that little adventure, my laptop has died overnight and now I can't post the thing.  I'm working now on the clankety clank old desktop that barely has a working keyboard. 

So - please keep an eye on the block for my very first freebie block of the month.  Hopefully it'll all work out good!

Hello World!

I think I may well be the very last person on the planet to start a quilting blog. 

I don't know what I aim to achieve.  I've got many things to say and to show you, yet when I sit in front of my little computer my mind goes blank.

I've been quilting for years with varying degrees of success.  I've got so much to learn, and not much time to learn it in.  I have a busy life and I am supremely unorganised with what limited time I have.  I've a lot of goals I want to achieve, and here we are, mid February and very little of them have been achieved.

So.  In a nutshell.  Here's what I want from this year.

1.  I want to blog daily.

2.  I want to keep an organised, happy home.

3.  I want to quilt daily.

4.  I want to stop starting new things, I want to finish what I start, and I want to put it away when I'm finished with it.

5.  I want to keep a regular quilt diary with photos of all my finished projects.

6.  I want to be all things to everyone and with that, I should just wave my magic wand and it shall all be. 

Yeah. 

And I also want to rejig my designs that I once sold in a previous life, and have a fabulously clever website that you can download them from.  I just have to learn how to do that, purchase a programme like Adobe and go from there.  Shouldn't be too hard, right?

Yeah.

Gotta go feed the kids.

S.G.