two bags full

I’m joining the linky party at SoScrappy for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge – for the first time this year!

Nothing like waiting till the last day of the eighth month to show up for a party that’s been going all year!

Inspired by Jess, at Quilty Habit, who made a rainbow wedding quilt of Dresden plates, I have finally come up with a way to set my heart blocks into a quilt.

Inspired by Deb, of A Simple Life Quilts, who has just finished a scrappy chevron flimsy, I am trying to get into the habit of using leaders and enders.

Inspired by Lori, of Bee In My Bonnet, who recently wrote a post detailing how she manages her scraps, I have decided to cut the scraps for the colour of the month (Rainbow Scrap Challenge; aka RSC) into 2.5” squares and keep them in a basket near my computer – that way I might remember to use leaders and/or enders instead of just whipping my current run of stitching out of the sewing machine.

On Friday, encouraged by WM, I got so inspired by my idea and my relatively tidy sewing room, that I turned one lonely red (the colour for August) heart block into this block, from 6” to 10” square:

But I couldn’t stop there; I turned two pink blocks into these:

Pink was the colour for January -- I’m just a little late to the party! But it was the next colour in my pile of heart blocks, which are ordered the way my scrap bins are ordered!

This has now become my number one project – so I guess it’s not really a leader/ender project any more!

Last night, while WM watched two games of football (rugby league), I spent three hours sorting scraps given to me by various people plus the leftovers of “recent” (ahem) projects (Ah, yes, I am a procrastinator, why do you ask?).

Two bags full of scraps in fact. Tom (full name: Tomodachi – Japanese for “friend”) thought he should check it out before I started. (Sorry about the night photos but it was then or never!)

I couldn’t take photos at midnight so this morning I woke to a lounge room floor that looked like this:

Those are abandoned blocks on the lounge. The pile right in front of the lounge is brights/moderns. The pile to the left of that is novelty fabrics. The pile at the end of the lounge is florals. The rest of the piles are sorted by colour.  (Don't worry, the lounge room was cleared soon after this photo was taken!)

All this sorting and block-making must mean I’m back into quilting.

And four posts in the last week (with more planned) must mean I’m back into blogging.

Now if someone could just wave a magic wand over my knitting needles…

Is that a finish I see?

Back at the end of June I set my goals for July – then I was diagnosed with shingles and didn’t sew (by machine) for the entire month.
So my July goals became my August goals.
Half of August passed before I was able to use my sewing machine again but by then, I has lost any interest in quilt-making. My re-awakened interest in family history had pushed aside any thoughts of crafting.
Then last weekend WM made good on a passing comment he had made two weeks before: “the next weekend we have free, we’re going to tackle your sewing room”!
Well, I'm still looking at small piles of mess but, for the most part, my sewing room is much better organised and a much more pleasant place to be. And it’s amazing how handling so much fabric as it is moved from one place to another can inspire all sorts of ideas (and challenges, like “what am I going to do with this?”)
And sew (yes, I wrote that intentionally) on Thursday, after sorting yet more fabric (more on that in a later post), I worked on some of my August goals.
I’ll leave the story of the Scrappy Log Cabin quilt for another post (looks like I’m back blogging too! LOL) and move on to my second (or is it my third?) project of the day.
I planned to finish my Gift of Hope quilt #2 before the end of the month. But, after sorting all that fabric, I couldn’t find a backing fabric that I was happy with. In the end I was left with a choice of solid white (boring!) or a print which had been folded for a long time and was dirty and possibly faded on the fold lines. I put that in a bucket to soak with some nappy (diaper) soaker – can’t make it any worse.
Frustrated, I turned to the block that was to have been Gift of Hope quilt #3. An abandoned (not-made-by-me) Dresden plate block measuring 22” square. Whilst searching through “that tub”, I came across some pink binding. “Perfect for that block”, thinks I. It was more than perfect, it was exactly the same fabric that had already been used to make an inner border on the block!

But when I measured it, I found that there was only 90” and I needed at least 98” of binding for the finished quilt. But, unfolded and pressed, 90” was enough to turn the 22” block into a 24” block – the recommended size from Yasminah’s Gifts of Hope.
So I pressed the fabric and attached it to the block. Now for the sandwich…
I had the “wadding” (cream flannelette); I just needed a backing fabric. But do you think I could find some? In the end I settled for a very pale lemon homespun (or is it lawn?).
I cut my backing and wadding then cleared off my cutting table to make a basting table.
In not much time at all, I had a sandwich.
Full of enthusiasm, I started quilting at around 9pm! I quilted “in the ditch” around the inner circle, the outside points of the plates and around the border fabrics.
I found some fabric that was suitable for binding (everything is a compromise when one is working with donated fabrics), cut and joined three strips that were two-and-one-sixteen-inches wide (I didn’t have enough fabric for a conventional 2.5”!) and pressed the binding in half. I attached the binding to the quilt and planned to leave it there.
But, at 1:00am I had to force myself to abandon the hand-stitching of the binding. (Too much enthusiasm here!)
I finished it last night and here is my first quilting-related finish in two months:
 
Blanket of Hope #2 will go to a family experiencing loss of a baby at birth or soon after. As I sewed, I sang a song (given to me in my private worship time that caused me to weep) “Somebody loves you, Somebody cares” over and over -- I pray that the parents will experience the love of God as they hold their little one wrapped in this quilt.
Linking up with TGIFF (Thank Goodness It’s Finished Friday), which is being hosted at Pippa’s Patch this week.

stitching with a machine

What's that? Oh yes, I’m procrastinating! I should be moving fabric back into the sewing room but this easier. But as soon as I’m done here, I’ll get to it!

I haven’t done any sewing at home in weeks but I have taken my sewing machine to class on the last two Mondays. That means I am back to working on my “Sampler Blocks”. It takes about three hours in class to complete one of these 12.5” blocks – that is: pressing, cutting, piecing, pressing, piecing, pressing, piecing, pressing. It sounds like a long time but in between there is chatting, consultation with the teacher, chatting, a cup of tea, chatting, goodies to eat, chatting, moving around a cramped classroom, chatting… well, you get the picture.

I’m not sure which, if any, of these blocks I have shown before so here are the five I have completed since (ahem) the beginning of the year. Of course I’ve been working on other things – a fair bit of hand piecing, making my project bag, basting and binding the Earth and Sky Quilt; to name a few. After all, how many of you work on only one project at a time? :-)

So here they are, in the order I made them (I think)

Domino

Oregon Trail

Cajun Spice

Pathways

Blocks and Star

I think I’d like to see "Pathways" as a whole quilt.

Do you have a favourite?

What would you do?

We have had a very mild winter and spring has begun early. Although we are officially still in the coldest month of the year (there was snow on the nearby mountains a couple of days ago), yesterday was warm, clear and bright -- not a cloud in the sky in the morning and only small puffs of white in the afternoon. A perfect day to be outside.

So where did WM and I choose to spend the day?

In my sewing room, where else?

Now, please don’t be shocked. You are going to see something that is quite awful. I’ll admit that I am a hoarder, a procrastinator and a bit lazy. But I’m working on improving in all those areas!

My sewing room was a bit of a mess. I really didn’t feel creative in there at all! Any horizontal surface, like my cutting table, my sewing table and the spare machine table that DD occasionally used, had become cluttered. The cutting table had mostly knitting projects from last weekend or those in progress but there’s also a finished quilt under all that. My sewing table has a pile of pre-washed but not ironed fabric on it plus a few other odds and ends. The old machine table had become the storage place for works in progress and more prewashed but unironed fabric, this time flannelette.

 

To begin the clean up, I moved everything that wasn’t furniture but was on the floor from the sewing room to the family room:

Yes, all those boxes, bags and tubs (and a pile of batting scraps moved from a container because I needed it for something else) were on the floor of my sewing room, making it hard to get at anything else. Don't worry, it's all ordered so I know where it's going! That lounge with the two tubs in front of it is covered in quilting related things and everything there will be going back into the sewing room. The lounge with the two green shopping bags on it has knitting related stuff and everything there will be moved to the wardrobe in the spare bedroom.

The wardrobe in the sewing room had been a repository of all sorts of things. The room had been DD’s bedroom so there were still some clothes of hers plus at least one box of her things. The rest was either quilting related (fabric) or stuff I had packed in boxes for our renovation in 2007 and had not unpacked yet!

 

Encouraged by WM, I threw out some unneeded, long accumulated items. This is very hard for a hoarder who saves everything because I might be needed in the future. I emptied four of the five archive boxes (the other was DD’s) and the large white carton carton and WM re-packed what was left into one carton (to be rehoused at a later date)!

WM visited the local Reject Shop (a discount store) while I, supposedly, moved things back into my sewing room. Unlike others who enjoy this part of the process, I don't -- I find it very hard to work out where I want everything. Especially when we started on the task before I had thought it all through!

WM returned with four storage units -- five plastic drawers in each. Here are three of them:

 

At first we arranged three of them in the wardrobe like this, but then we moved the old ones into the wardrobe and put the new ones on display because they are all charcoal (the only colour they had), and the original two units, now hiding inside the wardrobe, are blue.

I like the uncluttered look that we have achieved so far but the family room now looks like a disaster zone!

There's still a way to go. Lots of ironing and folding of all that pre-washed fabrics to be done too.

However, the thing that is really holding me up concerns a lot of fabric that is not actually mine.

As many of you would know, I belong to an organisation that makes quilts for children in hospital and for palliative care patients. We make these mostly from donated fabric. Because we have minimal storage space in the Council-owned room where we meet, different members are storing the donated fabric at their homes. I am one of those. At the moment, some of the fabric at my place is stored in a large plastic tub which is crammed so full of pieces of fabric that I have no idea what's in the tub and so am not using it to his full potential. That tub, the larger of the two in the photograph below, has been in my home for fifteen months now, and no-one, not even the lady who packed it, has any idea what's in it!

The big question is this: should I leave it all in the tub so that, in the unlikely event of our founder requiring it at a meeting, it will be packed and ready to go? Or should I unpack it and have much greater access to the fabric? If I do the latter, I lose space but gain precious time because I won't have to rummage around the overstuffed tub on the off-chance something inside might be just what I need. I may even become inspired when I see all those new fabrics to play with! ;-)

I'm inclined to unpack it -- but what would you do?

Does God heal today?

I know that I am being controversial. My non-Christian readers have already left. Some of my Christian readers are flipping out and/or gathering their refuting arguments.

But my Bible says that Jesus Christ is the same, yesterday, today and forever. (Hebrews 13:8)

That means He is just as willing to and capable of healing today as he was when He walked the earth in person.

As you know, I was diagnosed with shingles six weeks ago. For the past ten days, I have been completely off all forms of pain-killers; yes, even the “mild” ones like ibuprofen and paracetamol. I am completely healed of shingles!

Yes, it’s possible that I had a mild case and it was going to clear up quickly. But – I was in pain on Saturday and after prayer at church on Sunday morning, was completely free of pain.

I choose to believe that my God (who is also my Father and my Friend) healed me.

And if you don’t think healing a middle-aged woman of shingles is very dramatic, listen to the testimony of this young woman who attended the Healing Rooms in California. There is no doubt in her mind, or in mine, that God healed her!

Praise the Lord!

still here, still searching, still crafting (a little) – only a little doped!

Family history research is a very absorbing hobby – absorbing of one’s time, that is!

In the past couple of months, I have added over 400 people to my extended family. I try to include the parents and siblings of all my blood relatives’ spouses. Families with ten or more children are not uncommon among the working class from which my ancestors come so the numbers add up quickly.

So, if you’ve been wondering why I’m not reading and commenting on your blog – or writing my own – my computer time is almost totally devoted to family history research these days!

I’m not one for resolutions (and it’s not New Year) but some self-discipline is called for and I am now going to limit my time spent on family history research each day. I have friends who deserve my attention, followers that expect somewhat regular posts and craft projects that need my attention.
~~~~~~~~~~
There are photos coming but they have all been taken with my iPad so I apologise in advance for the quality!

Ah, shingles; yes, I was diagnosed with that mysterious virus four weeks ago. I spent the first week doped up so high I couldn’t walk a straight line. I was taking anti-viral medication and a daily dose of125mg of heavy-duty pain-killers (pregabalin for those who need to know such things) for post-herpetic neuralgia. But the good news is that the rash has almost completely disappeared and I am down to 25mg (one capsule) of the pain-killer a day so I’m thinking relatively clearly and almost ready to drive my sewing machine again!

I have been doing some crafting. A week after I was diagnosed I was supposed to teach a workshop on knitting with variegated and hand-painted yarns. I worked diligently through my fog to prepare for that workshop but, alas, it didn't happen; there's no way that I could get my befuddled mind into gear and teach! But samples were made, ripped out and made again.

Why do my mitred squares never come out square? This one will be ripped out!

I even managed to knit a whole dropped-stitch scarf in a commercial variegated acrylic yarn that I’ve dubbed the “brussell sprout” scarf because of the colouring.

In theory, knitting this scarf should have made the blotchy tendencies of this yarn less obvious but, unfortunately, this scarf is still so blotchy the pattern is almost completely obliterated!
 
If it wasn’t acrylic, I’d consider over-dyeing it. I’ve been successful in dying white acrylic yarn but I’m not confident that I can get colours dark enough to overdye this one!  Never mind, the scarf will still make the journey west to Mudgee next week when I tutor a workshop on “knitting with dropped stitches”.

A new project, called the “Mudgee Wrap”, has also been started for the same workshop but there isn’t much to show yet.

I haven’t been courageous (or foolish) enough to use my sewing machine while taking painkillers with that famous warning: “This drug may cause drowsiness. Do not operate machinery.” The idea of sewing through my finger is not at all appealing! But I have paid for classes so attendance is “mandatory”. Bring on the hand stitching…

In the past month I have made quite a few hexagon “triads” from scratch (the photo shows my intended layout although not the final position of the “blocks”)

– which basically means I have drawn and cut hexagons from 4” fabric squares, basted those hexagons and joined them in sets of three to create thirty of these:
  
There has been some humming and hawing over setting these triads but in the end I have decided to go with my original plan and have stuck with my “Dutch cap” shapes which I talked about in this post. In reality, there is quite a lot of fiddling around to create these shapes because each diamond is added separately to the triad then the diamonds are joined together.

So far I have made only one. I hope it will get easier with experience, otherwise I’ll be ripping them all out and looking for an easier setting!

So that’s my last four weeks summed up. Not much to show for it but I am supposed to be taking it easy and concentrating on getting better. The thing is that I just don’t feel “sick” and most of the time forget that I have been ill.

Onwards and upwards, as they say! In other words, back to my Mudgee Wrap which I ambitiously hope to finish in one week!

2013: The Year of the Finished Project – August edition

I hope that July was a more productive month for you than for me.

The month started well with a trip north to spend three precious days with DD, SIL and the grandsons. I posted about that here.

While I was away I had an itchy back. That became excruciating pain which caused a trip to the hospital in the wee hours of the morning with chest pain; followed by a diagnosis of shingles by my GP the following evening.

In the three weeks since that diagnosis I have balanced my pain medication so that I now only feel slight pain but am not so dosed up that I can’t walk straight. Because of that, I have been reluctant to use my sewing machine – that needle moves too quickly for me!

I have also avoided fine detailed knitting, like picking up and knitting the sleeves for my cardigan.

All that to say that my July goals remain just dreams – all projects totally untouched.

So my goals for August are basically my goals from July.

Country Houses quilt

Ambassador of Love mittens

Westall cardigan

Scrappy Log Cabin quilt

Purple Cocoon socks

Gift of Hope quilt #2

What about you? How did July turn out for you? And what plans for finishing those projects do you have for August?

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