Bad quilting day

Those days don’t come around often, fortunately, but today I couldn’t seem to make my head and hands work together at all. Just look at this mess!

With this design in mind, I cut a star from contact paper and quilted roughly around it several times along the middle sky section of the table runner. It didn’t look too bad, so I moved on to the echoing lines when I really should have left it alone. 

Big stitches, little stitches, stitches jumping all over the place. Awful. Oh well, now I have some hand work to do before I try again. The stars could stay I guess, but I think it will be easier with a clean slate.

While free motion quilting was clearly not in the stars, I went looking for something easy to work on, and searched through all my little treasures. In a box, buried under some old Christmas fabrics, I found a bunch of old Christmas blocks. 

I remember using some of them for two table toppers years and years ago. 

One of the fabrics was particularly horrible, just look at this rather stiff green one. The roughly appliquéd bright red heart did not add anything to it either, at least nothing good.

Now I have unstitched 8 of the blocks, discarding the appliquéd squares and replacing them with something better. Half of the blocks have been stitched back together, and the rest is laid out for tomorrow.

I don’t know when, if ever, these blocks will be finished, but tomorrow will be a great quilting day!

Of geese and fine print

I have been spending a lot of time this past week chasing wild geese, which mostly could have been avoided if everyone, including yours truly, had read the fine print.

On Friday, for instance, I had organized the afternoon so I could take our young man to his first swimming lesson. We left little man with MIL and went on our merry way with his brand new swimming cap and goggles only to find the pool filled with a group of 3-5 year olds with their parents. Obviously there was some mistake, but the person who had done the booking did not bring the confirmation email, so we did not know whether it was the day, the time or the pool that was wrong.

It turned out all right in the end though as I took young man on a little road trip on our way back home. We used to live in that part of the town when his mom was little, so we got to see his mom’s kindergarten, where I used to work and so forth. I was quite nice. The swimming class turned out to be on Monday afternoons by the way.

Then there was the saga of the blue suitcase that had an unplanned stop at the local airport yesterday. An aunt of mine caught her flight back from Scotland, but her suitcase did not. It took two trips to the airport, lots of fees, lots of texting, lots of missed calls, lots of Amazing Race-style running around from this point to that, and lots of giggling at the silliness of the situation, all which could have been avoided if we all had read the fine print. I was ever so happy when the suitcase was finally dropped off at its next stop on the way back home.

There have been dinners that have been cooked at the wrong temperature, some unsuccessful attempts at refilling the orange fabric stash, unnecessary load of homework that have been done by young man, half a quilt's worth of blocks that have been cut in the wrong direction, papers that have not been picked up, papers that have not been dropped off, oh yes, it has indeed been quite a week.

And then there was today. While I was waiting for an appointment, I decided to quickly add some touches to the challenge quilts I have been working on; just emphasizing the quilted windows with a little touch of silver and a little touch of volume paint.

Yup, I should have read the fine print, or rather the whole print, because all I read was blanc (blank means clear in Norwegian)

and now I have a line of white goo around the windows on three quilts

- and more white goo on a different project from a fabric glue stick that is supposed to dry clear.

Apparently it does not, it dries white, but hopefully it will wash out. Maybe I should read the fine print, or maybe just stay a day or two in bed with a good book..

Thanks for stopping by!

"Soft treasures"

This quilt did not make its way into the world easily, so with a late-but-big Tah Dah, I give you "Soft treasures" (Jan 2014, 65*77cm)

With all the fabrics and notions available to us quilters, it is easy to lose track of the simple joy of creating your own images, so I wanted to go in the other direction using only solid black fabric and colourful thread, and techniques from my free motion quilting class, Quilta Figurer.

The quilt is free motion quilted in various patterns and hand embroidered. Extra texture and depth have been added by playing with the thread tension and adding just a few lines with fabric crayons.

Those of you who read this blog, know that it took more than a few experiments to get the colours

and techniques

and stitches right.

Those of you who do free motion quilting, know that it takes more than a few hours to do such dense quilting.

Those of you who do hand stitching, know that it takes more than a few days to do this much hand stitching.

It did indeed take quite a lot of work to finish the quilt, but the competition for which it was made got cancelled, and after a lot of mishaps on the way to an exhibition, it was finally showed at a “Show & tell”, for half a minute, in a very poorly lit hall, 100 feet away, all crinkled and horrible. Tah dah. I felt crinkled and horrible too.

Hopefully I’ll feel better about the quilt when it gets unpacked in the new house. Maybe I’ll want to take properly lit pictures. At least I can use it as a sample in future Quilta Figurer classes.

I'll keep you updated..

Where the wind and the rain blows

There are two phenomenon of nature that makes me dance - snowy nights and hot, pouring summer rain. You see, my favourite saying “Life isn’t waiting for the storm to pass by, it’s about learning to dance in the rain” (quilts here and here) isn’t only a metaphor, it’s actually something you can do.

Friday was the hottest and windiest day of the year and you could feel the thunderstorm approaching from early morning. I was telling grandson about how we used to dance in the summer rain, and when the rain finally hit in the evening, I ran outside. The expression on his face was priceless as he watched me happily dance around, getting soaking wet while grinning like mad, but then he came outside too. It was awesome, he couldn’t stop laughing. I’m sure he won’t forget that day any time soon, and neither will I.

We spent the rest of the weekend going with the wind and the rain, which was great. This summer has reset a switch in my brain, turning the hyperactive mode off, which is quite nice. I don’t worry, it will get kicked back on again, and I suspect the upcoming Birmingham trip this week will do the trick.

It was also quite windy on the day I took these pictures of what I believed to be the finished quilt for my niece Ida (previous posts here and here).

 

I like the way the reds of the funky borders and fleece edges are balancing out the sweetness of the 30-ies pinks.

 

See where it went wrong? Yup, I did not catch the edges all the way around and there are 3 seams to unpick before I can fix it. You'll find my tutorial on how to make fleece edges (proper ones) here.

Isn't it just awesome what you can do with a few scraps and some old pieces from your stash!

Making quilts for others can be tricky; what you love might not be their cup of tea, but you’ll just have to try and do your best. And of course, in case the match doesn’t work out, you get to keep it for yourself.

Only 24 hours to go and I will be on my merry way to Birmingham with 6 of my best quilting buddies. If you are there, it would be fun to meet you, so do come up and say hi if you spot me somewhere in the crowd! I’ll respond to most versions of my name, but if you are feeling particularly adventurous and would like to have a go at the Norwegian pronunciation, you’ll find it at the bottom of this old post.

See the rest of you next week!

Happy, happy

Happy Thursday, everyone, happy July 4th, happy summer day, happy quiet day, happy rainy day, happy day indeed!

You may be wondering what all the happy is about, and I will be happy to tell you - the Whatever quilt that will be shipped off to the Festival of Quilts in Birmingham sometime next week is finally done. Yeeey!

I did something totally scary this week which could have turned out Oh so badly, but everything fell into place at the end of the day. Literally. Making the decision of adding yet another element to the finished quilt was easy. The execution however, was a challenge.

Goal: add a simple outline of the applique shape semi-overlapping the applique.

Method: make a plastic template, draw the outline with glue, add yarn, let dry, zigzag stitch in place.

Template: ok

Glue: making way too fat lines

Yarn: glue all over the place, had to be removed

Result: glue blobs on the quilt. Not a happy sight

Solution: dabbing the glue off with a paper towel, well most of it anyway, and free-couching the yarn using the template as a guide. The plastic template kept sticking to the bottom of presser foot, so I tried working underneath the edge and that worked like a charm.

Did I rip out part of the couched lines the very next morning? Yes, indeed, and quite happily so. It simply was too much.

Now both labels are secured to the back and just needs to be covered up with a piece of muslin before shipping. I have not decided on the packaging issue yet, so I might need to pick your brains on that later.

See, happy!