Thursday 30 April 2015

Phew

Remember my post here about my wonderful RuleSteady?


My Fibro is getting worse and I am not sure if I could cut fabric without it anymore. It is a very expensive bit of kit, particularly by the time it is shipped over to England from Australia.

I dropped it. It broke. I was devastated.
 Then a couple of weeks later someone on Facebook had broken a ruler and people suggested she could fix it with a product called Plastic Surgery. It is relatively easy to buy over there. I found it from an American seller on Amazon UK. It took longer than normal to arrive, over 3 weeks. I read the instructions and it sounded a little like Superglue as it sets in seconds.

I unscrewed the wooden handle and this is when I saw it was broken on both sides.... I had nothing to lose at this point.

And it has worked. I waited 24 hours before I tried it out and it is fine. I am so happy.

Last Friday we went to lunch at the Bell at Skenfrith. I had been told it was pretty round there. It was magical. We have so many magical places round here, I love it. I took my camera but the batteries were flat but DH had his phone. Heaven save me from iPhones. I have no idea why, but on every photo it took eleven shots in rapid sucession.
I shall share what I managed to take.
A pretty little house, possibly the vicarage. The church is right behind it and the castle to the right.

 People were shorter then....


 The river Monnow runs right beside the castle. A swan was nesting on the island.

I imagine when it is warm, the temptation to get into the river is irresistable.
 I couldn't work out if the wooden structure on the church was a dove cote or not.
 The doors are scaled down. I suspect the church gets flooded and those sandbags are evidence.

Such a pretty place. I would love to live there but the flood risk would worry me.

Tuesday 21 April 2015

I am always learning.

But let me start with a progress report. It might not look like much but there are hours and hours of work in there.

It helps when I take photos even if I cannot see it all in one shot. I can compare last weeks photos with the new ones and I can see some progress.

 Cat hairs and fluff.
George just has to lie on this quilt whilst I am working on it and even when I am not if I don't shut the door. Can you see the cat hair and fluff he brings with him. I know I shall not be able to stop him, he isn't a dog. Training cats is possible but only to a point. So my new quilting tool is this clothes brush. At least I can stop stitching cat hairs into the quilt....
I had been worrying about why when I gave the tutorial on doing the tricky gridwork why the little elipses didn't stand as proud as they do on the quilt. I thought it might be because the fabric is slightly heavier. Then I had a light bulb moment in the middle of the night. It didn't stand proud of the background because I had drawn the grid with the weave of the fabric. Twist it round to the bias where the fabric has a little stretch and it works so much better.

Spring is here. The flowers are starting to come into bloom and the birds start singing at about 4.30am. I loved the colours of the birds when I lived in Australia but the song of British birds takes some beating.
And I have had a delivery. These will be the basis of my next quilt. The plan is to make one in these fabrics and an identical pattern in something completely different.

Tuesday 14 April 2015

Tutorial. How to do that grid.

Bunny asked how to do this grid.

So I took a little break and thought I would show you.

Start by drawing your grid out on your fabric using your preferred marking method.
 In this sample I used a 1/2" grid.
 Stitch curves and hit the line on the intersections.
 And then go back in the opposite direction.
 Sometimes you end up in a corner. Just squiggle your way to an intersection.
 Then fill the centres with squiggles. You just want to flatten that middle bit, try not to go over the lines you have previously stitched for the curvy grid. Travel from one centre to the next by going through the corners.
And this is the back so you can see what it looks like without the grid marks.
 When you get more of them done, the ellipse shapes take on the form of a grid as they puff up.

Wednesday 8 April 2015

Not sure if this was bad design or me nitpicking.

Should I not have designed it with such tiny bits of background showing? And having done that should I have ignore them? It is actually worse than this tiny bit. If you follow down the diagonal going to the front and left, there is an even smaller sliver of background between the brown stem and the leaf. And yes, I have quilted that too. I might be more than a little insane, lols. I am getting so impatient to get rid of that white soluble thread, but it will have to wait until it is completed.

I gave myself a break from the tiny gridwork in the middle and did this much faster fill in the next border. It was positively relaxing after concentrating so hard.

The weather has changed here in the Forest. Suddenly it feels like spring. I go to sleep listening to the sheep with their lambs and wake to the dawn chorus.

Sunday 5 April 2015

Before and after shots

At first glance it might look the same as my last post, but there is work there. I have done all the petals in both the red and pink flowers, and added some veining to the leaves. And all the flowers in the borders have been done, but not the leaves. One of the advatages of taking photos as I go along is seeing the bits I haven't done like the red flowers in the pots in the other quadrants.
This is what it was like last weekend.
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And I got those borders put on the Di Ford Mystery quilt. I am pondering what I do next. I bought extra fabric of the last border supplied so I could add a full width of the stripe. That would take the quilt up to 69" square instead of the 63 1/2" of the original. But I could add another border in between to bring it up even bigger..... decisions, I love pondering them.
ps the flowers aren't there to make it look pretty, just to stop it sliding off the desk.