I have been doing some quilting!

Firstly I quilted this little top which will be the raffle quilt at a coffee morning organised by one of the members of a local quilt group. I used YLI fine gold metalic thread and was delighted at how it behaved itself. It's only about 40" square.

Then I quilted the feathers on the wholecloth I designed a little while back. I'm trying to decide whether or not to quilt it down between the feathers. If I do, I shall do it with white silk thread to make the background quilting as unobtrusive as possible. The feathers have been quilted with a vareigated blue to almost white Aurifil thread. I haven't washed out the markings yet so I can't see the full effect. I might have to do a little sample piece before I decide.

The back looks quite cool. I need to spend this evening burying the threads.
Meanwhile, I bought some old American Quilter magazines (the AQS ones) and found an article of reverse machine applique (I think the writer named it something different). She used the technique to make pictures. I'm doing something completely different.... Wait and see.
As always, click on the photos to get a good look.

What I've been up to

After soaking the shaped bits of batting off the white wholecloth, I went to use some fresh sateen. I measured it against the master paper pattern, doubled the length, added a bit more and tore off the length. Then I discovered the other sateen I hoped to use wasn't wide enough. At this point I realise this quilt is fighting me more than any other. I had planned to wash out the original and use it perhaps for backing this (backing hasn't been decided yet). Too impatient to order more, or even to wash out the remainder of the marking pens, I'm just using it as is. I know it will wash out when (if?) this quilt is finished but it's not too pretty to look at whilst I'll be quilting it.
Here I'm showing you what I'm using on this particular quilt to hold it still whilst I'm marking. Because the sateen is only semi opaque I can trace through without using the light table. If you look carefully in the bottom left you can even see some of the design in the photo. The paper pattern is held onto the table with several of the white clips you see on the right. They are made to hold tablecloths on outdoor tables (very Martha Stuart, but I have a life). I use these and the other clamps to hold the fabric in place over the master.
Not wanting to get that bl**dy grid wrong a third time (or is it fourth?). I resorted to marking it out on the bedroom floor (you can see to my shame, I haven't got round to making the skirt for the new bed). Firstly I pinned the fabric to the carpet but soon discovered this fouled the ruler. I use the word ruler very loosely, it is a length of cable trunking from a diy store. This was the longest straight edge I could find..I ended up using masking tape. Our thick carpet present yet more problems. If I crawled over the fabric, it distorted into the pile. You can't see but in the foreground to the right it buts right up against the bottom of the wardrobes. This meant for each end of each line I had to climb over the bed. There are 64 lines in each direction. At this point I'd only traced the outer square and the outer circle. I put a little cross in alternate diamonds to make absolutely sure this time, it WILL work!!!!!

And I've been contemplating my Heide Stoll Weber fabrics. I have several ideas, just want to see which fabrics would work with each idea. These two on the right might well be another strippy (or they might not, nothing is written in stone until they are cut)

And because they are so very different from each other, I need to be able to see a goodly amount of each one to make a decision. These stayed like this on the bedroom floor for 3 or 4 days, until I took pity on DH trying not to tread on them when he's been getting ready for work. I do wonder if he ever thinks he could have married someone more 'normal' but then 27 years later, I think he must have got used to it by now.

Finally

I get something done. Not a lot but something.
I washed the going round in circles quilt and it's now blocked and drying on Fliss's bedroom floor.
And I got the first bit of the contemporary wholecloth quilted. Can someone tell me why on earth I decided to trapunto this piece. It has dimension without it. It's far harder to quilt through the layers. I've used Quilter's Dream poly in the de luxe weight (the thickest). It has actually made the motif quite stiff, not a problem as it's a wall hanging but it is a problem as I'm posting it to the Festival of Quilts and even if I manage to send it on a roll, they romove it and fold it up into a bag prior to hanging. So it WILL crease.
And it has a name now "Contemporary Wholecloth #1" might not be very original but it does leave the way open for me to do more on the same theme.

New feathers

Last night I started designing the 2nd of the quilts I've entered for this year's shows but haven't made yet (gulp).I sat at my desk with a pencil and an eraser and played around until I came up with this. Most of the erasing was done to stop the feathers looking too formal. I find it quite difficult not to make the lobes even like the old feathers.
Once I was happy with it, I went over the pencil with a black pen. I then flipped the paper over (lightweight sketch pad) and copied it onto the back of the sheet. This gave me the mirror image.
The fabric is fine enough to trace through without the use of a lightbox with extra white paper behind the design. The brown lines are a disappearing Clover pen ti give me registration marks.
Whenever I've marked up wholecloths, I've always been a little sad to see the marking disappear. It's a totally different look. So this time the marking is part of the design. The fabric is pale blue and the markings are in teal and deliberately blurred. I shall stitch in teal thread to emphasize the lines.
Once I have this border design marked up, I shall design the centre of the quilt. I'm wondering whether to stick with the teal or change to a different colour for the central motif.

You can't get staff like you used to

Sorry it's been a few days since I've blogged. Domesticity reigns. I hate ironing big time and the one of the 'treats' I've always given myself is to pay someone else to do the ironing. I know there are loads of people who get away with doing none at all but DH wears suits to work and shirts are part of that 'look' and all our bedding is 100% cotton. I know the bedding doesn't 'have' to be ironed but the feel of fresh sheets ironed smooth is a luxury I wouldn't do without.

Margaret, my last ironing lady had to give up as she developed shoulder problems. She takes a lot of beating. Each shirt is immaculate. I started with an ironing service just before Christmas. DH complained loudly but with my leg there wasn't much I could do. Finally last week I got the ironing service to find me another lady, but she didn't turn up. The long and the short of it ended up with me doing the ironing and my leg which I had thought was nearly better blew up to twice it's normal size. Just very frustrating.

I did manage to take up the curtains for Fliss's room where Marion shall be sleeping tomorrow night. Two pairs of floor length curtains. I still haven't made her bed....

Pauline came over yesterday for lunch and we pondered the grid problem on the wholecloth. We both came to the same conclusion that just one direction of the markings would 'cure' it. I finished unpicking the trapunto but the existing marks proved just too confusing. With great trepidation and a towel underneath, I painted the area with a lightly wetted paint brush.
As you can see the marks haven't disappeared completely but they have blurred enough so any new marks shall be distinctive. In a couple of places the water soluble thread on the narrow lines of trapunto have dissolved but not so badly I can't stitch them back in. At the moment I'd like to walk away from this quilt and leave it for some time and I might even do that but after I've re-marked this blessed grid. It would be just my luck at the moment that if I did put it away for a few months, we'd have a very humid period and the water soluble thread would disappear! I don't hate the quilt, I'm still very pleased with the design but the frustration level is as high as any quilt I have done before and I haven't even started quilting it yet. It's like a lover who has been unfaithful. Can I forgive it? Probably, we shall see. BTW, a lover wouldn't get a 2nd chance (grin) and that says an awful lot about how seriously I take my quilting.

Not quite stitching but nearly

I'd thought I'd cut away all the batting for the trapunto on my wholecloth but clearly I hadn't. Now if only I'd found this out when my knee was really bad. So Pauline has pinned up the large sample from this quilt and I've pinned and even smaller piece for tension practise and I'm ready to go. Saturday's hiccup with my PC has been a problem. My darling DH rebuilt me a machine yesterday and I expect today I shall be reloading all my programs as I discover them missing.
This is the centre of the wholecloth with the excess batting cut away round the feathers. This is a slow process but it's crucial to do it very carefully. I have to cut as close as possible to the stitching line (Superior Threads water soluble) but at the same time be very very careful not to cut through the top fabric. The batting I'm cutting away is Quilter's Dream Poly De Luxe weight. This stuff feels like felt and clings like cotton batting but without the shrinkage problems. And if you are wondering what markers I use refer back to 'how to find your perfect marker' here.

This is how it looks on the back. This took well over 2 hours.


And these are the toys I bought yesterday. I used to have a Wacom tablet but it was tiny and anyway it died. (sigh). The larger ones are quite expensive but this beauty was only about £30 ($60). One of the frustrations of my knee is I cannot get down behind (or to the ones in front of ) my PC to use a USB port so I can plug in and play.

The other toy is this clipboard which I can draw on anywhere and then upload onto the PC. I can see me using this in bed, or when I'm away from home, or sitting on the sofa. I might even be able to draw feathers for you guys to print out and use.
I got both these toys and a new set of PC speakers for less than £100 in total. If you're in the UK, I got them from Aldi who often have special deals on electronic toys and TVs. I sign up to their email updates and mostly they have stuff you wouldn't want in a month of Sundays but sometimes, just sometimes, it's worth the effort to get there when they open for one of their deals.
Yesterday was the first time I did it and there was a queue of about 50 people waiting for it to open. Most of them were waiting to buy a super fast PC or the hard drives they also had on offer. Acouple of weeks ago DH went down there for me and picked up a couple of 1gig cards for my camera for only £5.99 each. No more shall I go out and find I've left the card in the card reader (grin) or am I the only person who regularly does this?

Wholecloth and Ostrich quilt

The dreadful wholecloth. As I've said before, I don't know why I bothered except it was good practice doing grid work. This is a preprinted Bernatex wholecloth and is very badly conceived. Why? Many reasons but a few are, there is not enough difference in scale between the grid and the designs, the centre portion is not framed or isolated in any why to give it prominence, ditto for the middle ring of ribbons ands flowers and then there is proportionately too little quilting in the outer border. This quilt despite it's creases looks far better in the carefully taken photo than it does in reality. (creases come from DH sitting on it (grin).) And that's without the problems of the gird work crossing single lines of flower stems.
You might guess by now that I'm not impressed....
This is DD's 2006 Ostrich quilt hanging where it was created for. The fabrics are almost all from Ikea in their Rosali range. It is rumored that these were designed by Cath Kidston or they might have been a rip off copy. Ikea didn't sell them for very long, they were dirt cheap and absolutely gorgeous and now sell for about 5 times their original price on Ebay. Unfortunately DH was with me the day I bought them so I was far more restrained than I should have been and I had to supplement it with some at the outrageous Ebay prices.

Opera and shopping

As suspected no quilting this week except for stitching the binding down on the Bernatex preprinted whole cloth. I cannot think of any good reason for having done this quilt at all. It was a pig to quilt with loads of interrupted grid work. And the only use I can think for it is to go on top on the memory foam mattress which blessedly saves me from backache but miserably makes me incredibly hot at night. I'm thinking a cotton quilt between me and the mattress might help? OK it was designed to be hand quilted and doing it on a machine wasn't in the designer's mind but as I worked on it I realised that it would have been a pig to quilt by hand as well.

DD wanted some fab new clothes for her new life so we trecked into London's Covent Garden area yesterday. I love shopping here, loads of street entertainers and interesting shops. Where else can you go and have brilliant coffee and listen to opera at the same time? The singers from the opera house and wannabes sing inside what used to be the old Fruit and Vegetable market. I'm not an opera fan (I don't dislike it but have almost none on my Ipod) but I find these singers almost always bring tears to my eyes.
Brilliantly the day started well with DD finding two pairs of 'perfect' jeans in the first shop. Nine hours after leaving we got home with our bags full of shopping and her best friend turned up to say goodbye. Needless to say this left me in tears again. I shall miss all these wonderful young people so very much. They will come back I know, but they will come back as different people.