Sometimes you’re the chalk, and sometimes you’re the sandpaper. At the moment, I’m definitely the chalk.
I’m trying to get the curtain of the ark project finished and I’m mired in the doldrums of the middle third of a project where it’s obviously not finished but the novelty has worn off.
I’m slowly picking away at it, but it’s a struggle…
Well, this is quite exciting, Dragon has a proto-quilt!
I always joked that I couldn’t have another child until I finished Dragon’s quilt and, as I type this that’s sort of true (but I’ve scheduled this to post about 10 days after I’m writing it).
My mum was due to arrive on a Saturday morning, and since I’d need to use the spare room/dining room to lay out the quilt ready to baste it, I planned a whole Friday to spend on it.
I thought I’d experiment with starching the top and back before I basted them, especially because there’s an awful lot of linen blend in there, so a little glide between the layers was going to be a good thing.
I’ve been using this tutorial from Oh Fransson! recently, where you lay out the wadding and the top, roll them up, and then lay them out on the backing.
All was going well for the first part, but the quilt top was a little bigger than I remembered. So I duly rolled it up and spread out the back, ready to tape to the floor.
If you have a cat, you’ll know that there is a point where the cat will come in, roll around on your project and generally require you to take a very deep breath before you do something you regret.
That was only a precursor to the realisation that the back of the quilt was smaller than the front, and that I didn’t have enough of the gray linen to just cut two long pieces to go at the top and side.
Six and a half hours of hand piecing later, I had extended the back sufficiently to lay out the top again.
Problem Number 2 then reared its head: How do I centre the top onto the pieced back so that when you turn it over, the binding and the seams of the squares run parallel? I fussed and fretted over this all of Friday evening, until I realised this – No one is the boss of me. Just because I have found someone’s technique useful in the past, doesn’t mean that I always have to use it.
Because the back is more detailed at the bottom left and fades to monochrome at the top right, I could line up the top and back edges at one corner and allow it to go where it pleased as I moved diagonally across.
Once I whip stitched the edges on two sides, I set off with another new method of basting, pad stitching, taken from tailoring, but quite effective and surprisingly quick for basting (some of that may have happened at 4am when I couldn’t sleep).
Overall, I’m quite pleased with how it came out. I appreciate there’s a significant amount of hand quilting to do still, but at least it’s ready to pick up and start.
I’m also glad I remembered who is in charge in this making lark (me, in case I need to check back later on), and discovered the pad stitch method of basting.
Parenting is a bit like trying to drill holes in the walls of our Victorian flat.
From the outset you’ll never be quite sure whether you’ll remain as unyielding as surprise masonry or as soft and crumbly as lath and plaster (or in fact be made entirely of newspaper and Polyfilla, but I can’t make that relate to parenting, so lets pretend we haven’t spoken of it).
My large weak spot is costuming. I’m starting to be able to tap the figurative walls and guess when this indulgence will rear its head, and when an invitation to a Frozen birthday party appeared, I knew it would be better to anticipate than react.
Luckily, I’ve been spared the princess-mania and since Dragon’s favourite character is Olaf the snowman, I could suggest a t-shirt rather than a full ensemble.
I’m pleased that this one came together with an investment of £1 in charity shop clothing and some felt (not to mention that I feel I’ve escaped very lightly without metres of sparkly tulle).
This commission has a sad story behind it, but I wanted to share it with you.
It’s a memorial piece for a wee girl who recently passed away after battling serious health problems for most of her life.
Her nickname was Ladybug, and while the obvious thing to do was incorporate that into the piece, I wanted to make sure that there was a little more to it than just an illustration.
Once I’d decided that the ladybird should be about to fly away, the rest of the colour choices fell into place.
The leaves are birch, which has symbolic meanings of youth, regeneration and the bridging the gap between this world and the next in several cultures.
This baby quilt feels like the end of an era.
Many moons ago when I was child-free and full of time that was my own, a very good school friend had a baby. So what could be more natural than to make her a quilt?
(Look at wee Kippie trying to help!)
Then I had a baby, then she had another baby. I didn’t want anyone to feel I was playing favourites, so I made a quilt. I enjoyed it, but it took a little longer than the first one (still under a year).
Then we had a synchronous increase in family size, her youngest arrived at about the time I discovered there was a Little Lion on the way, and I’ve been working on (what she assures me will be) the last quilt in the series.
It’s a mixture of machine and hand quilting, and I’m quite pleased with how it turned out in the end. (Although I have to admit I got a little stuck in the middle of it all.) Plus, I’ve managed to finish it within the one year self-imposed limit!
I think I’m going to give quilt-making for other people’s children a little break; for one thing I now have two quilts to finish for my own offspring and I’m also finding that hand sewing as a way to relax from hand embroidering is not quite as soothing as it might be.
But watch this space for Dragon and Lion’s quilt updates because I’m determined to get moving while my nesting spell is upon me!
(The photos of the previous quilts link to their original outings on my blog, if you fancy seeing more photos or reading more about their creation.)
It occurred to me a few months ago that if I was going to get any quilts finished for our increasing menagerie, I was going to have to get cracking.
Unusually for me, I had the urge to finish a project I’d already started, so I’ve decided to give Little Lion the Shirt Quilt.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with this long-term (ca. 2008) WIP, it’s made from my dad’s (forcibly) retired shirts. I’m paper piecing 1″ hexagons for both sides (I have quite a lot of shirts) in a fairly random pattern.
The palette is (as you will have noticed) fairly limited, so there may be some surface decoration, but I’m not quite sure what it will be yet.
If you’re interested in the process of going from shirt to hexagon I can write an explanatory post, but this is a good start for an overview.
Also, if anyone wants some shirt-skeletons – collars, cuffs, button plackets and French seams all still in shirt shape, please let me know.
I was a little concerned that I’d be at a loose end when I started maternity leave next week.
Well, I needn’t have worried. My website seems to have been targeted by spam-bots (now under control, thanks to the Lovely Young Man), but it’s meant that large portions of the website will have to be recreated.
It was vaguely on my list to restructure some aspects of the website, but now it looks like I’m doing it sooner rather than later.
This includes the shop and bits of my portfolio, so if you have any questions or want to commission or buy anything please get in touch via the contact form.
Another baby present today, this one turned out as a bit of a surprise, even to me!
I was thinking of Fairisle knitting when I chose the colours (cream, burnt orange, royal blue and emerald green) but in the end it didn’t look anything like knitting.
If the colours don’t show up very brightly in the photo, it’s because I had a window of photographing opportunity between 8.00 and 8.30 one morning to get it shot. I thought I was being super-organised, I set everything up the night before, took a few preview shots and went to bed feeling like I’d cracked this photography thing.
Morning came, there was the usual endless discussion about what toys were or were not going to nursery and by the time I lifted my head from my cup of tea I realised that it was in fact still dark in Edinburgh on a January morning at 8.30! So I stopped right up and hoped for the best… I’m calling it atmospheric!
Sometimes I have a very strong idea for a commission, either the fonts, colours or both.
This was a hoop that just fell into place with almost no prevarication. The lady who commissioned it showed me a photo of the mum and baby (I love that, it’s so nice to picture the recipient as I work) and the nursery was a lovely combination of buff, cream and gold.
I’m not very good at sticking to a colour scheme in my own decorating, so it’s nice to be able to play at interior design with someone else’s scheme!
I don’t know if this is universal amongst people who work on commission, but I have a very loose mental wish list of things I want to make.
For instance, I’ve never been commissioned to sew anything rude or sweary (Dragon is very close to starting to read, so if you’ve been pondering any embroidered profanity, please do it soon!) or marriage proposals, both of which I quite fancy.
However, I have now embroidered a logo for a fellow maker, which I’ve been desperate to do for ages.
This rather lovely purple is the logo of a French artist who goes by the same of Sarigami and creates gorgeous origami jewellery and decorative objects. She’s based in Paris and is in the midst of some exciting changes, but do have a look on her website and Facebook page for more information.
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