Taking Stock

Once the emails were answered and bills paid, it was high time to get back into the studio and do some quilting. This could not begin before I had a minor tidying session, making space for some new thread, giving the longarm machine a little TLC and setting the Bernina 710 up for piecing with the dual-feed 97 patchwork foot and single-stitch plate. 

I had two main projects on the go; one of which was stitching out quilting examples to send to Bernina and to use as “warts-and-all” photos in my Ebook. Usually, a quilter will try to match thread carefully to blend with the fabric but in this case I need a high contrast for photos so dark brown thread on white fabric showed up every wobble. I did not especially enjoy this task because it was a sample but I really needed the practice, feeling rusty as it seems to be a while since I did any tricky, custom quilting. I may consider adding paint and fancy stitches to the practice piece when I have time - it could be cut it up to make bags or wallets. 

I am on the lookout for jumbo suitcases to ship the Yurt coverings to Paducah, although it may be cheaper to buy new holdalls considering what charity shops sell junk for in my area. I made some progress editing the long-unfinished descriptions of the Yurt panels. When my original book about the Yurt got sidelined I never got around to finishing off some of the “chapters” and I certainly did not write patterns for every panel. I would love to come up with a children’s story based around the Yurt but I can’t just scribble it down in a couple of days. Life is just too busy to shut myself up in an ivory tower to work on ALL of the things that I would like to create!

I puzzled over my sketchy drawings of the Tartan quilt and confused myself over its dimensions. One of the diagrams showed a border but the other one did not so that would account for the difference. I made 3 blocks then could not figure out why they were not all the same size. After a bit of a panic where I almost cut one of the blocks down to a smaller size, I realised that the middle row is actually narrower. Although I love shot cottons, I was reminded how tricky they can be as the loosely woven fabrics fray and warp easily. The blocks are even bigger than I imagined so the quilt top should be completed relatively quickly. I just need to decide on some simple (Ha-Ha!) but interesting quilting. After quilting up my photo samples, I was beginning to feel that my quilting might be in danger of getting stuck in a rut. I guess I need to spend less time thinking and more time drawing, sigh…