Chalking it up to Inexperience

I spent NO LESS than 3 days marking my DWR quilt with chalk I am not convinced will ever rub/wash off. It should have been simple to mark a 2 inch grid all over but when it came to adding in some more information, it was obvious that a couple of the diagonals were not where they should be. A job that started off so neatly looked like a child had been playing on the pavement with a box of IKEA chalk and a wet sponge. I just hope I can actually quilt what I have scribbled! Of course, the quilt is now far bigger than it was meant to be therefore I had to sew extensions onto the 90” wadding and order more backing fabric since I no longer had enough, sigh:(

A simple customer quilt and a DIY customer alleviated the boredom and I spent many hours scouring the internet for images for the Domestic slideshow, ensuring that I would not be infringing any copyright rules. I have some great pictures so far, enough to take photos in order to meet a competition deadline. 

My weekend was beyond frustrating technology-wise. Whoever used my decent camera last (and I’m sure that was not me) mislaid the charger so I had to take photos using my phone. The phone takes great photos but when they are uploaded to the computer the quality is seriously reduced. I cannot fathom this at all. I have changed the settings on my phone but when you zoom in to inspect the images on the computer they are not at all sharp. 

Obviously, taking the photos in the first place was not going to be easy. The background quilt is white (ish). I hung it on a quilt stand with a black cloth behind it but inside photos of the quilt were too dark and outside photos would not show the projected images, even in cloudy light. The other weird discovery is that when you try to take photos of digitally projected images they show up as strips of red, blue and green. Then it started to rain… 

In rooting around for my camera charger I realised that I own a digital projector, overhead projector and pocket projector. The only way I could get a realistic photo of the quilt plus slideshow was to print a slide onto an acetate sheet and use the old fashioned OHP. If the piece is accepted into the competition I want to use the pocket projector mounted on a tripod but it won’t yet recognise the photos that I copied onto the micro SD card that I have now accidentally trashed while attempting to reformat it - ARGHHH - Seriously, I could have been quilting for hours in all of that time!

Putting in the Hours

There has been no slacking this week in my workshop! I quilted the table linen project in straight-ish lines and loved the texture that the rope added. There were a few problem creases that appeared which prompted me to run over them repeatedly with matchstick lines which I can attest was quite boring. There were 2 old stains on the linen which I should have left alone but I decided to peg it out on the washing line and throw a couple of buckets of water over it. When the quilt dried the stains had spread and multiplied and the quilt would not bend enough to go in the washing machine so I decided to soak it in the bath with some stain remover. While it was under water the central doily went completely blue so I fished it out, dripped it back outside, rinsed it with a watering can and hung it to dry on a farm gate. 

I left the two horizontal edges unbound to give them a rustic look but I added binding made from a ripped linen pillowcase to the top and bottom then added lengths of clothes line as an embellishment on all 4 sides. 

The idea is to project a slideshow of images onto the quilt on the theme of “Domestic”. I want to include old photos of women in domestic service, ladies having afternoon tea, cotton pickers, textile weavers, factory workers, makers and crafters. This is proving difficult since people did not own cameras and take selfies in those days and pictures on the internet are rarely copyright free. I want to include as much detail as I can about the subjects, dates, places and photographers. If any blog readers have any pictures the vaguest bit relevant hidden away in photo albums then I would love to include them. I reckon I need at least 60 which would make a slide per second one minute presentation. It would be great to include audio in this project in the future.

The rest of my week was spent on custom quilting a lovely New York Beauty customer quilt. It was entirely stitch-in-the-ditch and curved longarm ruler work which took a while but I am very pleased with how it turned out. 

I was sent photos of Beezlebub hanging at Paducah by Mark Caraher and Donna Hartford.  The quilt will now go back to Bonnie in Oklahoma to relax its creases while it waits for its next outing. At least while it’s away I don’t have to store it;)

Next week, apart from customer quilts and my usual malarkey, I must get “Domestic” ready to photograph (which means finding at least one good still antique photo) and mark out the DWR with a chalk grid. It is far easier to mark a quilt before it goes on the frame. I will worry about how to get the marks off later because I suspect that this will be another one that can’t go into the washing machine…

Down a Rabbit Hole

It can be difficult to get work done during school holidays but I do not really need to entertain my kids much these days. Nell and I went to St Andrews to see a magnificent student production of Sweeney Todd because Freya had been the costume designer. She had sourced authentic Victorian outfits and accessories and we were impressed by what a professional job the whole company had done with the show. We did not get home until 1.30 am so did not feel at all guilty about getting up late the next morning!

I managed to complete 2 simple customer quilts (forgot to take photos) and supervised 2 DIY quilts. I was honoured to make a Golden Wedding cushion for a lovely quilter with failing health. She has been a regular customer over my 10 years as a longarm quilter and it was sad to be told that this will probably be her final project. 

The DWR is always on my mind and very soon I will have to tackle some serious marking, once I have a clue how I will quilt it. I have made some very rough notes and I think I am probably (well, not definitely) going to give up on the idea of printed Russian women. 

It is the time of year to decide whether to have yet another crack at FOQ’s Fine Art Quilt Masters so I decided to try out something that I had filed under “Ideas”. This has taken me down a new rabbit hole The basic quilt top is old table linens but the quilting is something that I have wondered about since seeing an antique Indonesian rug. It was not made with wadding but with strips of rope - a lot of rope! I ordered 5 metres of soft cotton rope online to see how far it would go and was a little surprised to find that some people use it for Bondage! Luckily, my friend, Mo had a big unwanted reel of piping cord, like old-fashioned clothes-line, although thinner than I originally planned. 

The question was how would it be put together? It would be a pain to attach it on the longarm as I would have to keep lifting the quilt top to add the next strip. I experimented with trying to sew each strip on with the domestic machine using a zip or piping foot but it was very awkward and kept puckering up underneath. 

In the end I decided to use a piece of backing fabric and cotton wadding without the quilt top and sew each strip of rope on with the longarm trying to keep the lines as straight as possible, spaced ½” apart. It took most of 2 days to prepare the piped wadding and used up 500ft of rope!! The backing was not pretty because I stitched right through the rope and it wriggled around a bit. The next part of the process will be to use a new backing, more wadding, then the bumpy wadding, lay the linens on top and hope to feel the channels like Braille and stitch in reasonably straight freehand lines. We will just have to see how that pans out. If it works then I plan to add something extra that is still swirling around in in my head;)

Junketting Around

It’s a jolly good job that I travelled to Norfolk by train to visit family rather than driving the Landy, otherwise I would have come back with so much junk! I was accompanied on this trip by Nella, Fergus and Bumble and we spent so much time raking through vintage, charity or bric-a-brac shops that by the end of the week, even I had seen enough “brocante” to last for quite some time. I could have bought a Cornishware flour crock, yet more chairs or even an antique set of dentistry equipment. In fact, all I actually purchased was a wool beret and a very cheap guitar. 

The weather was foul over the Easter weekend and our trip to the seaside was very brief since the beach cafe did not cater for dogs. After the sun came out we enjoyed some pleasant riverside strolls and the kids had fun on their grandparents’ bikes on nice flat, empty roads. 

Bumble was not in the least bit phased by her train journeys. in fact, she was quite an attraction as Scottie dogs seem to be quite unusual in England. She has now travelled by car, boat and train so she only has a few other modes of transport to try before she can call herself a professional canine tourist.  

I was excited to open a couple of packages when I got home. I had won a unicorn quilt kit from Purple Stitches by posting photos of my Fancy Forest creature blocks on Instagram. I was so desperate to sew after a week away that I spent all of Saturday carefully following the instructions to make a Lisa the Unicorn mini quilt. The instructions are really good - I did not muck up at all and she looks great, especially since she has a gold lamé horn;) 

She will have to wait to be quilted because I currently have 3 customer quilts to do and must get on with the DWR unless I decide to rustle something up for my nemesis competition, the Fine Art Quilt Masters at FOQ…

Sticky Situation

The Denim Word-Search quilt was sent off to Uttoxeter for the British Quilt and Stitch Village Show, weighing in at just over 5kg! I decided that it did not need blocking again as it is so heavy it will just hang straight down all by itself.

I spent a very long time sewing down the skinny orange bias onto the DWR quilt. I tried out various feet and finally decided that Bernina foot 20D was the best as I could easily shift the needle position to get close to the edge of the bias tape. I used Elmer’s Glue to stick it down and pinned it to make sure nothing moved. I used a small paintbrush for the glue which I shoved in my mouth while I wrestled with the pins, resulting in sticky hair - good job it was washable! Being very right handed, I always seem to place the pins facing downhill which makes them difficult to remove as you sew up to them so before sewing began I turned them all up the right way. 

It took the good part of a day to unpick any basting stitches that were on show - nothing I do seems to be straightforward. I bought a pair of duckbill scissors to cut away the excess fabric under the DWR and wavy border and after I figured out how to use them was amazed at what a good job they did, not snipping into the quilt underneath at all. 

Since I am nowhere near ready to start marking the DWR quilt prior to quilting, I decided to complete the giant owls and hedgehogs for the Fancy Forest project. I managed to muddle up the pieces a couple of times but I now have enough creatures, great and small, to put it all together except nothing fits logically. I will have to figure out how to add some sashing and filler blocks which I guess will involve some taxing sums. I will put it into the UFO department until I have time to figure that out. 

The Easter holidays began with snow showers but I hope it will be more temperate 500 miles south in Norfolk. I am heading off on the train with Bumble and 2 out of 3 kids which will be quite an adventure;)

In A Spin

The problem of how to cut and sew the DWR quilt borders really got my brain spinning. I kept staring at the fabric and eventually realised that I would only get  10” mitred borders from my 3 metres of navy so I had to come up with Plan B. That was to reserve the navy as the backing then find a wide piece of grey fabric that I use when blocking quilts and bung it in the washing machine with half a dozen packs of blue and green dye and see what transpired. It looked worryingly purple while spinning around but it came out a good-enough dark teal.

Freya was home from Uni for Spring Break so I enlisted her help to draw a 90” chalk square onto the teal background. I wished I owned a tile-laser to get accurate lines and angles. Once the main body of the DWR quilt was centred came the tricky issue of the wavy border. It proved to be too big, even for the 90” square “quilt-top” which I had now had so I had to remove a section on all 4 sides until it could sit roughly 12” away from the main quilt. I can’t tell you how long all this faffing took, pinning into an unwieldy double section of insulation board, balanced on my table to I had to breathe in and shuffle around. The board is so big that I have to turn it to reach all of the sides and this often knocks things over. Eventually I pinned all of the fabric on, typically putting the pins in backwards, making them difficult to remove when I machine sewed it all down temporarily using an extra large stitch. 

There is now a Plan C, since it appears that appliqué has come into play. I had to make a lot more ¼” orange bias to go around the wavy borders, as well as the main DWR. I will have such fun sewing all this on then removing the temporary stitches (NOT!)

Fergus is about to have his final lesson with the guitar teacher he has had for the past 9 years. I thought he might like a cushion for his studio so I ordered a thermofax screen of Jimi Hendrix’s head. The cushion cover that I bought was really too big for Jimi’s head, that I had forgotten to enlarge accordingly when I placed my order so I had to hand-cut an acetate stencil to make a border like one of his groovy album covers. I admit I did not think this through - I should have used a spray glue to make the acetate sit flat and used a stencil brush to dab on the paint - the result is definitely a bit rough and ready but Jimi’s head printed with puff paint looks really cool. Maybe I could print a psychedelic duvet cover next…

Freya had a “fake” birthday a week early since she is meeting friends for a holiday in Italy. I made a 4-layer chocolate cake which barely had room for all of the candles. Now that she is a grown-up she just requires sensible presents like holiday money but I decided she should also have her own pepper grinder and a DVD of Paddington 2. I misplaced the DVD inside a quilt that I picked up from the local craft shop and did not find it until I had a brainwave 48 hours later. Never mind, Nella and I can watch it first then post it to Freya for a bit of light relief from all that studying;)

Practice Makes Perfect - Sort of;)

I was in the unusual situation of not having any customer quilts waiting to be done so I decided to push on with what happens in my DWR borders. They have been keeping me awake at night, as I have trying and failing to figure out how to piece them. I guess I could work out the maths eventually but I think I will have to just cheat and wing it with invisible appliqué since I just don’t have acres of border fabric and I have already spent £150 on the materials for the top alone. I made 4 wiggly pieced borders, turned under the edges and will attempt to put the quilt top together next week. Any printing of iconic Russian women can either be added later or abandoned if necessary. I did a test-run with a paper print of Jimi Hendrix using Modge-Podge but it was a messy disaster so the only way forward will be thermofax screens or linocuts. 

Since I had some down-time, I took the opportunity to do some practice ruler work on a simple quilt pattern by Iva Steiner that I got from Regina in Germany. I am always telling students to practise while never getting around to it myself. It was a fun project but it made me think that I really should use a much finer thread for back-tracking so I guess I will be placing an order from Madeira for the DWR quilt. 

I gave a talk for Thistle Quilters in Edinburgh at the weekend and pulled out some quilts that have not seen the light of day for a while. It is always surprising to rediscover what is stored away in boxes. I did not take the Coracle as it is such a bulky item to cart around but I did take a large Totem and Purdah - and a bicycle that I had sold on Ebay! The audience always enjoys my invitation to rummage through the quilts when I give a talk so they can examine the stitching and actually feel the textures of the more unusual fabrics.