Gradual Circle Progress

 I decided that since I only officially had one customer quilt to do last week, I would crack on with making progress on my circles. I finished all of the machine stitching but the large zigzags did not seem very stable to me. I had reduced the tension substantially so the bobbin thread would not show on top. I decided that the answer was to secure the zigzag stitches with a double trip around each circle edge with silver thread. The process for each circle square is quite long-winded and I wonder if anyone will even notice. It took almost 2 days to sew in all of the loose thread tails and secure them. At least I got to watch some telly on the iPad - I particularly enjoyed “The Good Karma Hospital”, set in Kerala. It has made me want to visit India again!

The second 110” square quilt got quilted in one long day this week. Its maker stayed for the duration. I kept it simple, using the computerised pattern, “Stacked Snailz” otherwise it would have taken considerably longer. 

Fergus and his two pals had their first gig in 4 years, opening the evening at Cafe Drummond in Aberdeen. There were a couple of minor technical issues that the audience did not notice, a good turnout and their set went down really well. The floor was just as sticky as it was pre-pandemic and it was great to see Fergus back enjoying the music scene. I intended to film it  with 2 of my tiny cameras but it was too dark to press the right buttons so my footage was patchy. I spent an entire day afterwards nerdily fiddling with settings and researching mics for recording music so I hope to get another chance to be the official videographer;)

A Painter's Temperament

I was meant to have a low-key week in preparation for my Talk and for getting the caravan ready to meet Freya and George in Perthshire at the weekend. I decided to put Fergus to work painting the kitchen and the very dodgy coat cupboard. He started off as a reasonably willing apprentice but as the week wore on and the number of coats of paint went beyond normal he became less enthusiastic. My supervisory role became more involved… 

The red walls needed 5 coats of paint and I switched to using masonry paint after finding that it was effective over the damp patches (after treating them with mould killer). It was not an easy job and the girls asked why I did not just do the back door area and re-coat the kitchen in its original dark red. The results are far from perfect and messier than the original job that I last did 23 years ago but the whole area looks bigger and fresher. 

I got a big quilt done for a friend who has just bought a new house in between coats of paint.

My Talk seemed to go down well and was reportedly quite funny but I still have to refold all of the quilts which just got shoved back into their suitcases at the end of the evening. 

I did not spend long getting the caravan ready for its first outing of the year but nothing crucial got forgotten and it was a good practice for more ambitious trips. Typically, I could not get the electricity or gas going on arrival, partly because I had forgotten how it worked but I figured it out in the end. It was rather a damp weekend and I was glad that I was not sleeping in a tent. We walked about 8 miles on Saturday and took Nessie to the pub. Not much sewing got done but I finished reading a book - The Muse by Jessie Burton - and it was super spending time with Freya;) The only drama was being waved at by other caravans on the way home because someone had opened the loo window and I did not check All the windows before I left!

Has Spring Even Happened?

 

I took Nessie to the beach at Stonehaven on Bank Holiday Monday. It was busy with volunteers doing a beach clean-up operation. The tide was out but it was pouring with rain and pretty breezy. I had decided to leave Nessie’s raincoat at home so we both got soaked. At home the wild cherry trees are already dropping their blossom. Because it has been so damp and grey I had not even noticed that they actually had any flowers. In Norwich Nella has been experiencing thunderstorms and heavy rain and so far does not believe that Norfolk is one of the driest parts of the country. 

I have unwrapped any caravan in readiness for a weekend trip to Perthshire to meet Freya. It seems to be dry with only a couple of cobwebs and the fake ivy has come unstuck from the bathroom walls. Nella is not keen to go on a caravan road trip with me this summer so I will just have to go on short trips instead. In theory I would like to drive it down to Norfolk and beyond but that seems like a daunting solo undertaking.

I have been busy all week with customer quilts and an enthusiastic new longarm pupil. While all that was going on I worked on my small rainbow/lamé squares. After I sewed in all of the ends from the machine blanket stitching I stitched around the rings kantha-style. My fingers ache because they are not used to so much hand sewing! There are 150+ squares still to do then I need to decide how much more machine sewing will be added. The deadline for FoQ entries is June 12th and the fee has gone up since I last entered as it is now £18.00 for non members of the Quilters Guild, plus postage each way. 

This week I am presenting a talk to the Aberdeen Patchwork and Quilting Group. I hope they have forgotten what I spoke about previously. It has been posted as an evening that will be funny - at the very least I need to make sure that my USB stick slideshow is working and that I have the correct quilts. 

Don't Make Me Paint the Kitchen!

 

My wonderful blue fridge conked out after 26 years and I got fed up with traipsing across to the garage every time I wanted milk so I ordered a new, orange one. It is NOT the same. I guess I will get used to it eventually but it has reminded me that the last time I painted the kitchen was 23 years ago. I really ought to freshen it up but that will highlight the disgusting ceiling, covered in stains and cobwebs, and that is a job I do not wish to tackle until it collapses.

I had also considered painting my room but I decided an easier way of cheering it up would be to create a plant window. I hope I can keep them alive - some like water while others do not.

I don’t know why I never thought of it before but this week I watched some telly on my iPad while the quilt machine was running. I avoided stuff with foreign subtitles and managed to do some hand-stitching. While The Coronation was on I stitched around 100 reverse appliqué silver lamé circles with a machine blanket stitch. The Bernina knee-lift was marvellous for lifting the sewing machine foot every couple of stitches. I have set myself the task of sewing in all of the thread tails which is not something I would have bothered to do previously. 

I spent a whole day cutting out and heat-pressing circles onto 100 more squares. As usual I thought this would take a couple of hours at most which just proves that I always underestimate how long things really take;) Since I seem to be steaming ahead with this project I should really get around to entering it into FoQ, particularly as I have not made a competition quilt since 2019!

We're Gonna Need a Bigger Boat!*

I made the long solo trip back from Norfolk on Monday, helped along by a packet of M&S giant chocolate buttons. I unloaded the car but still have not unpacked. Before I left I had prepared a customer quilt with a tight deadline so I had to get straight on with it the next day. It was a hexagon quilt that 2 sisters had completed for their 92 year old Mother. The layout was unusual because instead of a simple flower-garden layout, it had random patches of colour as it was actually a herbaceous border, which I thought was very clever.

The next quilt was HUGE at 110” square and it only just fitted onto my frame after I removed a couple of fittings at each end. I had a 14 ft. quilt frame for years and rarely needed that extra space but now that I have a more modest frame I have had 2 enormous quilts arrive within days of each other. I am told that they were lockdown projects that just kept getting bigger. The pineapple log cabin quilt looks fantastic but it is really heavy and I am not sure I would like to make a bed with it on a daily basis;)

While the quilt machine was doing its thing and I was keeping a close eye on things, I did some hand-stitching on my circles. I have no idea whether I will finish this project in time for Festival of Quilts but that is my intention. 

On Saturday a customer brought in a wedding quilt with a stained-glass central area. She wants to add embroidery later but she was not keen on the easiest / quickest option of simple background quilting. We settled on a leaf motif in the HST blocks which I had to edit in ArtnStitch to remove its pantograph tails. The central area was quilted stitch-in-the-ditch with invisible thread. 

I have a few more quilts to do next week - it seems to be either feast or famine. I have not made a video for a while so I should really do that if I hope to get more than 300-odd Youtube subscribers!

*In the 1975 hit movie “Jaws”, Martin Brody, the Police Chief of a small summer resort town in the northeastern United States, utters one of the most quotable lines in film history when he gets his first up-close look at the Great White Shark.

Out and About in Norfolk

 

Nella and I headed down to Norfolk via Glasgow where I dropped off an amp for Fergus who had sold it on Facebook Marketplace. The May blossom was out and the trees were definitely greener than in NE Scotland.

Nella settled back in to her room in Uni and I became the annoying Mother who insisted on cleaning the student kitchen.

I had a couple of outings during the week, including a very bracing visit to Southwold. I managed to stay out of junk shops (not completely, obviously). Time passes at a different rate here - it is very elastic in that nothing much happens yet the days pass quickly. 

I had made a concerted effort to get my circles ready to stitch in all of the “spare” time that I would have in Norfolk but I have not even managed to complete two squares. 

I have been in Norwich a few times and we walked all over the city, calling in a couple of cute cafes. It is such an easy city to walk in as it is generously pedestrianised, yet still easy to drive around too. 

I am heading back north on Monday and need to crack straight on with some seriously large customer quilts. Hopefully I can do some of the hand-stitching while I watch over the Q-matic.

Going Round in Circles

The trouble with having a phobia about Maths is that I can waste a lot off time trying to work out a simple problem. I wanted to cut out a lot of concentric circles in t-shirt vinyl that were either ¼” or ½” wide but I had to convert them to decimals and factor in gaps. Long story short - I tried to come up with a new set of circles, even though I already had a perfectly good set of circles because as usual, I was over complicating matters. I eventually spent a whole day cutting out a life-time supply of circles which somehow I have to share equally between the inset circle-squares that I have made. 

It has been rather chilly for April but finally we had a decent day so we headed to Stonehaven for a dog-walk and takeaway coffee from a wee cafe near the harbour. 

Nella has been busy working on Uni projects during her holidays and I have gone from hardly any customer quilts to half a dozen, including a couple of really big ones. I have loaded one up to get started straight away when I get back from Norfolk as I am taking Nella back to Norwich for Term 3 of first year. I am taking some of my circles project with me but it is unlikely that I will have time to work on it but at least I can if I have the opportunity;)

Project Samples

 

As well as dealing with admin and having the girls home for part of this week, I got a customer quilt done, joined the Caravan Club, and worked on sample blocks for the quilt that I might make next. 

I am still not set on exactly what it will entail. I think it will probably feature silver only centre circles. I have not yet decided whether to stick to one size or whether to make smaller 4-patches. I don’t know whether to keep complementary colours for each block or allow a rainbow of coloured rings. I could also stack the rings without any gaps. I have to choose between neon quilting thread or multi-coloured. I feel that it needs some hand quilting and for some reason I want to quilt solely with straight lines… 

The other idea that I had is still very much in the background - it was to do something using zeroes and ones, like binary code. I think I will need to make a batch of blocks and see where it goes;)

Barcelona!

Nella and I thoroughly enjoyed our short break in Barcelona. We went Monday to Friday which I think was slightly less busy than it would have been over a weekend. The weather was perfect for exploring as it was dry and in the low 20s Celsius. I do not recommend getting such early morning flights since we had to get up before 2am. It was OK-ish on the way there as it gave us an afternoon to explore but we really lost a day on the way home and it was exhausting having to get to the airport by 3.00am. It was easy to get a pre-booked airport shuttle bus into the city but we had to order a taxi for the return journey. 

During the week we walked for miles, mostly just wandering around the Gothic Quarter and we found it easy to use the Metro system, mostly getting single trip tickets. If you knew where you wanted to go then some sort of travel card might be useful. I wish I had done more forward planning and research. We did fit a lot in but it might have been more economical to have bought multi-venue tickets. Most museums sell QR coded tickets which are cheaper when bought in advance. I sort of wish I had done the open-top-bus tour because it usually gives a good overview tour of a city. I had a little guide book but I am not sure it was that useful. Some places were written about enthusiastically but were not so good in real life. 

We were not blown away by the areas near the main beach but maybe that was because we were staying in such a quaint area with many little boutiques and cafes. All of the buildings had balconies and the streets were too narrow for traffic. Nella says that it is always more relevant to check Google for reviews rather than to rely on a guide book. I wish we had gone to see the magic fountain one evening or even a flamenco show but really I think we could have done with an extra day or so to make the trip a bit more relaxed. I kept trying to fit too much in or rushing around trying to retrace my steps to some little shop that I could not find again if I had decided that I wanted to go back. We had a couple of hours sitting on the beach at Platja de la Barceloneta which was enough for me. Some people even had their bikinis on although there was a cool breeze by the sea in March. 

Obviously, we visited Gaudi’s incredible unfinished cathedral. It was busy and we had a scheduled visit time. The exterior stonework and towers are unbelievable and still not nearly completed. One aspect featured realistic statues and nature inspired carvings whereas another side of the building had more block-like figures, almost like Transformers. The inside was filled with colour from the abstract stained glass windows and the tree-like supporting columns were a bizarre mix of Art Nouveau style and science-fiction. I loved the eclectic feel of Sagrada Familia but I have never been subject to the concept of “less is more!”

Later on that day we took the Metro to Parc Güell (also designed by Gaudi) and nearly died struggling up a precipitous hill to the entrance. I think there was probably a more accessible approach elsewhere;) Here there were mosaic clad whimsical buildings and grottoes with oddly angled pillars in a beautifully landscaped park. There were even green parrots flying amongst the palm trees. 

Elsewhere in the city were other Gaudi hotspots from shops with balconies that seemed to be made from enormous vertebrae to wildly imaginative residential properties that celebrated the Spanish Modernisme Movement. As a whole, I thought Barcelona was a very stylish city.  The architectural styles ranged from Gaudi, Classical, Imperialist, and narrow Medieval alleys to futuristic buildings like “The Stapler / La Grapadora” which housed an impressive design museum.

We visited the Picasso Museum which was near where we were staying and it was interesting to see that he had in fact started out as a conventional artist who started working on abstract series, sometimes inspired by Velázquez classical paintings. Some of his major works were not housed in that museum because they are owned by other more famous museums around the world. Maybe we should also have gone to the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya where we could have seen works by other major Catalonian artists, some even dating back to Roman times.

It can bear tricky to know when to stop with museums - we enjoyed the Moco Art Museum which showcased pieces of art by modern greats including Banksy. In the end we did not visit Museu d’Historia de Catalunya but I rather wish I had since it tells the story of the region from Stone-Age settlement to beyond the Spanish Civil War. 

There were amazingly good choices for vegans in Barcelona despite being in an area famed for aged air-cured ham. We made several trips to surprisingly well stocked supermarkets within the city centre, more akin to Waitrose than Tesco Express in the UK.  Nella and I enjoyed enjoyed Tapas, vegan paella, chocolatey churros, fabulous fresh fruit and delicious Sangria. We were also rather amazed by the proliferation of posh pharmacies and shops selling crystallised fruit. Market shopping was interesting too, although pricey at Mercat de la Boqueria which was close to the busy Las Ramblas streets. There was a scruffy flea-market called Mercat dels Encants which was like a shabby car-boot sale on a par with Glasgow’s “Barras”. In contrast, we wandered into a designer store called “Loewe” where none of the merchandise had price tickets and you definitely were not allowed to touch anything!

Barcelona was a place that I would love to visit again as there was so much to see and do. I would definitely avoid high summer since it was already busy with tourists and school parties in March. I carried a backpack so I could take water and a cagoule but I kept my valuables in a neat crossbody bag because pickpockets prey on tourists. I would recommend having a suitcase that could go in the aircraft hold to take back jars of olives and oranges. I think a good street map would be useful because I find it easy to get disorientated using phone satnav maps. It would be useful to have a rough itinerary written out for each day to make sure you see as much as possible but also allow time to wander and soak up the atmosphere:)