Since I have been on a roll with the Norse series, I made an effort to crack on with quilting the piece that looks rather like seaweed. The brown taffeta looks amazing outside in the sun, just like a piece of polished bronze or maybe iron which is just what I had hoped. I bound this one and the blue piece so that I am not left with a marathon session at the end. It will be bad enough attaching 8 hanging sleeves and labels. I intend to add some embroidery stitches or couch something sparkly down all of the bindings as a finishing touch later on. My sewing machine went on strike again after Norse Piece #7 but after I cleaned to fluff, and paint dust out of the bobbin case it decided to co-operate once more.
Amanda visited on Wednesday for another session of longarming tuition. She had bravely decided to longarm quilt a huge hand-pieced hexagon quilt and because she was limited to one day in the studio she chose to use the large spiral continuous template. She was delighted by her efforts, especially since the beautiful quilt top had been folded up in a cupboard for some time. She will eventually turn in all of the many edges by hand instead of cutting off the hexagons!
I taught 5-6 year olds for two days and they enjoyed working on dramas of the cannibalistic story of Hansel & Gretel. Some of the children wanted non-speaking parts as the witch's cat but they were very good at loud purring and miaowing. They loved the part where the witch gets shoved into the oven but they let her out before she was cooked alive as long as she promised not to kidnap any more children. If I had been the supply teacher for the class for a few more days it would have been fun to construct the gingerbread house.
I had a really positive business discussion with APQS over the weekend and I am excited that I will be working alongside Claudia Pfeil in Ireland at the new International Quilt Festival in June.
I have been plugging away at restoring as much of the Blog as possible to Wordpress by trawling my computer's archives for Word documents and photos back to late 2008. By the end of next week I will have put back as much as I can including an entry about our family holiday to Carcassonne in 2009 that had disappeared completely from the computer. Luckily I found the original handwritten notes in ink in a real notebook with pagesJ. When this laborious exercise is complete I will print the entire blog. It has been funny looking back at all of the entries over the past 3+ years. I continuously seem to be looking for more time and trying to fit far too much in. It is also interesting to look back at my progress and reflect on how ideas such as the Yurt project developed.
Over the weekend I quilted the eighth piece in the Norse metallic wholecloth series. The tissue lame was not easy to work with even after adding some thin Vilene; there are a couple of tiny creases that I will have to ignore or disguise.
I have been playing around with ideas for the title of the series: I figured that since a three piece quilt is called a TRI-ptych then an eight piece quilt could be called an OCT-pytch. I was amused that sounds similar to OSTRICH so perhaps my Norse quilts could be known collectively as an OS-(p)t(R)ych? I wondered if that was really a convincing enough reason for the unusual title so I consulted Wikipedia and was delighted to discover among the various definitions that "Os" can mean an Anglo-Saxon pagan god in the Old English language - this seemed appropriate for some of the strange carvings of Viking figures that I have been quilting. Therefore, the series is going to be known as OSTRYCH and the individual pieces will be known by their metallic symbol from the periodic table. I need to try to stick to metals that the Vikings would have had. Copper, iron, lead, tin and gold are obvious but I will have undertake research to find out whether I can have titanium or cobalt for the blue piece. If not I will have to convince myself that the Vikings were able to trade overseas for some of the foreign metals!
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