What will happen if I RUN OUT of thread?

Pretty much all I have done this week is quilt with pink thread so it is a good job it is variegated, just for the occasional surprise. After a 10 second discussion with myself, I decided to quilt tiny spirals in the half inch piano keys because I knew I could not bear to leave them naked. Then I started on the marathon task of stitching small spirals and swirls in the background which was back-breaking because I like to have my nose as far over the quilt as I as I can and I don’t have a hydraulic lift on the Q24 table. Frankly, it was quite boring at times and progress seemed to be slow because it is a pretty large quilt at 94” square. Even Bumble, thought it was tedious went outside to watch the grass grow. 

To alleviate the tedium, I did laundry and opened one of the bottles of Furze Fizz which was so lively that the spring top did a fair imitation of a champagne cork at the Grand Prix. Despite losing a lot of effervescence before getting any actual fizz into a glass, I was able to do a tasting and decided that it was delicious and would probably go rather well with gin.

We had a 3-day heatwave with temperatures up into the mid-twenties celsius. If anyone ever leaves me a holiday house in the tropics in their will, I will sell it and buy a hunting lodge in Finland. The heat makes me grumpy and gives me a headache and when it is so hot that I have to have my workshop door open, I should just give up and find somewhere to hang a hammock.

Fergus reconfigured or messed up the internet this week, attempting to speed up our broadband, despite being advised not to touch it… it is now worse than before and I discovered a stash of unsent emails several days later, some of which were thread orders. I am now panicking that I will not be able to get enough wool thread to start requilting and embroidering the large motifs on BzB later in the week. I may even challenge Aurifil and Madeira to see who can get thread to me faster and I will use whichever one gets here first. I have made a back-up plan in case the thread does not arrive. I have yet to complete the background quilting, prepare the binding, make a label, a double-sided sleeve and consider adding colour using watercolour pencils or paints because the quilt has to be FINISHED before the school hols start at the end of June!

Barking up the Wrong Tree?

I confess that I may have spent more time experimenting with thread than preparing for 4 days in the classroom but everything worked out well and I enjoyed teaching an enthusiastic bunch of kids. The older members of their class were away on a residential trip so it gave me carte blanche to do fun stuff with them like make slime, introduce them to algorithms, Scottish monsters, make rocky road and fidget spinners using cardboard and 1p coins. It was nice to be met in the playground each morning and get reports on how their slime experiments were going but I was shattered after 4 days - goodness knows how teachers manage to keep going for 5 days, week after week!

I had 2 exhibition rejections this week. Unsurprisingly, “Shield Maiden” was not juried into Fine Art Masters at FOQ but it looks like I am in good company as several well known British art quilters also had their pieces turned down. I have decided to keep plugging away at that competition because I will take great pleasure spending that elusive £5000 prize one day. Touch the Pickle was not one of the 59 final pieces selected from 500 entries to go on tour in the USA but it will be in the Threads of Resistance online gallery. I keep telling myself that “You have to be in it to win it” but it does irk that you have to pay more than regular show entry fees to enter these competitions and there is no refund if you don’t make the grade. Sometimes I feel like it is almost like buying a raffle ticket - you win some, lose some.

I attended a fun Saturday workshop at Grays School of Art on screen printing to see if I would like to study textile printing in more depth. The art school had great facilities and the tutor was lovely but I already knew how to do what was covered in the class. To be honest, I would rather teach than be a student but since I do not have an Art or Textiles degree, that just won’t happen. 

After the class I drove down to St Andrews to collect Freya, her friend and all of their worldly belongings for the summer break. I honestly could not believe how much stuff they had and was not convinced that even half of it would fit in the Landy. It took 2 hours to stow it, lash it onto the roof, stuff every crevice, and even then the girls were squashed into their seats with their feet on boxes and bags on their laps. All the extra gear made the Landy extra sound-proof so the journey home was quite pleasant (for the driver)!

The incentive for unloading the Landy on Sunday morning was that we had to pick up our new family member. Bumble the Scottie has come to live with us and she has made herself at home. She just likes to hang with whoever is around, does not bother cats (who are not best pleased so far), can manage to jump on the sofa but can’t be bothered to go upstairs and will even watch students play monopoly or strum guitars. After the summer when everyone goes back to school and uni, I expect she will even watch me quilt. I actually feel a bit like Doctor Who because she is exactly the same shape as his robot dog companion, K-9! 

I am hoping to get most of the background quilting done on BzB this week as I have got the cotton thread for that but I still don’t have all of the Aurifil lana that I need to re-quilt the large motifs. A couple of quilting friends were on a mission to track it down at Malvern so in the end I should have enough. However, I will also be taxiing students around, chatting to my new hairy friend and gingerly testing the Furze Fizz;) 

Bottling It

I overcame my fear, plucked up some courage and began the outline quilting on BzB. I went VERY slowly in manual mode because that it simply the smoothest way to quilt around a drawn line. However, I must warn everyone - never, ever drop your bobbin case, even onto a carpet… I always try to be very careful not to do just that but sometimes it just bounces out of my hand and I am not quick enough to catch it which is what happened recently. Even though the bobbin case looks fine, it somehow got buggered up. I kept having to fiddle with the bobbin tension and eventually had to crank the top tension all the way up to 9. I don’t know how many times I rethreaded just to be sure but there are areas on the back of the quilt where the bobbin thread was not bedding in properly as the tension was not quite right. 

I ordered a new bobbin case and decided to forge ahead anyway. Most of the back is OK - I wondered whether I could hide the dodgy sections by applying paint but I have since decided that I will quilt it all again using a thicker wool thread, even though it already took at least 30 hours and was pretty much all I did all week! I can’t do any more until the new bobbin case and threads arrive and I am teaching all of next week. I really wish I had allowed myself a year to work on this quilt, instead of a month as there is so much that I want to do and I can’t think how it will get done by my deadline on a quilt that is 94” square!

I have bottled up my Furze Fizz (gorse champagne) which was fizzing away and smelling quite floral. It is pretty cloudy but so is ginger beer and posh lemonade. I have applied proper health and safety techniques by putting the glass stoppered bottles in a sturdy cardboard box in the workshop loo with an upturned bucket on top. I will wear safety goggles and release the pressure after a week. If it is any good I may have to have a party as the Fizz will have to be consumed quickly;)

Relentless!

Monday was the deadline for entering a handful of quilt shows that I had known about for months but had still not got around to entering. As usual, I did not have all of the necessary information for every entry so had to faff around finding or retaking photos and look for the blurbs lurking somewhere on my computer. I have even entered the very unfinished BzB into The Open European Championships as they allow pictures of work in progress and when I get it done they can have an updated photo. None of this scrabbling around at the last minute was helped by our pitiful Wifi connection which was so bad that I even tried to upload files from my phone in the supermarket carpark where there was at least some of the slowest ever 3G.

Having committed BzB to an actual show, I realised that it was definitely time to load it onto the longarm frame. I was beyond irritated to discover that I had not saved a whole pack of wool wadding and that the black wadding was not wide enough. Yet again, I questioned why I had made BzB so big. I phoned around several well known UK quilt shops but none were able to guarantee next day delivery or even had what I wanted in stock. There was only one solution which was to join all of the leftover bits of wadding together. The huge pieces that I reconstructed were then generously spritzed with water and laid out to relax because the wool that come in packs is always impossibly creased. 

I have to admit that BzB is making me very nervous. It has been a long time stewing and has to be sewn upside down for me to be able to see the quilt markings. The back is pieced and I have to get perfect tension on both sides since I intend for it to be a double-sided quilt. I tried out different threads, including a wool blend which looked great on the top but was not so nice on the back because the colour was not right. I was faced with the choice of ordering some more thread, sight-unseen online or making do with something else. In the end I decided that since BzB is a bit anti-establishment then I will use a 30wt neon pink cotton because I have it on a huge spool. It is my plan to get most of the outline quilting done next week but we all know my plans are very subject to change. 

Fergus has time off school for exam revision but he has a not-uncommon approach to that which involves worrying that he has not done enough work before proceeding not to do any actual work. He wastes as much time as I do doing avoidance jobs like tidying computer cables but he has not got enough self-discipline to avoid spending hours watching irrelevant videos on Youtube. I jollied him along and tested him on Music theory and I even bough a DVD of “Romeo and Juliet” with nude scenes but he does not yet seem any more enthusiastic about Shakespeare.

I happened to catch a re-run of the “River Cottage” cookery programme the other night and was reminded how I have always wanted to make a gorse version of elderflower champagne. The bright yellow gorse this May is incredibly abundant so it did not take me long to pick a bucketful of flowers without getting too scratched in the process. The last time I attempted to make a lightly alcoholic, foraged fizz I added too much yeast with explosive results. This time I am attempting to stick to a recipe and after 48 hours it is beginning to smell like fermentation is happening.

After all of that activity, I told myself I could have a relaxing weekend except for making a simple dress. The pattern from The Maker’s Atelier looked straightforward enough not to bother making a tester “toile” so I took my measurements and made the size that looked like it matched up the best. The result was that I made a great dress that was several sizes too big. At least it was not too small, like the oilcloth top that I could get on but struggled to get off. I might try to make it again one day in a smaller size but maybe I will take the trouble to make a rough version to check the size first. Not put off by this experience, and because I had some “spare” time, I decided to run up an apron-dress in the skeleton toile-de-jouy that I bought for the job at FOQ last year. It was actually very easy after I sussed how to make the pockets but I seem to have made another bigger than necessary item of what I would not call clothing. I have seen several textile artists swanning around in such garments, rocking the look but I think mine looks more like a 1940’s utility overall. If I had made it in denim it might have been sensible but at least I now know that I can make another one should I feel inclined. 

Not content with making two “frocks”, I forged ahead with a huge customer quilt so I would have no distractions about tackling BzB, apart from my relentless To-Do list and motivating a teenage boy to get stuck into some exam revision…

Just another typical Quilt Quine week!

Phew, no wonder I didn’t manage to write a Sunday night blogpost after another hectic week, ending with a fun trip to the Knitting & Stitching Show in Edinburgh. Although I feel that my tyrannical To Do list never lessens, I managed to supervise 2 DIY quilts and complete a simple customer quilt, publish a schedule of Quilt Quine classes onto my Facebook business page, and make daily hashtag-pointless newsflashes starting the week doing a weather post in the snow.

I was asked if I plan to offer online quilting classes which is something I need to investigate but in the meantime I need to promote my Ebook, “Deviant Quilting” which has lots of video clips.

I caused chaos in our cluttered Music room by playing furniture Tetris, which moving a full sized rock drum kit and shifting the sizeable electric piano upstairs, negotiating a tight dog-leg staircase. 

I allowed myself some fun by stitching intensely onto the Dijanne Cevaal linocut print, reminding myself that it was an exercise, rather than a show-off piece. I would like to do more “longarm drawing” pieces but I need to remember that even though I think I will just do a little bit of stitching for a few minutes, I can easily still be there after 2 hours!

I received a super box full of Haribos from Maria in Germany as a swap for a piece of gold pleather that she made into a super tote bag. I have had to hide them in a safe place so I can’t scoff them all at once.

After forcing myself to update my paperwork, I set off to meet Ellen and Kay with a side trip to IKEA. I should have considered that Saturday has to be one of the worst days to do this as the store was full of screaming kids who did not want to be there and other kids running around with mini trolleys. No wonder I was traumatised and left my phone in the ladies’ loo. I was extremely fortunate that I realised it was missing before I drove away and that a very kind citizen had handed it in. 

Kay, Ellen and I enjoyed a catch-up over curry and alcohol then visited the K&S show on Sunday. I am pleased to say that it was busy, bigger than last year and that there were plenty of vendors. I was not impressed to pay £5 for parking in a field then being harangued at the door for opting out of a show guide for an additional £4! The K&S show does not have any competition entries and the exhibits were varied but I really think that there should be more of them than vendors to make the ticket price worthwhile. I bought a selection of heavier threads to experiment with on the Bernina Q24 and also yet another shift-dress pattern and fabric that will make me feel guilty unless I ditch all of my other projects and tackle it. 

I was expecting to have 3 custom quilts to do in May but the makers have not quite finished them so I have no choice other than to load the rather large “BzB” (or whatever new name I decide) and make an attempt to get it done in time for FOQ. If I enter it into the show this week then I will just have to get it done;)