I Can See Clearly Now

My intention to start the week with a customer quilt at 8.30am on Monday was temporarily halted by the arrival of 2 packages from overseas. 

The first contained my bulk order of custom carved waril figure wood block stamps from India (I could only order them in batches of 10!) which arrived too late to be printed on the front of my Warli quilt but may yet appear on the reverse. 

The other package was zippers for the longarm machine to allow quilts to be loaded or swapped easily. I had to really pay attention to get them on in the right orientation but they were helpfully printed with text for people like me who get things the wrong way round. These zippers could have grosgrain ribbon or canvas strips attached in case the quilter wants to attach the quilt back with safety pins but I have no idea why they would want to do that. The zips get attached to the quilt back top and bottom using a large stitch on the domestic machine then get zipped onto the canvases on the frame. It is not a major time saver but the biggest advantage is not having to deal with big stabby pins;)

The beach themed quilt was completed with a seaside panto which looked really fun!

I spent FAR more time than I planned working on my Dream Big dahlia panel. The biggest issue was deciding which pattern to place in each petal and swapping threads so the colours were evenly distributed. There was much angst wasted comparing my efforts to already completed panels that I had seen online, especially when I made myself tackle patterns that I had never quilted before. However, I treated it as a useful practise exercise, even if I only quilted 2 or 3 petals a day. My greatest interruption was cracking the whip so that Fergus would hand his essay on Rap-Rock music in on time.

I spent ages preparing a new slideshow for my forthcoming talk at the QGBI Region 16 (Scotland). I last gave that Region a talk in 2014 and my blog informed me that I had been on my travels and made all sorts of projects that I had forgotten about in the interim. It also reminded me that I should have a piece for FOQ well underway by now but whatever it is going to be remains at the undecided stage. Every week planning a potential 2019 competition quilt just keeps getting put back on my To Do list;) 

For the slideshow I had to find and select a series of photos then remember how to get them into a Keynote/Powerpoint presentation. My unco-operative laptop kept displaying the “spinning rainbow ball of doom” then told me that I did not have permission to save my work. The simplest solution was to make a duplicate copy and save that version. 

I was surprised when I booked an eye test to discover that I last got new glasses for close work 4 years ago. One pair of specs was particularly wonky, scratched and was missing a nose clip. I picked up 2 sparkling new pairs and was amazed at how I could see everything clearly again.

I hope to complete the Dream Big panel in the coming week - it has certainly taken more than the couple of days that I intended and that is without taking background quilting and the probability of adding fabric paint into account…