At Your Auntie's

 

When I was little if you were “At your Auntie’s / Granny’s House”, normal rules did not apply. My sister and her boys came to visit for their half-term hols and they were allowed to do pretty much what they liked;) Luckily, we had decent weather almost all week so we went for long walks with Nessie and had a trip to Aberdeen on the wet day. Other than that it was very relaxed with video games, crafts and snacks. The boys thought my cluttered house was great as it contains every known gadget, book and musical instrument yet there is no cold water in the bathroom and the kitchen ceiling threatens to collapse at any time. 

My only quilt related activities were sending “Help ma Boab” off to ICHF Events for the Scottish Quilt Show and making a couple of short promotional videos for my forthcoming teaching weekend at Quilt Direct in Devon. One of the videos was a tongue in cheek scone test, wondering if Devon or Cornwall won on the jam vs. cream debate. I have a bit of an admin / catch-up type of week ahead and will make sure that I am thoroughly prepared for my teaching trip. I might even practise those blasted Beziers!

Brainpower Required

As a person who owns several cameras, these days I take very few photos which does not adequately document my week. I had a huge customer quilt that took 2 days and a DIY quilter who spent 2 days here custom quilting. 

I considered starting on my Tula Pink butterfly quilt kit but that would require my full attention so I decided to dip in and out of the Art & Stitch manual. I think I am absorbing it more easily and it was pointed out to me that I don’t actually need to know it off by heart - I can in fact, consult the manual if necessary. My nemesis seems to be drawing on the computer using the Bezier tool. I hate it but feel that I need to conquer it in order to explain how it works, even if I never put it to use. Concentrating does use up a lot of brain power and I was able to keep going with a date and nut snack boost mid-afternoon. 

Since my QGBI Zoom lecture is done and dusted my next milestone is to prepare for a teaching weekend at Quilt Direct in Devon, mid March. I re-wrote the Northern Lights notes and calculated how much fabric would be required to make the whole quilt. The original Bifrost was made in 2015 and it was interesting to look it up on my blog history to see what decisions I made during the construction. I have no idea why but the photos I took at the time were terrible - low resolution and blurry. I don’t know whether I took them with a small camera or an older iPhone but it has made coming up with a slideshow rather hard!

Freya was here for the week to continue her dentistry saga and it was lovely to have a companion for walks when she wasn’t working. Nessie was delighted to have someone else pay attention to her. 

This coming week is going to be a holiday week since my sister and her boys are coming to stay. They have not been to Scotland for a while and it has been ages since I had guests other than the kids’ sleepovers. I had to find quilts and towels, make a meal plan and activities list and hope they don’t mind cobwebs and clutter that we don’t see any more…

Triumphing over Tech (in the end)

 

I spent a lot of my week testing out the Tech that I needed to use to do my Zoom lecture and demo for the Scottish branch of the Quilters Guild of the British Isles. I was using the MacBook Air that I got from Music Magpie and a usbc hub since the MacAir hardly has any ports where you can plug in gadgets. It turns out that there is more than one version of a basic usb port! I wanted to use 2 Camlinks in order to livestream images from my 2 GoPro cameras but they needed a faster port than usual, 3.0 instead of 2.0. Having ordered a new usbc hub I had to return it because the ports were too close together and the 2 quite fat Camlinks could not both fit. Let’s just say, the Postie was kept busy with my Amazon exchanges until I got the right gadget;)

That was not the only stumbling block - I could not get a microphone to work reliably until I realised that I had one that could connect to the Mac via Bluetooth. Despite that, when I practise Zoom with my sister there was no sound. I was so paranoid that I also did a practise run with the Region co-ordinator and Nella. None of this was helped by the fact that the wifi was also being temperamental. To my horror, when I logged onto the meeting 15 minutes before the start there was again no sound but in the end it was suggested that I leave then rejoin the meeting and after that everything ran smoothly. I had a face camera, a slideshow and 2 work stations with day 2 other cameras. What a relief when I got through the whole presentation and people seemed to have enjoyed it:) 

That was my first big commitment of the year. The next one to concentrate on is a teaching weekend at Quilt Direct in Devon in mid March. I was asked by one of the Zoom participants if I was going to enter FOQ this year but I said that I was not going to push myself to a deadline when I need to concentrate on my teaching commitments without getting my knickers in a twist;)

In addition to all of my Tech trauma, I managed to get 3 smallish customer quilts done. The forthcoming one this week will be another big one at 100” square.

I had intended to make a short Art & Stitch video this week but I went a bit off-piste wondering if an old drawing tablet might be useful (it wasn’t) and I tried to get to grips with computer drawing using a Bezier arc/line tool which I found almost impossible. 

At least I have found my planner useful… it was really good having decided what to eat each night, even though I have a lot of risotto left over since Fergus decided McDonalds would be more appealing. Because it was scheduled in, I went swimming twice and things actually felt a little less chaotic. I need to keep up the good start;)

Time to Redeploy a Planner

 

While my kids were still at school, Life was pretty busy, getting them to where they needed to be, running a business and entering quilt competitions but at least there was a schedule. These days, I don’t have many time commitments so I can please myself how much work I do. The trouble is that I make myself try to get too much done, all at once, so I hardly ever allow myself any down-time. I felt so harassed that I dug out a planner that I used to have in 2019 up until Life came to a grinding halt when Nella was ill. I don’t know whether keeping a planner again will help but I think it is good to see what can be done realistically when it is written on paper. The thing is - I do keep a notebook where everything I think of gets jotted down but it is a bit messy and difficult to see what are appointments in amongst the scribbles.

I have in fact got all sorts of things done work-wise but I have not brushed Nessie every day, gone swimming, caught up with friends or done any fun sewing! That is not a good balance between Life and Work…

The BIG job that I had to do this week was a custom red and white quilt. The blocks were too big on-point to quilt in one go so I decided to use triangle blocks instead. These had to be precision placed so everything would line up. I also had to fit in a border and corners, do stitch-in-the-ditch and a million one-inch circles. It all took almost 20 hours!

It was a relief to go from that to all-over basting a quilt that a customer wants to tackle herself with straight line walking foot quilting on her domestic machine. 

I had to finish making and photographing samples for my Zoom lecture for the Scottish branch of the QGBI next weekend. I also had to write instructions in case anyone wants to make the whole quilt. This involved working out fabric quantities which I did not do in advance when I made it;) Two slideshows will accompany my lecture; one of step-by-step photos of the construction process, the other showing the development of the original ”Help ma Boab!” quilt.

The other major task was to sort out all of the “Tech" that I plan to use for my lecture. I have a lot of Tech but I needed to round it all up, charge it up and work out how to place it. My plan is to have a laptop so I can speak directly to it and show slides but also a wireless mic so I can move around and 2 other cameras (with lights) at my cutting table and sewing machine! The Go-Pro cameras also need battery packs because they use up their batteries too quickly. Of course, it should all be straightforward but isn’t - despite having the correct cables the laptop would not pick up the mic I wanted to use so that took a  lot of time faffing around until I found the solution. Afterwards I had a whole lot of reorganising to do. My plan is to practise on Tuesday so I can sort out any glitches.

I hope this week is less frenetic - I have even managed to write a meal plan to take out the stress of deciding what to cook at the last minute. One thing to be positive about is that we have now passed the darkest 10 weeks of the year and there are  signs of Spring:)