Life: an update

Hello hello hello! I’ll admit I was a little recalcitrant on the blogging side of things last year but I’m not apologising.

So how's life for me?

Shop girl
Remember how I used to make project bags for knitters and crocheters for about 8 years and then I retired from bag making in November 2015?

Well I really missed the thrill of buying lovely new fabrics and crafting them into something both beautiful and useful. And I missed the interactions with customers and the thrill of an irregular shop update.

 


So I'm out of retirement. I’m back on Etsy for the interim because it wasn’t sustainable having a website and also paying to use Bigcartel. I’ve made a heap of bags already and completely sold out of some of them (there are still some in the shop right now) and I’ve also got some beautiful fabrics waiting for me to cut out and sew. I’m a bit excited!

Making clothes
We had three weeks away from work over summer and it was magnificent. My vegetable garden got some attention, we decluttered like no one's business, saw some great movies at the cinema, and I spent time in the sewing room.



I made a total of three skirts and four Springfield tops, all much needed in my closet since my big closet curation late last year. Admittedly two of the tops were already cut up and/or half sewn and discovered during the decluttering. But they are now finished. And I used the Upton sleeve to do a sleeve hack on the Springfield and it totally changed the look of the top. I have a new favourite top for work now!




Quilting
I finished of my 365 stars project on the eve of my birthday (September 2017) but after that I rarely touched a needle. I needed the break. I worked a little on the Ice Cream Soda BOM, and finished off the last 30 blocks for the Stepping Stones Quilt. Over the last month though I have been working on getting at least one quilt ready for the Sydney Quilt Show in June. It's slow work, this piecing-by-hand business, but gosh it's fun and a bit of a lark especially when I get together with friends to stitch.



I joined The Applique Guild of Australia a couple of years ago however they are mostly based in Victoria so it's usually an online thing for me until I catch up with a few of the members at the Sydney Quilt Show each year. I realised we needed a Canberra chapter (also known as "coffee and cake and stitching"), and we had our first meeting towards the end of last year. Our next meeting is this weekend and I'm hoping to make it a monthly affair. If you're interested in joining us, drop me an email and I'll send you the details. There is an expectation that you'll be a member of the guild at some stage, but honestly it's a great guild and there is also the opportunity to attend something like this every couple of years.

Swimming
It's not summer without finding Michelle camped at the local outdoor pool early in the morning. This year I joined the Lap Legends challenge, mainly to keep myself accountable. But I had to swim 77.7 km to be eligible for prizes at the end of season BBQ and I never thought I would be able to do that in 4 months. Just keeping myself honest was a prize in itself.



Well bugger me if I haven't done 88 km since the end of October! It turned out that I really needed to swim before heading to work each day to maintain my sanity (seriously, it works. By the time I get to work I've swum 30 laps of a 50 metre pool, talked to really lovely people about the weather! The light! The clear water!, had a shower and slowly driven to work. I have no more cares! And I'm more productive). My arms and shoulders are really sore and I'm having to do a ridiculous amount of stretching before swimming to prevent injury, but I've never been stronger or fitter. The challenge now is how to keep that up once the pool closes in a couple of weeks.

So that's it from me for now. Just the usual quilting, sewing, swimming routine around here, chucked in with work and life. It's pretty sweet!

How to applique your EPP without pins and stress - a tutorial

I was making a Project 48 block last night where the instruction was to applique the EPP to a background fabric. It's something I do quite often in my EPP projects, but I find when I explain the concept to people, they sometimes don't understand how I do it, or how easy it is. So on finishing this block, I thought I'd do a little photo tutorial to show you.

This technique works with either blocks, or entire quilts, or side strips. 

(And I'll apologise now for the state of my hands and the macro shots. I've been gardening like a mad woman the last couple of weeks so my hands are a mess; and my little Canon camera has a mind of its own on the macro setting, giving me a horrible glamour filter each time. It's like a freaking Doris Day movie every time I look at the photos. Probably best given the state of my hands, but sorry about that.)

So this is your finished EPP block, unpressed but still gorgeous.

And here is the back of it.

Give the back a bit of a press with a hot steamy iron. Don't push back and forth. PRESS. You want to put a permanent crease in those outer shapes, especially.

If you've glue basted as I have, take a cuticle stick (one of the wooden ones you get in packs of 3 at Priceline) and gently use it to lift the fabric from the paper. It will kind of pop. 

If you have used a scant amount of glue, kept the glue away from the edge, and used a decent seam allowance, this will be easy. If you haven't, then you're doing EPP wrong. Sorry, but you are. I'll come by another time and show you how to EPP properly, I promise.

Use your cuticle stick to lift out the papers as you release them from the glue. 

Or if you have thread basted, just clip the threads and pop the papers out!

This is the back of the block after all the papers have been removed. Don't worry about the seam allowances that have lifted, because ...

... you'll get the chance to give them a bit of a press. Again, PRESS, don't move the iron back and forth. You want those seams to maintain integrity. If any of the seams move and go a bit skewiff, just use your fingers to re-position them and press them gently back into place (preferably without burning your fingers). Easy!

Grab your spray starch of choice. Mine is Crisp because I can get it easily at my IGA. Yours is probably something else a lot cooler and funkier. It doesn't really matter. 

Give the front a quick spray of the starch and press with a dry iron. Do the same with the back, pressing so you don't dislodge all the fine work you have done with your seam integrity :).

Your EPP block is now prepared for the next step!

Take your background fabric, and press it in quarters and open it back out so that you have registration lines for placing the EPP on top of it.

Position your EPP on top of the background. See how it is centred perfectly?

Roxanne basting glue is your new little friend. I use the one with the steel nozzle because it makes gluing minimal and accurate. Very important!

Fold your positioned EPP block gently forward at the half way line without moving it off the position you placed it in. Gently dab a little dot of glue inside the seam line, just on the corners will do it. This is where it pays to have a 3/8 inch seam allowance on your EPP. Trust me - you do NOT want this glue anywhere near where your needle will be because it when it is hard it is damn near impossible to get your needle through it and your will curse this technique forever and ever. 

When you have glue dots on all the corners, gently flip your block back to where it was originally. 

PRESS the glue dry with your iron (dry iron).

Now flip the bottom half back and dot with glue again. Don't forget to also add glue at the seam allowance near the centre line. Flip it back...

...and press. The glue should now have dried. 

This is how I double check it's all attached. Just kidding. But look! No pins required!

Find your best matching thread. I use Superior Egyptian cotton exclusively for all my applique because it's bloody lovely. And no one is even paying me to say that. I get it in the donuts in all the colours because I do so much applique in so many bright colours. But other people swear by Aurifil 50/2 cotton, or silk, or Superior bottom line. Use whatever you can afford and whatever suits the work you do.

As for needles I only ever use Clover Gold Applique No. 10. I tried the Hiroshima Tulip needles but they weren't as bendy for my style of applique (I swear by Tulips for EPP though). Again, use the needle that suits you the best.

Knot your thread and come in from the back. Start a little beneath the applique, and just catch a couple of threads at the seam fold.

I do a stitch every 2-4 mm.  Depends on the curves an intricacy. But this is an EPP block with straight edges - every 4-5 mm will do the trick.

The points are important. Make sure you take a stitch at each one to secure it. If you don't, your points can invert when you wash or iron the block again.

And here's what the back looks like.

Keep going until the whole block is appliqued. You can choose to cut the back out if you like, later. Just carefully trim 3/8 inch inside the stitching lines with sharp scissors, making sure you don't cut through the front part.

And there you have it! Told you it was easy!

Please ask any questions in the comments below and I will answer them there. Hopefully you'll find this tutorial helpful!

Sydney Quilt Show

Well hi there! It's been almost 5 months since my last post. Life got a little, ah... well I won't say "busy" but a better word is "distracted".  My husband had a second hip surgery in early February and then had (and still has) some pretty serious complications, so there was that. And I started a new job in an entirely new field, so there was that too. And I'm running the house single handed and becoming a master of the meal prep, so again. And I entered the Sydney Quilt Show with a quilt that wasn't even a finished top yet.

(People (of the flummoxed type, I expect) sometimes ask why I enter quilt shows given that while I am obsessed with quilting, I don't take the whole exhibition and judging thing or even quilting seriously. AT ALL.  Look people - if you haven't worked it out yet, it's so I have a reason to finish quilts.)

So I entered the quilt show with an unfinished quilt, and I worked really, really hard to finish it. And it totally paid off, because not only did I get a quilt finished, I also got this!



I got a phone call from the President on the Sunday morning before the show that I had won "something" and to say I was shocked would be an understatement. In fact, when I was standing with my friends at the awards ceremony last Wednesday I was convinced, after they had called out the judges commendations for the small or wall quilt (amateur) category, that they had made a mistake in calling me, so sure was I that it must be one of those awards. Nope. Second.



Yep. Chuffed.



The quilt is called Seven Garden Maze and was designed by my good friend Cathy Miller, also known as the Singing Quilter.  She made hers originally in silk dupioni and it is STUNNING.  I decided to pick homespun for my version (solids, the cool kids call it) except for the ocean blue which is a Kaffe Fassett shot cotton. The borders of each maze are not black, but very dark brown (from memory Kona Espresso).



Each hexagon is 1/2 inch. I machine quilted each wedge from side to side to form it's own secondary labyrinth. I also faced it with 1/2 hexagons because quite clearly I was insane - just this sewing of facings took me a couple of weeks. I handed in the quilt to the person-before-the-dropoff-person just in time.



So Sydney! It was pretty spectacular. I spent 6 days up there, and unlike last year I didn't injure my back the night before, or get laryngitis while I was there. So this year I got to talk! And walk! And spend heaps of time with friends new and old. I had a fantastic time. I spent three days at the quilt show, mostly volunteering, with the highlight being day one. A group of us friends stood together at the awards ceremony, and then this happened (and this is only a few of us who won ribbons - aren't we a talented bunch?)...







The biggest surprise though was when my lovely friend Rachaeldaisy won best of show! I've stolen this photo quite blatantly from the guild's Facebook page, because it is just so classic (and we were all a bit emotional!).



What else about Sydney? Oh there is so much. I took photos of quilts but don't have permission from the makers to post them (because I forgot to ask), so instead if you want to see some winning quilts (including Rachael's amazing masterpiece) go to the QuiltNSW website.

Oh, and one last thing. I decided to start another new thing (all the other new things are meant to be in a post all of their own, there are so many) and this new thing is the Panama Pyramids sewalong. Linda Collins from Quilts in the Barn is running the sewalong and while she was working at the Quiltmania stand during the show, she brought along the original antique quilt that launched a 590 member sewalong. And I got to hold it and stroke it and really appreciate that amazing yellow. Aren't I lucky? It's absolutely beautiful.



It was a fantastic show. Heck - it was a fantastic week! A friend came to stay for a couple of days early on and we went to the Isabella Blow and Collette Dinnigan exhibitions. I had dinner with friends, and the Sydney Spoolettes. I met up with my quilting friends at the show each day, met some online friends finally, had a little meet up with some beautiful women from The Applique Guild of Australia who were visiting the show and I got to take the first and last ferries from Circular Quay with my friends Di and Di most days.



By Saturday I was buggered and so ready to go home so I got to the airport a bit earlier and sat in the sun at Gate 19 and stitched some of Chester Criswell while watching the planes take off and land. That was nice. I might have snoozed a bit. And since I got home to Canberra I have been absolutely freezing after the warmth in Sydney. But I can't wait for next year.

I've entered the Canberra quilt show in August with another unfinished work in progress. I have 32 days to finish it. And it's queen sized. Ha.

Cam's Quilt

My beautiful friend, the lovely and talented Cam, also know as Curlypops, was turning 40 and she was kind enough to invite me to her party in Melbourne last month.

The invitation said strictly no gifts. Pfft to that, I said. Cam's special. She is one of the nicest people I have ever met, and the most fabulous and tenacious friend. And she is such an inspiration to so many people, myself included. I wanted to make something, and somewhere in the crazy that is my brain, I decided to make her a replica miniature quilt using her fabric design (my favourite fabric of all time) as the basis. Her fabric is on the left. My version is on the right.



Did I mention that the design is really small?  I'm talking 1/4 inch hexagons here.



The first battle was colour matching - I found the 6 colours easily enough at my local quilt store, but really struggled to find the perfect grey. Thanks to a friend who saw me at the store one day, I eventually found it - in the prints section of the store! It just took a little bit of fussy cutting, and when the papers are that small, it's not too hard.



I started the quilt in late February. I had no plan other than to replicate Cam's fabric. In fact I only made a plan in the last two weeks before Cam's birthday party. This was my one mistake. I really was skating on thin ice time-wise, but jeebers I was loving making this quilt so much!





I finished all the piecing with a day to spare. I had made a little mini quilt for the hexagons to be appliqued to.



I started appliqueing it down in Melbourne the morning of the party. Thank heaven for Roxanne Applique Glue. An hour or so later, I was finished. A couple of hours before the party started, even.



 To be perfectly honest I thought I would be showing Cam the quilt, and then taking it home again to finish - it was that tight.

The whole quilt is about 11 inches square. Pretty small. Although I got very used to the size very quickly as I was piecing it, even with my big fingers. I'm now making a 1/2 inch hexagon quilt and it seems enormous in comparison.

The birthday girl wore the exact same pink as in the quilt. How cute does she look!



I'm not too sure I won't ever do a 1/4 hexagon project again. It definitely pushed my limits, but I learned a lot about stitching something that small, and also about planning a quilt BEFORE you just randomly start stitching. And Cam loves is, and that really is the whole point.



Happy birthday gorgeous friend. Hope I'm around to help you celebrate your 80th too.

I'm joining in with Gemma's I Quilt linky party!