Archive for June, 2008

• diagrams are useful, ay?

  Date: 2008.06.24 | Category: random | Response: 0

  
  Remind me diagrams are useful, ay? Particularly when you’re like, unfamiliar with patchwork, and, like, making the pattern up yourself? Don’t keep that in your head, do, umm, like, even a couple of scale drawings or something?

  Things I learnt from drawing my plans (kinda) to scale:

  - if I can’t be bothered drawing over 800 fish, I likely can’t be bothered handsewing them;

  - my maths needs a little more practice … 800-odd??? Why didn’t it occur to me the rows and columns would multiply out to such a big number?

  - I think my first quilt better be machine-pieced, hand-quilted, perhaps? Just so I finish it?

  - I don’t need triangles, I don’t want parallelograms, I just need the same wonky-sided diamond, over and over (ok, and a few triangles) when I cut it:

  - I likely need 2 more fabrics, so not bad guesstimating and anyway partly because I only want to use the black once, and I’m thinking of doing something fancy with numerology or something …

  -husband having done Tech. Drawing at school means he can sometimes become quite interested in the correct drawing of quilting blocks and in finding errors in my assumptions … I’ll be asking him again, I hope

• a selection of fishy fabrics

  Date: 2008.06.23 | Category: fabric | Response: 0

  
  So, after you’ve just finished a big assignment, what’d you do? You’d go out and buy fabric, wouldn’t you? To make whatever you’ve been dreaming of all the while

  These are the ‘fat quarters’ that’s right, isn’t? 50 x 35cm, anyway, I chose from Okadaya. (And I really must write a review of the shop for you soon). The red fabrics and one black are for the fish, the rest are the water. Chosen while M was mostly asleep, and so was A (in the backpack), except they woke up towards the end, and because the quilting section has little (i.e. child-sized) baskets, they ran round pulling down fat quarters to stack in their baskets … I think the assistants were amused, rather than angry, which was lucky …

  It was interesting choosing, I had a tiny time to think about what I was doing, before I got interrupted I started with the blues, the hardest. I picked up lots of fabrics, tried to put them back neatly. After awhile, I decided they had to say “water” to me, or they were out … and my view of water (at least in this quilt) was all squiggly lines modern, maybe some spots. I then tried to match the blues together – tricky, and I’ll bet some of them give me trouble later on … I even had to resort to greys and mostly-whites. The reds were easy, I love red best, perhaps that’s why, no picking up and putting back, 5 fast choices, done.

• random photo on a sunny day

  Date: 2008.06.22 | Category: random | Response: 0

  
  Ahh yes, the post-stress illnesses, how I love them (not) …

  I’m catching up kinda backwards, I’ve a bunch of posts in my head for you all:)

• plans for my first quilt

  Date: 2008.06.20 | Category: fabric | Response: 0

  
  So, yes, I’ve kinda got really interested in the idea of a hand sewn quilt, made with fabrics from Okadaya. I thought I’d make it for my youngest, M, because she rarely gets new stuff, or stuff “first”. Also, it could legitimately be smallish … which would test out whether I have the stamina for hand piecing a big one

  Little M loves fish at the moment, so it will be a fairly simple fishy quilt, with lots of different fabrics to create water movement. I’m trying to plan the shapes out, above. I bought the Clover metal templates from Okadaya … I think they don’t quite fit what I want to do (I need an isosceles triangle as well as equilateral ones, maybe a parallelogram?) but I’m glad I’ve got them anyway, I’m sure to use them later.

  Sorry ’bout the grey day photography … you can make the photo a bit bigger by clicking on it, if that helps;)

• umm, sorry

  Date: 2008.06.19 | Category: random | Response: 0

  
  Sorry about that unplanned blog break … I’m here on Uni exchange; have to write some reports and so on … I always imagine I won’t get stressed this time, I’ll be able to do all the normal things … but that never seems to be true …

  Photo from my balcony, on a sunnier day than today (like, the day when I started getting totally absorbed in my assignment).

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