Something is happening!

A bit of quilting is happening!

I've started so many new things since 2010, it's hard to get anything finished.

Now I'm making some progress on the blue stripes quilt. I think I want this to be big. So far I've just been using leftover strips and I want to keep it that way rather than cutting into fabric especially for this. There always seems to be strips leftover from projects, so it makes sense to use this in the traditional sense of quilting, i.e. using the waste from another project for a quilt!
So 4 more blocks are almost done, just need to be ironed and cropped to size...

My make-shift sewing space - in the living-room once again :) The future quilt room is still awaiting furniture, and right now I've got a big rug drying in there after beating it out in the snow to clean it, so there's hardly enough space to get across the room!


Now that I've moved, my place is much more quilter friendly! Laminate flooring so I can tape my backings to the floor again, and lots'n'lots of light from the south-facing window wall... the future quilt room has westfacing windows - nice light without the colour-fading effect.



I still don't have a lot of time for quilting, what with every night being filled with another activity (I'm learning Norwegian now, what a fun language!), but at least the starting conditions are much improved over the last hole, I mean apartment, I lived in :)

What it takes to get me quilting...

... a sick friend, apparently.

So it was time for a cheer-you-up little quilt, the motif was chosen based on an insider joke of ours...

I don't think I've done a scene like this before, but it was fairly basic.

I sketched my scene, then layed out scraps of fabric that I had at hand until the image worked for me:

Next, I ironed the small scraps to heat'n'bond and laid them out as I wanted them, as a final check of fabric choices. The larger pieces I cut to size but didn't heat'n'bond them:

I then sewed the background layers to a foundation piece of muslin, ironed the small heat'n'bond pieces on top (I always have a hard time getting them to stick to the base... I might heat them too much when I attach the paper to the applique piece. When the backing paper is removed, the glue is supposed to look milky, and it doesn't always do that, even though I have the setting on silk and only count to 2 seconds as per instructions. Maybe I count too slowly!). Then I outline quilted things like the palmtree leaves, the sun, the umbrella, person and beatch towel. The palm trunk, sand, ocean and sky received matching patterns and the sun got some extra rays:
It finished at around 8x12" which fits perfectly into a large brown envelope with 2 chocolate bars another little gift and a long letter. Started the quilt on Friday, worked on it again Sunday and had it in the mail on Tuesday - hopefully some of the rays of sunshine will reach my friend!

I've been doing a *little* bit of other quilting too. Days are getting colder and darker outside! More about that some other day, I've had enough of slow internet for one day!!!

Triangles and squares

Playing with some charms (Moda Wonderland) to make an easy-peasy quilt. Sometimes easy does it.

The rest of the charm pack (all the pinks and browns) are going into this HST-quilt. I think I have enough charms in the right colour-line. I'll just have to get creative if I don't. They're sewn together, but I have to press them, and I seem to be very reluctant to pull out the old ironing board! :) Funnily enough, I posted about these HSTs before, when I had "decided" on a layout :) So times change...

That carpet, by the way, is horrific. I miss my old hardwood floors dearly, but that's what you get when you rent ;) Not sure how I'll baste my next big quilt, I've never done anything other than tape them to the floor during basting... a first for everything!

On the workfloor

I started quilting one of my galactic wall hangings (the set of 3); I just checked an older post for the actual name: Triple Constellation.


I'm trying to blend the 'incomplete' circles so that it looks like a full circle. Have a couple of additional layers of thread to go to blend it better:


I also pulled out a project I started earlier this year - or maybe late last year. I think I called it Warm & Fuzzy because of the burgundy/wine colours. I'm still making matching green blocks; my plan is to lay them out checker-board style, but if that doesn't look good, I'll do something with the individual colour combos...


Let's see how much time I'll get to actually work on these projects. Having them laid out on the living room floor should be enough of an inconvenience, I mean, incentive to get quilting, eh? :)


I'm just updating my side-menu. The Chicks&Elephant baby quilt in white is out of my hands. I gave it to a colleague of mine who had a very difficult pregnancy and basically was prescribed bedrest starting in month 2 of the pregnancy. I was hopping that on her good days, she might be up for making a special quilt for her little one, so I basted the quilt for her and gave her husband instructions on how to hand-quilt since she wasn't up for receiving visitors at the time. No idea if the idea worked, but the baby was born in great shape in July, phew!

Hooray, it's working!

Thank your for your advice about google reader! It's much easier to follow my favourite blogs now, though as was pointed out to me, I still have to load the blogs to comment, so please forgive me if you don't get many comments from me anymore!

I've worked on a couple of pieces recently:

1) finally started the quilting on Free As A Bird (see sidebar). So far, I'm doing the brainless stitch-in-the-ditch (with brainless, I mean that I didn't have to think about what to do, it's pretty obvious, no marking or designing required :) I still think it's one of the most difficult quilting methods - it's so easy to slip out of the ditch and then it looks pretty sloppy!), but I ideas for the large grey triangles are brewing...


2) I used the rest of the drunkard's path blocks to make 3 wall hangings (they're just stuck together on my make-shift designwall right now. It's not so much a design wall as a 'get things off the floor' method, since my floorspace here is much more limited than before... I think I may have shown pictures of these wall hanging triplets before (pre-sewn together).


Well, my quilting output is still not up to pre-move-levels. There's just so much other fun stuff to do here! Come winter, it'll probably pick up again :)

Bear with me, and happy quilting!

This is the new style

... of my blogging life. Gone are the days of a post every 2 days. Ah, I never treasured wireless internet as much as I should have while I still had it!

I'm not livng out in the boons, working with a mobile internet stick since there is no affordable faster version here. The next village is supposed to get glassfibre cables maybe this year...

So as I read pages of books while waiting for a quilting blog to load, my patience for uploading my own pictures wears thin. (can someone tell me if using google reader means that all the latest posts of blogs I choose show up in one place, rather than having to load each individual blog with the many photos that come with it (including from old posts which I've already read)... I'd really like to catch up in my blog reading, but right now, it's just not doable! Help!)

On top of the internet handicap, I've just not been quilting as much. The area around here is beautiful, so I spend more time outside than I used to. Maybe that'll drive me to handquilting ;) I did some applique today, out in the sunshine.

I only did that because I had to sew some really weird curved shapes together that I couldn't do by machine, and the reason I had to do that in the first place was to finish this small quilt top:

It's made from two UFOs, my Sunset on Water convergence experiment and my Drunkard's Path experiment. For some reason, this quilt made me think of planets while I was working on it, so it's my Solar System quilt now :) The drunkard's path blocks measure 5.5" finished, making this about 38" square.

There are 4 odd blocks in this quilt top, e.g. the 3rd block to the right and also the 3rd block up from the bottom left corner in the outside row. I was 4 drunkard path blocks short and had used all my fabric, but I still had 12 of the cut out pieces from making the drunkard's path blocks, so I picked the 3 neighbouring fabrics to my 'gap blocks' and cut the pieces up and sewed them back together to make a 6" square. The fabric was *just* enough! No room for mistakes there!

I think this will be a good small starter project to get me going on quilting again. But either way, the days of frequent blogging are over until the internet speeds up around here...

I Found A Quilt Shop!

I was exploring the area in northern Germany, where I live now, and almost missed this quilt store (the only one around, as far as I can see online). I had, in fact, already walked by it, but noticed the huge patchwork scottie and thought, hey, I need to take a photo for my blog readers!


Then I wanted to see what type of store has a giant patchwork scottie out front, and lo and behold! it's a quilt store :)


I went inside, where a young South American looking/sounding guy was working behind the cutting table/cash register, who said I could take photos if I wanted to - great!

They had a lot of ribbons, buttons and embroidery stuff, and a nice selection of fabrics, though as always, much more expensive than I'm used to buying (would be around 24$Can/meter, incl. tax), yikes!


I only bought a panel, which was about 1/2 or 3/4 yard of the Duck Duck Goose fabric. I already had two prints from that series, blogged about a long while ago, and never new what to do with them... Now I know :) I dredged up the photos of the old fabrics:


I live in the countryside now, and everything is already in bloom here! Check it out, true spring, not something piddly like the one week I used to get in PEI! It's heaven :)