Tuesday 26 July 2011

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!

Sunday 10 July 2011

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...