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!

Free As A Bird Progress

Okay, so as I've been moaning and groaning about, I was out of grey fabric for my exciting Free As A Bird quilt...


Luckily, I went to another Fabricville last weekend and came back with a big haul of fabric (I ONLY wanted to buy 1.5 m of grey, but it just so happened that the solids were on sale


because the fabric was so cheap, I also ended up buying ALL the grey they had left (5 m or so I think, plus a couple of pieces).


I see many beautiful quilts in the future of this bolt :)

The reason I ran out of the grey originally is this: I told you that the quilt wouldn't look anything like the original picture (above) ;)

Well it doesn't, because I decided to set the center piece on point. Meaning, I needed very large grey triangles.


Isn't it gorgeous??? I made the border out of the left over charms and ordered them by colour to get a smooth transition between colours.

I cut that strip in half and put it around my quilt center.

The first picture has the left over grey fabric lying around the quilt border to see what it would look like with that colour arrangement. Well, I liked it, but because I cut the large grey triangles, I was left with strange small triangles of grey fabric, not enough to make all the necessary borders out of. There I thought I had bought so much fabric when I got several yards of the grey initially! Hah! Anyway, that problem is now solved, and I put the grey borders on last night.

Oh, I can do better than that, no? You can't even properly see the pattern!

Let's try that again:


I want to do some kind of coooool quilting in all the grey space. Something like Diane Gaudynski's quilting - well, an amateur version of that.. (see bottom blog roll). Though I think I should actually, for once in my life:

a) practice
b) mark my quilting lines with some kind of pen
c) practice some more
d) use a fresh needle
e) check my tension before I start

:) Anyone want to lose some money and bet that I'll do the above? But I'm starting with the best of intentions!!! Let it be recorded here :)

Free As A Bird

I was having one of those days, recently... one of those days when you're one year older all of a sudden :) Just in time for that, some fabric arrived from Green Fairy Quilts, yay!


Aren't they pretty???


And for the first time every, I cut right into the fabrics - well, not much cutting to do with charm packs ;) - and used the two Freebird charm packs to start this quilt:


This will look nothing like it seems now by the time it's completed, but I'll keep you in suspense for now :)