A Christmas Folly in 4 Acts
by Lily Boot
Act 1
In which Miss Lily chooses fabric, draws lines and cuts triangles.
Gather your fabric - I like four individual pieces and a fifth which will be the backing of each of the four. This way you can alternate the triangles, creating a pretty repeating pattern on both sides. The huge and lairy floral on the end is for the binding - because I will cut it into 2 1/2 inch strips which are then folded twice, these gorgeous swirly flowers will not overpower the christmas fabrics because you will only catch glimpses of them.
Cut one 8 inch strip from the full width of each of the four individual pieces.
Draw a straight line parallel to the left selvedge of the wrong side of your 8 inch strip.
Along the bottom edge of the 8 inch strip, measure 3 1/2 inches from the straight line and mark with a dash.
Draw a diagonal line from the top of your straight line to the 3 1/2 inch dash on the bottom edge. Now measure 7 inches from the top of the straight line, mark with a dash, then draw another diagonal line from the 3 1/2 inch dash to the 7 inch dash. You’ve now created your first bunting triangle!
Repeat all the way along the 8 inch strip to the end - I usually get around 11 triangles with a nice bit of leftover at the beginning and end to put in the scrap box.
Of course, you won’t need to bother with marking any more 3 1/2 inch dashes after the first one - you always mark your 7 inch dash from the point of the previous triangle.
Isn’t it just delightful how triangles sit together with such snug economy!
And when you’ve finished making lines - you slice along them! This way and that way and this way and that way - it’s almost like an old fashioned dance as you swish back and forth :-)
Now you are ready to stitch!
This was going to be all about bunting - for Tine! - but you know how it goes. I was hunting around in my drawers for a particular piece of old blue with holly maison noel and after a bit of cursing, not only found it, but found a Mary Engelbreit Christmas charm pack my lovely friend Amy sent me a while back.
Ooooh - I grinned - I was going to make a chinese coin quilt with this - well, I’ll cut out the bunting and start taking photos, and just cut this up quickly whilst I’m at it. Several squares at once, 2 inches, 1 1/2 inches, 3 inches, 2 1/2 inches.
Hmmmm … the pile looks a bit ordered …
I’ll toss them around a bit for a chance at random - remember, I don’t do random well!
Then I’ll just quickly chain piece the strips - four columns, so piece in lots of four in an effort to keep the columns pretty even - before I settle down to zigzagging my bunting triangles.
Oops! Better put on dinner. But first, I’ll just even up the bottoms - add a bit here, add a bit there.
Well now, dinner’s over, a fabulous evening of news is done (I’ve gone tingly and cried a hundred times!), Abigail’s in bed, but before I tackle the triangles, I’ll just add the stripes in between the columns of coins.
I was going to use this black spot but it makes it look a bit halloweenish.
Oh! Oh! How about my all time favourite red Wee Play - nah! Too hot.
But, another bout of serendipity - whilst digging out the wee play I found this wee play check - very Mary!
You know, a bit of black spot on the edge would like good - after all Moda calls it essential spot and I couldn’t agree more - everything looks great with spots. Well, after Abigail enduring two bouts of chicken pox, I guess I mean everything fabric looks great with spots!
Now for those red borders - a bit of wool applique tickles my fancy, but green would just look like the colour blindness test from my Year 9 Biology textbook. How about some white Christmas balls … with a bow to tie onto the tree. Clearly not THIS bow - it’s too big and clunky and red! And maybe some button embellishments?
Nope - now it looks like a smartie cookie. Maybe a bit of embroidery and some small buttons ….
… <sigh> there’s nothing for it, I shall have to visit the patchwork store and acquire some Mill Hill beads - that’s what my Christmas balls need.
Oh no … the bunting - too tired. Will try tomorrow!
My goodness - that was an extended - and completely unplanned - break! I feel like the weary traveller who’s arrived home to find the potted plants dead, the furniture covered in dust, and the mail all over the front lawn!
I haven’t been anywhere - well, apart from Sydney for the weekend - just caught up in the busyness of school and family and work. We’ve all been a bit unwell, there were special events to prepare for and two weeks just disappeared.
We had a lovely Halloween Birthday Party last Friday for Abigail’s best friend Peter - what a lucky boy, born on Halloween. I made Halloween bunting and napkins and a table runner and a Sally costume for Abigail (from Nightmare before Christmas).
Julian carved a marvellous pumpkin, and together we cooked up slimy dip (Nigella’s pea and greek yoghurt), brains and blood clots (Martha’s popcorn and cranberry balls), worms in mud (Chocolate crackles with lolly grubs sticking out) and a pumpkin pie. It was an incredibly busy few days and a fun Friday night.
I feel as if I could make bunting and napkins in my sleep …
and indeed they’re on my Christmas present list … in Christmassy fabrics of course!
But my table runner provided the at-long-last opportunity to try my hand at free-motion quilting. And how addictive is that! :-)
I began just doing the coral looking wiggles round and round the plain six inch blocks - the first block had a few long lines and sharp corners and we won’t even look at the stitch length!
Then after several of them, I decided to try a concentric flower on the pieced blocks - and that was such fun! Bit tricky at first, when the circle-y shape was small but I got better.
And this spooky table runner is dedicated to the fabulous and lovely Amy over at Mrs. Schmenkman Quilts who sent me these gorgeous fat quarters and charm pack,
and the quilting is inspired by the talented and dear Nanette over at Freda’s Hive for her suggestion to start on a small square that I wanted to keep and just keep practising! Without the wonderful encouragement and friendship I have received from these quilters and friends, my 2008 would have been an uneventful year.
So the runner has a long path winding it’s way through a Halloween eve from the spookily lit windows of home, to the eerie darkness of the churchyard. Next year I’ll set it up with appropriate Pappo and Playmobile figures and we’ll get a good story going.
And just in case you were wondering … I didn’t get it quilted for the dinner - it laid on the table as a flimsy! And when Pete started fussing with a pumpkin, I snatched a glass votive out of his - or rather, the pumpkin’s - way, burnt my fingers and dropped the candle which sloshed wax all over one of the runner blocks! Ooops! Never mind, Shannon Lush (Australian housekeeping guru) says to put it in the freezer and then the wax will pick away easily. I’ll be doing that when I’ve finished quilting my houses and bound the quilt. :-
p.s. also making blogging a bit tricky over the last fortnight was the demise of my laptop - it was six years old, had absolutely no memory, was ridiculously slow, the battery was kaput and finally, the power supply died. Now I’m standing at the laptop on the bookshelf in the vestibule between the dining room and bathroom - yay! I absolutely do not want to spend $2000 on another laptop - we’ll see how long I enjoy standing at the bookshelf :-( If you’ve emailed me lately and I’ve not responded - that’s my feeble excuse - Julian’s going to put my mail on this bookshelf laptop and then hopefully I’ll be back! Maybe I should buy a stool …
(looking gorgeous in Urban Chiks 1974)
Isn’t it funny how when you look at a quilt you may see one thing, and then later it becomes something else entirely.
When I began measuring and cutting my squares to make a 36 inch Square Deal, all I could see was half square triangles.
Then I saw some flying geese …
Then I saw a cacophony of red and white …
And then when I began to quilt, I finally saw the squares! So I quilted my way out, round and round the every-growing squares.
I might add, I thought my points were pretty cool in this quilt, until I began quilting it. Hmmm … some of the squares’ lines were more wonky-wonky rather than straighty-straighty!
But I sure have red, white and blue love at the moment! Next mini-quilt is going to be cream and green and orange - with a bit of Julian red of course.
On other stitchy fronts - Carolann came over and we finished up the 33 Christmas cottages for the lovely Nanette’s swap. They are now at the door, flapping their wings, waiting to fly off to Utah today! They were, however, finished lickety-split so there was plenty of time for more sewing. But I’m sad to confess, I was hogging the table - so all poor Carolann got to do was get out her quilt pieces … (don’t look Tory!)
and then work her way through a pile of interiors magazines. I did tell her to shove some stuff out of the way, but she was quite engrossed …
At least now we know what to do with chairs that cannot be sat on anymore. Country Homes tells us to line them up in the hallway and place baskets of wild flowers on them - the dogs would love that, we’d have wild flowers strewn from one end of the house to the other, and Julian would fall over them when he comes home each night! World of Interiors tells us to hang them from the ceiling in the kitchen - awesome - cooking with concussion! And Australian Country Style tells us to simply stack them in the corner of a room where the paint is peeling and the plaster chipped to create an East Heads West look - I don’t even know what that means!
I think we’ll leave the broken chairs downstairs … until the next hard rubbish day and then we can place them artfully on the footpath.
I love painting - it’s certainly not a talent - but sometimes for Grandad’s birthday, I pick up the paintbrush and paint and set to work. Grandad is very family-history oriented - so the paintings always reflect something from his life or past - which is maybe why I’m always pleased with these canvasses - their stories have been in my mind’s eye for a lifetime.
My favourite style of painting is Naive - especially colonial American and contemporary European naive. As a strange bed-fellow, I also like the Australian Aborigine dot paintings so often have layers of dots and dashes in my paintings as well.
Here’s Star - he was Nanny and Grandad’s cocker spaniel. A silly dog but so lovable and the best company for two little sisters on holidays in the country. We used to go tramping for hours across fields full of cows and thistles, down to the river where the huge camphor laurels were. Star was our guide - there were many barbed wire fences to negotiate and invariably we would become stuck, our knitted jumpers snared on the barbs as we were crawling though the strands. But Star would always wait, standing patiently on the other side, watching us with his loving, bloodshot eyes. He was also marvellous at protecting us from the cows - they were huge and would lumber up to us silently as we crossed their paddock - but Star would bark sharply at them - “Get back! This is little Lily and Janie, my granddaughters! Get back you big old cows!”
A favourite family story about Star was when he ate a neighbour’s chickens that had escaped from their pen. The neighbour marched over, fierce and accusing - “Star was a dreadful dog, he’d eaten her chickens, he was a menace!” Nanny, hands on hips, Star skulking behind her apron, declared “Her dog would never do such a thing! He was a lovely, sweet cocker spaniel. And besides, he’d been inside all afternoon in front of the stove!” Shame about the feathers that were floating around :-)
(the colours and flowers in the border are from Nanny’s Lotte dinner set - a beautiful, whimsical set of Norwegian stoneware made in the 1970s by Figgio - Nanny still has all of hers, and I now have an almost full collection myself, having spent the last four years buying it piece by piece from ebay - having five aunties, I know my chances of inheriting Lotte are slim!)
And this is Grandad in his vegetable garden. Every house they built - and there were many - they would establish a beautiful garden - lots of flowers and vegetables and fruit trees.
After every visit, we would return home with bags bulging with spinach and potatoes and carrots and beans …
This garden was in Kuraby, their second last home before moving to the retirement village. It was bare rock when they moved in - when they left 4 years later, it was an oasis.
