Totally inspired by Kathi over at Inspired by Antique Quilts, I *ran* into the sewing room, grabbed my recently re-discovered scraps, threw them onto the dining room table and have been busy ever since …
There will be five columns – three of five and two of four – this is the “square” version of my rick rack setting! And again, I want to try prairie points for the edge.
My mum thinks it’s the prettiest quilt I’ve ever made :) she *loathes* the civil war blocks :)
My nanny can’t wait to try it – because there are NO triangle points to match!
More to come …
I am taking part in Calamity Kim’s Doll Quilt Challenge and the theme for March / April is Chinese Coins with a green/spring/Easter feel. I had been thinking about what fabric I would purchase for this for weeks – and then completely forgot about it whilst at the awesome 29% off everything sale.
However, whilst working on my scrappy, wonky nine patch stars on Saturday morning, I came across a little paper bag stuffed full of the narrow strips left over from the shabby floral memory quilts my mum, nanny, auntie and myself made in 2006.
There were 48 little pieces, all 8 1/2 inches long and of widths between 1 inch to 2 1/2. Perfect! I rescued a long piece of green floral I was using for the nine patch stars and set it aside for the sashing and trimmed the little pieces straight. I confess, I arranged them into a particular order – can’t help myself! – and added the pink stripe randomly throughout the four columns.
Gleefully, I sewed up my columns and then began adding the green sashing only … ! Despite having the same number of “coins” in each column they were all different widths weren’t they? So they didn’t all turn out the same length did they! So I had to add bits to the three shorter ones and alas, the column ending in the yellow polka dot is alarmingly crooked.
Hmmm… oh well!
I have been hand quilting it – just 1/8 inch from the ditch in pink. One more column to go and then I want to hand quilt a curvy line in the green sashing. Then, on the green polka dot borders at the top and bottom I am going to add some appliqued felt eggs and carrots. Hopefully start that tomorrow.
(excuse the lack of paragraph breaks – it’s a very strange WordPress blip that only happens when I use Safari, which I’m using ’cause I’m at my mum’s – I’ll fix it up later when I’m at home :) – done!)
My local fabric haunt, The Quilter’s Store, had its once in four years, 29% off everything on the 29th and boy was it awesome!
I had the same thrill asI have when I wake up on Christmas morning and know there are all sorts of treasures awaiting us under the tree! Goodness, how old do I sound!
And after it was all over, I had a touch of sadness! Did I buy enough? Did I make the most of it? Did I buy the right fabric? Maybe I should have bought some red and white … oh I wish I could wake up tomorrow morning and I could do it all again! :)
However, I was very disciplined and stuck to the two themes I had already decided upon – 20 1/2 metre pieces of reproduction fabric for my Civil War Quilt, and pink, orange and ecru for a 1930s style quilt. Here it is …
But I haven’t yet settled on a pattern for it. What do you think?
Should I do …Option A – Three and Six / Special Blessings
Option B – Rolling Nine Patch
or Option C – Hour Glass
Whichever block I decide upon, I will be laying it out in the same manner as the V Block – on point with the rick rack background. I have Darlene Zimmerman’s book on edges coming in the mail so I would like to try prairie points for the edge – at the moment I am thinking a strong pink but I will wait until the rest is done before deciding.
You never know, it might look good with a really vivid green!
Actually, after a week of leaving you misinformed, I would like to clarify that we had no tree”lopers” – oh that they merely “loped”! We did, however, had a terror of tree “loppers” and lop they did!
I was hoping I would find one eventually – and here it is. Mr. Big, our resident front garden water dragon, now has a throne from which to loftily regard his territory.
Oh my goodness! Now he’s on the letterbox! I have never seen him do that – he leapt up there from his throne to catch a passing bug.
His landing was a wee bit clumsy, but he quickly regained his regal composure. Look at his pink belly – must be nice and warm on the metal letter box.
Oh will I ever get to the ironing!
Here are my three eforts for today. I still have not fetched the book and don’t think I will do any more blocks until I have it. Whilst last night was exciting, this morning is just a little chaotic and I would like to feel a bit more ordered in my sewing of the blocks! Neurotic, I know.
BTW, I am having terrible trouble taking decent photos of them – I think I changed the settings on the camera by accident – will have to wait for J’s return so that he may fix it – and the light at the moment is hopeless. I never thought I would say it, given we’ve been in drought for four years, but I am sick of all these grey clouds! I’d love a wee bit of blue sky and sun. We have had the odd day, since Christmas, but it has been odd – especially Saturday just past – 42 degrees celsius at 2.30pm but an hour and a half late, 27. On the coast, it dropped 10 degrees in 10 minutes!
Anyway, here’s the blocks … Selling the livestock
Funny purple and blue … didn’t the stripes turn out odd.
and the sweetest of the morning, Pink and Green triangles – I would love to try this block in the 1930s fabric too.
Now I must be off – the iron is talking to me in morse code – click, click, click Lily, you’ve left me on again, come and put me to good use on the piles of laundry that are cluttering your sewing room and making you feel so wah wah!
I have been watching with growing delight over the last two weeks as several talented quilters I visit in blogland display their “Civil War Diary” wares. They have been popping them out at an awe inspiring rate and their prettiness knows no bounds.
I have seen Rosemary Youngs’ book before – in fact I own a copy but it has been on an extended holiday with a lovely woman who is not a close friend and whom I have not seen since lending it to her 18 months ago – but have always been daunted by the littleness of the blocks – 6 inch – and the incredibly detailed piecing involved in some of them.
Bound up in my slowness to tackle these blocks, has been a finicky quibbling in my mind over the colour choices – they sometimes look so drab to me – and the “oddness” of some of block constructions.
However, as I said above, I have been enchanted with the efforts of quilters such as Megan and Kathie and have decided to cast aside my wah-wahs (as J and Little C call whining) and begin. I couldn’t convince C to take part – hmmph! – but I’m hooked!
Since 1pm this afternoon, CWQ blocks are all I’ve been able to think of and I have so far produced 7 (I machine piece – hope this is okay) – as per those on Kathie’s blog as I don’t have the book. I was hoping to “win” one last night on ebay but it was not to be (you may of course be asking at this point why I don’t just ring the earlier mentioned lady and ask for my book’s return – I am a horrible cowardy custard and would rather stand in my mother’s mosquito infested back garden for an hour on dusk than be so presumptuous!).
However, dear C is coming to the rescue and lending me her copy (guess I shouldn’t complain she won’t join in!) She was going to pass it over on Friday at the quilt shop sale but I think I will have to call by tomorrow and collect – I cannot wait til Friday. So here’s my start.
Special Blessings … I really like this block and am contemplating a lap size quilt with this block in Aunt Grace / Feedsack style fabric.
John Morgan … who is he? Must have the book to find out.
Yankee Papers — I’m also very fond of this one
Now, I don’t know the names of the rest of these … I’ll name them properly when I get the book so until then, Churn Dashy thing … eeuuww on the colour combination but I’m being brave … ooh! ooh! I’ve checked on Lorre’s blog – this is Letters from Home
Red and Navy … so smart!
Blue and Brown … very demure, definitely an outfit for afternoon visits.
Pink and Brown … cocoa and raspberry meringues … and this is Enthusiasm
So there you are – my beginning. What I am loving about this exercise thus far is that it is really stopping me from over-thinking my fabric combinations. I would NEVER have used some of the colour combinations above but they were from my reproduction stash and I am determined to just plop those reproduction fabrics together in a scrappy, hit and miss way. I saw purple and blue and thought fine, purple and blue it is and didn’t stop to consider it any further, just snatched up the closest two. I’m thinking – hoping – this will add to the end charm. By golly, I hope I’m not wailing into my tea at the end of this! :)
Oh! And J will add the “Sew Many Blocks” logo to my page when he gets home – he’s in Melbourne at a conference and I haven’t a clue how to do it. OMG! The potatoes are burning, the lamb is still frozen and the greens .. what greens? And it’s 7.40pm on a school night. Enough!
With all the cleaning that went on, there wasn’t a lot of time, or clean enough hands, for sewing. Just a little admiring of the lovely lines of background rickrack appearing in the V Block Quilt.
The French Hen wash cloth grew enormously whilst Little A did her cello and piano practice and then utterly ungrew when I realised that it was not quite working.
I was following the pattern on the purl rows and then supplanting the next row of pattern with a straight knit row. I expected enough of the picture would be revealed this way. It wasn’t. And also, the picture was over before it had started. So now I am purling every row of pattern with the plain rows of knit in between and we’ll see how this goes. Good thing it is only 62 stitches wide!
Oooh! And look what I managed to buy today! The left-behind-in-a-desperate-moment crochet book …
I definitely need some of these …
Does this look like me? I hope so!
And Simon will look fetching in this – definitely an improvement on the cobwebs! :)
Yum!
After a quick start to the morning – 7.15 wakeup, 7.17 realisation that strings ensemble is now on Monday, not Tuesday, 7.45am at school with cello, lunch and child – I decided to make the most of not having had time for a shower before school drop off and get stuck into all those dirty tasks I had been avoiding. Simon joined in …
I’m not sure what he was up to but I swept the front path, swept out under the house (my feet were black with dirt after this little exercise), cleaned the bath, swept and tidied the back landing and stairs and scrapped and painted the little chest of drawers I desperately need to put in my sewing room to hide all the fabric.
Actually, I was only going to sand the chest of drawers, but when I scrapped at a hard trickle of old paint, the paint flaked off like showers of confetti – so two hours later the high gloss magnolia was up my nose, in my mouth, through my hair and from one end of the garage to the other – but at least it wasn’t on the chest! First coat of Vintage USA done!
And then, I finally, finally, finally carried inside the poor little old house that I had rescued from under the house weeks ago and then added insult to injury by leaving it on the back landing. How awful am I for letting this happen!
Mind you, the remaining family members didn’t seem too bothered by the horror in which they were living – they had faith :)
My old nanny and grandad brought this little Fisher Price house home to me from Canada in the early 1970s. It gave me years and years of fun and remains my dream home – with a bathroom added! So I carefully cleaned it with an old toothbrush, a soft cloth and some soapy water – had to be very careful with the water and the illustrated paper linings which provide all of the house’s life and character. Cleaning the roof was so satisfying! Inside was less dirty but harder to clean …
Children’s room … obviously where I get my inspiration for curtains …
Parents’ room … problem with the detailed papering was that I always ended up covering something important with the furniture, it was most frustrating …
Sitting room … looks very like the sitting room in Happy Days …
and the best bit, the Kitchen … oooh I would love to have a kitchen with a rock wall and roaring fire …
Before long, everything was *almost* sparkling and the abridged family were thrilled with the renovations. Hopefully, dad and boy will show up soon, dragging the missing kitchen chair and beds behind them.
But life goes on and before mum and girlie could check on their roast, the school bus had arrived to take girlie to school …
… it lost its papered illustrations many years ago – but the little “headlights” still flip up and down, the wheels clackety clack, and the driver’s head swivels delightfully as it bumbles along.
What a good clean day Monday has been!
Now this didn’t come from OMATB. A declaration I know you’ll be greeting with gasps of amazement given the adulation I have been heaping upon that worthy tome. Nah! This comes from the luverly book of quilts inspired by the 1930s that I bought recently.
I’ve always liked the snail trail – those winding and interlocking colours are very appealing. But being a cowardy custard I have always contemplated it as a botchy little collection of cheating half square triangles and wobbly rectangles. And then realised it would look crap so shied away from it.
This morning after I evicted myself from the sewing room, due to the risk of heat stroke, I plonked myself down in the sitting room and flipped through a few books, thinking about what to spend my good money (as opposed to the bad money that I never seem to spend) on during my last fabric splurge for the next few months this Friday at the Quilter’s Store – 29% off on the 29th. There’s a particularly fine red and white quilt whose picture is stuck in the sidebar of my online news program that I would like to make, and I am keen on some more Civil War fabrics because I would love to make the 6 inch blocks from the Civil War Diary – as inspired by the likes of Kathie (btw, don’t you just adore that quilt she uses for her banner! – I read somewhere on her blog I think, that everytime she had some scraps, she would cut them into the correct sized pyramid so that when she had enough they were ready to go – cool!) – and I would also like some 1930s fabric because I just so love their vibrancy – I would like to make either a wondrous mountains or jacob’s ladder – and there was the snail trail pattern.
Saturday morning, J and Little A at their weekly activity, I have to go to work at 2pm so no point starting something new, too hot to do housework, no green wool for crocheting. What to do? So I took to the graph paper and tried to work out the dimensions of the triangles in the Snail trail (the pattern in the book was foundation pieced and I wanted to piece it with precise pieces). Impossible.
So I discarded the silent graph paper and started at the beginning with the Four Patch – I used 1 1/2 inch finished size squares – I refuse to sew anything smaller than 1 1/2 inches – and then used some Baking Parchment and my quilting ruler to work out how long the hypotenuse would be (of course J said later I could have just divided the length of the hypotenuse by 1.414 to work out the length of the side of the square, or at least I think that’s what he said) and how big I would need to cut the square. And I only cut one dud fabric square.
I cannot for the life of me understand why I used the measurements I used. But it worked! And I have enough fabric to make at least three more (I bought this fabric a few years ago to make a tiered skirt but have steadily used tier after tier until there’s no point pretending it will ever grow up to be a tiered skirt).
I have recorded all my measurements so I can repeat it – and any Snail Trail’s by Lily will always have to be this size. Eleven and a quarter. Very satisfying.
The V block – I must say, it is a particularly uninspiring name. When I look at it typed, it is definitely an Anne Shirley moment. It looks too short and mean to be the name of such a pretty block. I’m a bit lacking in imagination today – which I will put down to enduring a 42 degree day – so far the only thing I can come up with is that maybe the V could stand for Victory and I could imagine it is the block thought up by mothers and wives and sisters when the war was finally over in 1945. Hmmm… kind of nice, I love the whole Home Front history thing, Hope and Glory, Chamomille Lawn and all that. I’ll keep thinking.
But – this is my first block from Judy Hopkins superb, marvellous, fantastic, inspirational and challenging “Once More Around the Block”. Do I sound keen on it? I AM!!!!! Earlier in the week I had been solemnly pronouncing my dedication to finishing all the projects stacked up around my sewing room and not spending so much money on fabric. And mum and J and Little A – I am indeed genuine about this. But by golly – I’ve only got to catch a glimpse of this book out the corner of my eye and I am unable to think about anything else but fabric and all the quilts that could be made.
Back to the V Block. I had ordered a pile of pinks and reds and browns from Fat Quarter a couple of weeks ago, along with some pale grey blue with a light, small brown spot. And they arrived on Thursday – yum! They are from the Charlston collection and are even more beautiful in the “cloth” than they were online. So straight away, I turned to my new constant companion – OMATB – and studied it for hours, choosing which block to make. I wanted somthing that wasn’t too fussy. And yet, I don’t want to be a quilter who always opts for the simple. But I didn’t want a plethora of triangles (is that the collective noun for triangles? I’m sure I could do better!)
And it had to look good on point – because I wanted to do something like this … don’t you just adore that blue background. It took me AGES to work out how they did that. I was trying to line up those blocks and put borders on them every which way until it finally dawned on me that they had made vertical rows of the blocks on point with setting triangles and then every second row was half a block lower from the top and half a block higher from the bottom. It is now my all time favourite way to set a block. See …
The V Block fits all my needs – perfect for strip piecing, good for two colour combination with a light plain highlight and doesn’t it look great on point – shows up that V. I have pieced 24 of the 36 blocks – 12 yesterday when it was only a sweltering 36 degrees, and 12 more this morning when it was a ridiculous 42 degrees – and then I realised that being the “verandah”, my sewing room was almost lethally hot and I needed to peel myself off the chair, turn off the iron which was complementing the heat so nicely, and relocate myself, Little A’s cello, and the remaining bag of palm oil wax to the internal sitting room which was slightly cooler. Thankfully, the predicted cool change has already hit – there’s such a breeze clattering through my window that I almost feel too cool! How mad is that!
So tomorrow, the sewing room will be suitable for human occupation and I could slice up colour combination three -
or, I could paint the chest of drawers that has been lurking in the garage since I lugged it home a few Sundays ago. J has even trimmed off the legs for me so that it will be the perfect height for my sewing table. But it would require getting hot and dirty and I just don’t know if I’m in the mood for that.
Mind you, once it’s done I will have somewhere to put all the piles of fabric that are sitting around my room and then it won’t look as if I am an indulged, extravagant fabric maniac (my mum seriously suggested the other day that it was a little bit like an addiction!)
And! I didn’t order enough of the blue fabric so will not be able to sew up all of the rows. But you won’t believe this. I only ordered a metre of the blue fabric which, when cut into 12 inch squares for the setting triangles (how clever do I feel, having my little formula for this!), only yields 9 squares, i.e. 36 setting triangles, i.e., three vertical rows and I will have seven. I was going to have six, but given the rows will be long, short, long, short, long, short – it needed a seventh to look symmetrical. Cannot bear things not symmetrical. One of my childhood stories I will always remember invovles Mugum the Indian gardener we had in Malaysia when I was young. Everyday day he would line up the potted plants in the courtyard and every day after he left, my mother would arrange them higgledy piggledy again. Mugum found this lack of order baffling. I so understand Mugum.
Anyway, I ordered more blue. But do you know what I thought. Hmmm… I have three more rows so I will need three more metres and then a fourth metre to do the tops and bottoms of the short rows. Yes, four metres. Hit that complete purchase button now! IDIOT! One metre did three rows. WHAT WAS I THINKING?! You’ll be seeing a lot of blue in the coming months.
Don’t you love the V block! I do.
Since I discovered blogland last year (whilst enduring the 11month job from hell), I have seen several beautiful rugs crocheted from granny squares. I especially love Molly Chicken’s effort and her description of sewing in all the ends is one of those anecdotes I will never forget because I sooooo know what she’s talking about – 1 day to quilt it, a week’s worth of evenings to finish off all the wretched loose threads on the back.
This week – with my need for all that is quiet, repetitive, productive and pretty – seemed a good time to start my granny rug. Auntie C lent me a wonderfully encyclopaedic book on crochet stitches and motifs and that seemed like a good place to start – especially given my earlier inability to purchase a crochet book! – so I bought myself a crochet hook and four balls of wool, poison green, light pink, light orange and red (and Molly Chicken is right – granny rugs are greedy guzzlers of wool) and set off to my dear old Nanny and Grandad’s on Thursday for a beginner’s lesson in crochet.
It was a busy day at chez Nanny’s. The man from Home Assist was installing handles to the sides of exterior doors for balance, a non-slip surface on the shower floor, and best of all – delivering custom designed wooden platforms for Nanny and Grandad’s sofa and armchairs to sit on so they are a better height for getting up and down. Then the man arrived with Nanny’s new walker – so there was much reminiscing about growing up in Windsor and which football team they followed and then! – a true Brisbane moment – it was established that the walker man’s father and Grandad both started in the GPO (post office) as 14 year old telegraph boys. Who’d have known!
Nevertheless, we fitted in enough time for crochet. Nanny vows she is the last person who should be teaching me. My other grandmother – Nanny Dougall, who died when I was 11, was the queen of crochet and she and the nuns from the convent in Leeton (NSW) taught Nanny C. Nanny C found some books in the wardrobe that had once belonged to Nanny D and gave them to me which is lovely. They are of the dearest little baby clothes – I’ll have to wait until Little A has children.
Looking at the pictures made me feel quite sad because I recognised several of the little pieces – Nanny D had obviously crocheted them for my sister and I, and then we had used them for dolly clothes, and I confess, not taken very good care of them. On top of that, we had a terrible moth plague a few years ago and I know that many little pieces – including some lovely cardigans knitted by Nanny C for Little A – were chomped into pieces. Martha Stewart once wrote in response to a reader that only poor housekeepers have their clothes eaten by moths – I’ve never felt as kindly about her since – but there’s possibly an element of truth in it. Until now, I have been a bit hit and miss with my cleaning and storage of woollens. Having Nanny D’s patterns with their handwritten notes and measurements has inspired me to do better.
Anyway, crochet. We more or less followed the pattern in Auntie C’s book – Nanny added a few more slip stitches to the end of each round because she says it looks neater – so I will too – and in no time, we had two little squares. Granny squares may indeed be greedy guzzlers of wool, but by golly, they sure make up quick!
The other hint Nanny passed on was not to leave too long ends – she said it was wasteful and I would regret all those inches when I came to the end of a ball of wool. Well, as always, she was right! Look at this – only two more trebles and a few slip stitches and I would have finished block 10 last night. Instead, all of my blocks have looooong tails to sew in and I’ve run out of poison green!
I was thinking that I would limit the colours of my rug to the green, pink and orange for the blocks, knitted / crocheted (I haven’t read how to do this bit yet) together with red. But having just looked at Molly Chicken’s rug again – its rainbow of colours is radiantly beautiful. Maybe I will rethink my colours – they are looking a little too plain.
But first I need some more wool.
p.s. my crochet hook slipped out of my square before I left Nanny and Grandad’s on Thursday afternoon – I was soooo disappointed when I went to crochet whilst Little A had her piano lesson. So, I rang J at work and asked if he could slip down to the haberdashery store and buy me another one before he went out to a work dinner that night. Do you know, he came home before the dinner just to drop it off the hook, because he knew I would want to keep crocheting after Nanny taught me the basics. What a nice man – it’s no wonder I greatly esteem him :)
With Valentine’s, J’s birthday, and Grandad’s birthday all happening in the space of five days, there have been lots of lovely books wrapped and given.
Valentine’s Day was so nice this year. J utterly surprised me with this …
… with the most romantic inscription he has ever written! J said he looked through all the quilting books on offer one lunch hour and chose this one because it is so unlike anything else I have. He’s right! It is really beautiful with a very detailed and fascinating history of textiles and quilting in the Provence followed by the patterns for several reproduction quilts. They are all whole cloth quilts but the quilting is exquisite – and the book has all the templates for it. Highly recommended.
Dear Little A gave me a chicken cookbook from the Donna Hay series – she is obviously determined that I shall own every book Donna Hay writes! It is very tasty and we used one of the recipes for the belated Valentine’s dinner we had with friends on Friday night.
Little A gave J this …
We are huge Tim Burton fans and adore this film but didn’t realise there was a book version – and it’s illustrated and written in verse by Tim Burton himself. We were very excited to find it at our local – and superb – bookshop, Riverbend, whilst having afternoon tea last week.
In case you’re curious, I made Little A a huge batch of dark Lindt coated dried strawberries which she ate for breakfast on Valentine’s morning. I don’t know how she wasn’t sick! And I gave J – I am cringing a little as I write this – a really super new pillow! It is one of those latex mould-to-your-neck-and-head-pillows – and he hated his pillow and was waking up with a sore neck and headache. It was terribly thoughtful of me, really!, albeit not very romantic!
Then for J’s birthday, Little A and I gave him this …
My oh my! What amazing photography and what a man! J loves photography – it is his lovely camera I clumsily use for all my photos – and we are building him quite a library of books. I have to confess, it is sheer pleasure – I can pore over these books for as many hours as he. I was particularly impressed in this one by Capa’s determination to show the wars of the mid 20th century through the faces of the people they were affecting. So very different to the traditional approach of clamouring for the “large” picture and the – I don’t know quite what word to use – but the “majesty” of war in all its destruction and terror.
And, this is a guilty pleasure just for me …
I bought it sooooo cheaply on ebay – and it arrived so quickly! It has accompanied me around the house each day and has lived each night under my bed since its arrival. Oooooh! I can study the blocks and their construction over and over again and never tire of them. I do think that this is my favourite genreof patchwork – an assembly of traditional blocks. I’ve already put it to good use.
