Use Your Eyes made it home – finally

My quilt “Use Your Eyes” that was part of the Text on Textiles Exhibit at International Quilt Festival in 2011 and 2012 arrived home recently. While it was away we finally got properly moved into the house in Spain. Orginally the quilt was supposed to be away for 3 years, but unfortunately

Though we planned to travel the exhibit the three years following its premiere and had many discussions with possible exhibition opportunities, arrangements were not successfully made.

So when the email came to say that the quilt was to be shipped home early I decided to have it shipped to Spain to join my other quilts rather than to my flat in Germany from where it would at some point have to be transported on to Spain.

This is the sad story as reported by DH&CP on his facebook page:

5th March

The Germans refer to the “Servicewüste Deutschland”, meaning the lack of customer orientation in many German companies.

Let me tell you, delivery companies in Spain can teach the average disinterested company in Germany a lot.

One of Ruth’s quilts which had been on exhibition in Texas has just been returned. Fed-Ex sent us an e-mail saying they couldn’t deliver to our house because the address was wrong. This is excuse number one for delivery companies that can’t be bothered to come to Bixquert, where we live. They don’t bother coming, they just set the delivery status to “wrong address” and ask us to collect the package. In the case of Fed-Ex, they don’t have an office in Xàtiva, and the nearest office of a partner company is in Ribarroja – over 80 km away, near Valencia airport.

We wrote back saying that was too far and they could either deliver to our house, or to the Fed-Ex office in Frankfurt, as Ruth is in Germany at the moment. Suddenly they can find our address in Spain and have said they prefer to deliver there. I am interested to see what happens next…

6th March

hahaha – speedy delivery? We asked them when they thought they would deliver, so that I could be in. They didn’t know, so of course they came when I was getting my car serviced today.

We got a mail telling us that there were no house numbers and that I hadn’t answered my mobile when they called. There is a ruddy great number outside our gate (although not all houses have numbers, it is true), and there were no missed calls on my mobile…

So now we have given them the address of a pizzeria (we know the owner) in the next village to deliver to. If they can’t find that, I don’t know what we will do next…

8th March

yay! The quilt has just been delivered to the pizzeria

FedEx also called the ladies at IQF to say there was a problem delivering. They were able to extend the amount of time/tries before it got returned to them. All a bit disheartening, not sure I will be so keen to ship stuff off to exhibitions in the future, if this is par for the course. But the good news is that the quilt is safely home from its travels in the US.

I’m currently in Spain for Easter, so I am able to see for myself that it is back safe and sound.

Five regrets of the dying

Maybe some of you have already stumbled across this article. It has been syndicated on a number of websites. I ran across it this week on the Guardian website. Here’s the link to the original on Bronnie Ware’s blog Inspiration and Chai.

If those are the five most commonly expressed regrets by the terminally ill, then they should give us all food for thought. I’ve been feeling a bit displaced and out of sorts the last few weeks. Reading about this brought me up short. I don’t want to find that I haven’t made the most of my life when the time comes for me to shuffle off this mortal coil.

Black and white #2 is hung

The quilt actually got hung twice. First of all I made the sleeve and sewed it to the back and the same evening DH&CP cut a baton to size and banged some nails in the wall. That was Wednesday evening. On Thursday I realised that I hadn’t made a label for the back. So Thursday evening I made a label and attached it to the back. This is always a rather fraught operation, because I print the details onto PFD cotton ironed onto freezer paper and then feed into my Epson Stylus printer. If I am lucky it will print first time. Thursday was not my lucky day and the printer chewed up the first piece I tried to print on. Unfortunately the printer is not the most user friendly device when it comes to clearing paper jams.

The second attempt on a new piece of freezer paper was a success, but as I was pressing under the seam allowances I realised that I had put the date as 2012. DH&CP had made an obtuse remark about 2012, which did not register with me when I was still at the printing on paper stage. At this point I decided that the starting date for the quilt was good enough and not the completion date. I wasn’t about to go through the whole edit and pdf and fight the printer process again.

Here are a couple of photos of both black and white quilts hung together over the guest beds.

Mister Finch

I was wandering around the web last night – as you do – when I discovered Mister Finch. This is what he says about himself:

My name is Finch – it’s actually my surname… everyone calls me it and I like it.
I live in Leeds in Yorkshire, not too far from the beautiful Yorkshire Dales.
I actually have no formal training in anything to do with sewing or my textile based work. I’ve learnt everything myself.
I’ve tried many areas creatively over the years and now I find myself sewing which I adore.
I’ve called my business Mister Finch so its clear from the start that I’m a man and one that sews.

He sews the most beautiful evocative soft textile sculptures I’ve seen. They remind me of the illustrations in children’s storybooks of yesterday. Here’s a taster:

Forest Moths Copyright All rights reserved by ohmisterfinch

Forest Moths Copyright All rights reserved by ohmisterfinch

You can see more on his blog and on flickr. If that has whetted your appetite he has an etsy shop too.

And he has cats, which makes him even more agreeable in my eyes.

Quilt almost finished

I did manage to almost finish the quilt I was working on – the sister quilt to “Black and White and Red all over”. I finished all the quilting and attached the binding. It was too late and I didn’t have the energy to make and attach a hanging sleeve. I left DH with instructions to take some photos to put up on my blog.

The new design wall was pressed into service.
Quilt on design wall

It was quite hard to come up with a quilting design for the centre area of hexagons composed of triangles. I played with circles, but it was difficult to be accurate and then it started to look a mess. So I went with straight line quilting in the end. So it seemed to be the natural conclusion to continue with lines onto the borders, but boy was that a lot of sewing that had to be done.

Black and White #2

Here is a detail of the centre panel, which is a one-block wonder section using some fabric I bought a good few years ago in Amsterdam that is a print like a comic book.
Comic book one-block wonder

I like the fact that the centre panel fits well to my philosophy that a quilt should allow the viewer to find details to surprise and delight on closer inspection. It’s only close up that you start to see parts of the face of the girl in the comic print.

So on my next visit all I have left to do is attach a hanging sleeve and Black and White #2 can be hung up over the second guest bed.

One project finished

Of the seemingly many projects that got started this holiday season, here is one that has been completed. We really did manage to transform a car boot full of bits and pieces into a new design wall for me. It was a bit of a flying-by-the-seat-of-your-pants project. DH was ready to abandon it at one stage and admit defeat. But we persevered and here is the finished product – “drum roll” …
Design wall completed
It got finished just in time to take up residence in the garage until my next visit long enough to contemplate starting a new quilting project. I am just taking a break to post this from a mad quilting session in an attempt to complete the quilt project I started this holidays. The end is in sight, but I’m not sure I have the stamina to get it completed. At least if I don’t there will be so little left to finish that I should be able to get it done in one of my shorter sojourns here.

Story of a Design Wall

In my old studio I had a moderation board on castors that I used as a design wall. Apart from the fact that the castors got mounted incorrectly, so that the brakes were both on the same side of the board and it never could be made to stay in one place of its own accord, it served me well. It came with us to Spain, but unfortunately it was damaged in the move. At the time we didn’t give it much thought, but got rid of it. It took up a lot of space in the room and so it went. We didn’t really consider what would replace it. Ideas came and went, but the design wall did not materialise.

As I mentioned in my last post. I am currently working on a new quilt and am missing my design wall. Even a battered one would be better than none at all. I started off with a design table:
Design Table
The problem with a table is that you can’t get far enough away to see the big picture. Enter the design steps:
DesignSteps
That was better, but the design table is also my cutting table and I needed the space for cutting. So I improvised by clamping my Clover Design Layout Sheet to the book cases in the office side of our combined office / studio:
DesignSheet
It’s more like a design curtain than a design wall and I had to pin the piece to the cloth as it didn’t want to stick, but it’s a definite improvement. However my improvisation spurred DH in action. Yesterday we went to one of the larger DIY stores nearby and came back with this:
DesignWallComponents
The component pieces for what is to be my new design wall. Time will tell!

My iron just got an on/off switch

One thing that really bugs me when I’m sewing – which I am doing right now – is that irons don’t come with on/off switches. I hate having to constantly plug in and unplug the iron every time I want to press a seam. It is always such a fight to get the plug into or out of the socket.

Well as of yesterday my iron just acquired an on/off switch. I plug my iron into a socket on the end of my ironing board. The board comes with a cable that gets plugged into the socket in the wall. Yesterday while I was getting some other stuff in our local Hiper Asia – an amazing shop that sells all kinds of useful stuff from cleaning products to all sizes of plastic container – DH picked up this socket with a switch. It is now installed at the end of my ironing board:
On/off switch
So now I only have to flip a switch :-)

I’ve finally found time to inaugurate my studio in Spain. I’m here over Christmas and the New Year and am making a companion quilt to the one already installed over one of the beds in the guest bedroom. It is so nice to be doing some art quilting again.

Grids and Michelle Obama’s dress

This week a number of things happened. On 6th November Barack Obama was re-elected as President of the United States. On 8th November my used copy of The Uncommon Quilter by Jeanne Wiliamson arrived in the post. Two seemingly unrelated events. There is a connection though. I have been looking for something to keep me creatively occupied here in my flat in Kronberg and bought the book hoping for some inspiration. I had decided that if I can’t sew quilts here, then maybe I could create some journal quilts from paper and other things I have access to here. As the “mother” of journal quilts I hoped her book would give me some ideas.

I like grids in all their variations. I think it is one of the things that attracts me to patchwork and quilting, because traditionally quilts are based mostly on grids. So I have chosen to make my journal based on the theme of grids. Barack Obama’s “Four more years” tweet has become the most retweeted tweet ever. The photo included in the tweet made it onto the cover of the Economist this week:

The first thing that caught my eye was the grid pattern on Michelle Obama’s dress. So I decided to use that grid for my first paper journal quilt. I used my aquarelle coloured pencils and my artist’s coloured pencils to make this grid:

I’ve also started a collection of papers and other bits and pieces that I think may have a use some time in one of my quilts. Let’s see where this idea takes me.

As for the book, I think I would have been a little disappointed if I had paid the full price for it. Most of the book is taken up with step-by-step illustrated instructions on how to make the same journal quilts as Jeanne herself made. I don’t really feel that journal quilts are the type of quilt that someone else really wants to make again for themselves. Having said that, there are enough ideas in the book that I think it was worth buying second hand. That amount of money was well invested.

Another knitting project finished

I suppose there are some advantages to being off sick with bronchitis and confined to my flat, apart from trips to various doctors. I have now finished my summer top in time for winter. I like the results. I shall have to take it to Spain with me on my next trip. Perhaps I will get to wear it there sooner than here in Germany.

I had little success taking photos of me wearing it, so there is only one to give a rough impression. The two taken of the top lying on the chair probably give a better impression of the garment.


I learnt a few new techniques whilst knitting this top:

  • Crochet provisional cast on, which I prefer to other provisional cast on techniques
  • Sewn cast off – used here at the bottom of the ribbed waist
  • Applied I-cord cast off – the neckline finish

I don’t know what I would have done before the days of the internet. It’s so easy these days to pick up new techniques. I found some excellent videos on YouTube.

Here’s one for the crochet provisional cast on by Cotton & Cloud:

The sewn bind off from knitpurlhunter:

She also has one for the crochet provisional cast on with some good tips at the end of the video.

And finally a video for the I-cord bind off from Knitting tips from Judy:

Judy shows what to do at the end of the cast off too. This was often missed out on a lot of sites and videos I looked at.