Well there hasn’t been much progress on the quilting front. I finished up all the basting on my quilt sandwich on Saturday and put it in the hand quilting ring. This was a big struggle and should have had alarm bells ringing in my head. But then I’ve not done much hand quilting as yet. The first attempts were hopeless and it didn’t turn out as I’d envisaged. The sandwich is just too thick and dense with the quilt top being made up of double thickness of material and the iron-on interfacing. I hadn’t added that into the equation.

So I got a bit discouraged and downed tools. Since then I’ve not touched it. Not entirely because I have to come up with Plan B - that was a no-brainer. It will have to be back to machine quilting. That’s ok, I’m fine with that and already have a list of advantages to Plan B that I had been avoiding as problems with Plan A. So good has come from the experience and I am that bit wiser. The rest of the weekend was then taken up with Christmas preparations and the evenings have flown past with odd jobs taking up the time. Maybe I’ll get to make a start tonight. We’ll see.

The knitting is progressing though. But the photographer still hasn’t taken any piccies, so you’ll have to wait and see

Had a pretty hard week at work so I didn’t do any quilting in the evenings. Did start some knitting though. Last weekend I discovered a new-to-me wool shop in the next town to us. Came out with some lovely lilac wool to knit a sleeveless pullover. I did make a start on that. Will have to get the photographer to take some photos of that too. He tends to just think quilts

Yesterday the weather was awful - rain most of the day - so we continued the big sort out in the cellar cupboards. But I did find some time in the afternoon to start tacking the quilt sandwich together. There is already so much machine sewing on the quilt top that I decided to be brave and hand quilt the sandwich. Otherwise I felt it would have too much machining on it. Hand quilting is also a good thing to keep warm under in the winter evenings!

So here’s some photos of me doing the tacking:

As you can see I have added some gauzey bits to emphasize the underlying colour burst. They will be attached with the hand quilting.

I’ve also bought some more bugle beads, which will also end up on the quilt.

This afternoon apart from assisting at the photographing of Compass Rose I have been having a major sort out in the sewing room cupboards. As the slide scanning is finished and the thousands of slides have made their way into the dustbin (gulp) there were 2 empty shelves in the cellar cupboards.

This prompted me to empty both cupboards in the sewing room onto the floor. I then disposed of some things - like the rejected photos that never made it into the photo albums, and move other things (Christmas decorations and Easter decorations) into the freed up space in the cellar cupboards. I also shifted some less used items (odd balls of knitting wool, tailoring stuff etc.) into the cellar too. This enabled me to rearrange my fabric stash onto 2 shelves and clear up the top of one of the cupboards which had become an overflow. So I now have two cupboard tops as work surfaces - both have cutting mats.

I also rearranged my dyeing supplies into the new storage boxes I bought a couple of weekends ago. Unfortunately they still have to live in the hallway in the cellar but it looks a bit neater now. I still have a bit more sorting to do in the sewing room but I’d had enough for one day.

Wonder how long this neatness will last?

No progress made on the WIP quilt Although I did dye the backing material on Friday evening. Forgot to calculate the hanging sleeve into the yardage again, grrrr!

We finally took some decent photos of the finished Compass Rose quilt. I have just uploaded them into the gallery and commented them. Go take a look!

I have all my nails left and I’ve finished cutting chunks out of my quilt. Here’s a couple of photos to give you an idea as to what it is that I’m doing:

The squares were easy to do as I explained in my last posting. There wasn’t a lot of choice as to where they went. The circles were trickier because I wanted them in a particular orientation. So I had to tack them in place first before I could turn the quilt top over to fix them for sewing with the iron-on interfacing.

Last night the circles all got their satin stitch edging. Tonight I’m playing with ideas for the next stage.

I worked most evenings last week for at least an hour on sewing down the edges of the weaving on my latest quilt. I finally finished yesterday afternoon. It must have been at least 10 hours work, not to mention the metres of sewing thread that went into it.

Today I cut the first shape out and reinserted it. The piece is held temporarily in place with iron on interfacing of the thinnest sort. The edges are joined together again with satin stitch on the machine. More metres of thread! I ran out of the right colour thread late this afternoon, so that stopped play for the time being.

The nail biting moment is past now though. I’ve made the first cut and seen that the idea is working.

Recently I wrote about where I go, to get inspiration for my quilts. One of the things I mentioned was using the Google image search. Another thing I use images from the internet for is to get ideas for colour schemes. This is what I then do with them.

For example I chose four pictures - a beech wood in spring with a bluebell carpet, a beach sunset, a lavender field and a red admiral butterfly sitting on a bright yellow/orange flower. I use a program called OmniGraffle (it’s for Apple computers) to pick out the colours using the equivalent of the eye dropper tool. I then create a set of little squares each with a colour chosen from the picture.

It’s a really interesting experience as the graphics program also shows the value of the colour chosen. You can learn a lot about how much our impression of a colour is influenced by the colours that surround it. Sometimes a colour I expected to be light turned out much darker then expected when viewed in isolation. It also taught me that you can get some very interesting colour schemes with quite muted colours, so long as there is something in there which acts as an accent. The proportion of a colour in the final image is important. When I look at my colour palettes where all the squares are the same size and therefore the proportion of each colour the same - some of them are not as inspiring as the original picture.

You can have quite a lot of fun and some real surprises. I shall continue to play around like this. It’s a good learning experience.