Lobster Designs

The Crazy Women project is finally over, all except the card and accompanying note which will go with it to the charity it's going to. I picked Forward UK because I wanted to focus on something connected to female sexuality, a theme we all explored in this project. They do fantastic work in an area many people do not want to think about. It was challenging and inspiring to work on this project, and I am honoured to have worked with the women of the LJ Birthday Block swap group who contributed, as well as my blog readers and friends who helped with advice and even an impromptu photo shoot in a nearby park.

( Photos! )

I'm now working on the Crazy Women wall hanging, and have done a certain amount of embroidery and beading. Any suggestions as to where I take it from here? And does the beaded gold spiral look well-balanced?

( Pictures, including a photo of the Crazy Women quilt outdoors in the sunlight )

I am finally making progress again with the sewing, although at a slow and stately pace. Yesterday I finished the quilting for the Crazy Women quilt, and hope to get it bound this week. I am also considering what to do with the matching cushion that will go with the quilt when it's raffled off, and the wall hanging which will go to the charity for their own use.

( Photos, a bit on the not-safe-for-work side in a very stylised way )

I ran a bit late with the BJP piece for March, and only finished it the other week. At least I got April done straight afterwards, and I may try to get May done at the start of the month. With any luck I'll be moving flat this summer, so I'm trying to get ahead on the craft stuff.

( Read more... )

I have at long last found a good fabric for the owl wholecloth. It's a lovely warm yellow, lighter than the marigold yellow on the owl fabric so that it won't be overwhelming, but an excellent colour match. You can see it in the photo below sitting on top of the quilt, with random eyebrow designs done to test out threads. I will order it now, but I have to finish quilting the turquoise/green baby quilt first, quilt the Crazy Women quilt, which will be my first foray into using thicker thread (perle #8, with correspondingly bigger stitches), and at the least get started on quilting the seashell quilt. This will give me a chance to mull over threads and binding choices. I could use the stronger yellow/orange batik fabric which I've put in the photo below the owl fabric, or I could pick out an orange or pink from the quilt, or else I could use this fabric from the same range, which might be a bit dark, hard to tell. I'm including a photo of a quilt the manufacturer has put together with lots of fabrics from the same range. The two fabrics in question aren't right next to each other, and it's a small photo, but you can at least see them near each other. Is flannel a practical fabric to use for binding? Alternatively, and having now tested out more of my fabrics near the combination, something like this would make a lovely binding (also shown below).

As for thread, the photo shows a perle #8 in a medium-deep pink on the right, and two strands of 40 wt quilting cotton in a darker fuchsia on the left. The right hand thread is one I could get in a perle #12, whereas the left hand thread isn't, it's just the only thread of any sort I have in that colour, and the nearest equivalent would be this. For the first one, you can get slightly different colours in the same range: the one I have right now is col. 28, and I am finding it hard to tell whether there's one which is basically just a slightly darker verion of the same pink. At the moment, I think the lighter thread looks better of the two samples, but then it has a stronger effect because it's in a thicker thread, and I was thinking of using perle #12 for this one. That said, it shows up so strongly as #8 that it should still show up pretty well as #12, and it would interfere with the owl fabric on the back of the quilt less. I think I will wait and see how the Crazy Women quilt turns out, and by that time I will know whether I want to do an entire wholecloth in perle #8 (I suspect not). It'll also give me a chance to see whether I have visual trouble working with the deeper pink/red threads.

( Photo time! )

I am planning three posts for today or soon, so watch this space.

You know how I'm participating in the 2011 Bead Journal Project? The rules are that you make one piece per month, sticking to the same shape and size (5" square for me this year), and in theory you are in some way journalling your feelings about the month, though I think many of us just go for whatever colours and patterns we're drawn to at the time. I'm currently waiting for supplies to turn up to make my March piece. Anyway, I woke up with the idea of making the 2012 BJP an interpretation of Bartok's opera Duke Bluebeard's Castle. Go and read about it here, and if you're so inclined, prowl about on Amazon.com and listen to extracts, say this recording. I absolutely adored this opera throughout my adolescence, it's the most amazingly evocative work, dark and beautiful and bright and cruel.

There are seven rooms, each with a different meaning and assigned a different colour of light. ( Read more... )

I have a feeling that I have enough quilts planned that I am not quite sure what I should make when, so here's an attempt to organise it.

( Because this really is not that exciting a post )

When I set up my Dreamwidth account, I did so because some people outside LiveJournal were having difficulty accessing my LiveJournal quilting blog. Unfortunately, I've now found that not everyone can access the DW version, and others just find it more of a hassle. I had originally disabled commenting in the LJ cross-post so that I didn't have to deal with two sets of discussions on the same topic, but I've now realised that it didn't really solve the problem, plus it's not as if this is a busy blog anyway.

So commenting on elettariaquilts is back up! Apologies for any inconvenience caused in the meantime. I'll be checking both posts for comments, don't worry. I can't apply this retrospectively, so if you've seen a older post you want to discuss but you can't comment on it, just let me know and I'll be happy to chat about it elsewhere.

And here it is in all its glory, the Bead Journal Project piece for last month. It was quite a hard month and I wasn't in the mood for complex beading, so I picked a soothing green and went for simple straight lines. They took longer than expected, of course, and not all of my bugle beading lines turned out dead straight, but the overall effect is still pretty and as usual, I learnt something from it (mainly how to get my bugle beading lines straighter!). I'll try to start the March one soon, the fabric I'm planning for it should be here any day now, as I hate doing this near the end of the month and feeling pressured by the deadline.

Below the cut: baby Noah with his quiltlet. As the proud uncle put it, he hasn't quite learned how to stay still for the camera yet! He's six weeks old. They really are the best photos, quilts with babies on them.

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I made an entire quilt today! Well, it's a basic thing with a piece of flannel for each side and then simply tied, and I confess that I embroidered the recipient's name on it a couple of days ago, but hey, it's still quilty. It was great fun, and I now plan to buy a couple more fabrics from the same owl range and put them aside for future baby quiltlets.


( One more photo and some burbling )

Now that I'm feeling a bit more confident about beading, it's time to get back to peering thoughtfully at Dr F's wallhanging-to-be. I am still fairly stuck but at least I've started sketching. While the designs are very much in the early stages, I thought I may as well ask my lovely readers for ideas now. I have been thinking of doing a border design all the way down the left and in the top half of the right borders, and then continuing the curved lines into the border in the bottom right. I have lots of beads available as well as embroidery threads, a couple of colours of 3mm organza ribbon, cotton thong and satin cord, and I was thinking of using those along the curved seam lines, though I may not.

( Read more... )

I don't generally do New Year's Resolutions, but this year I was inspired by Mathematical Doodling and have just bought a shiny new diary. The plan is to try to doodle every day, which I know will seem laughably forced to some, but I've never been an improviser and it's high time I started!

( Stitchy stuff )

Thread-basting a quilt: ignore the last couple of inches when doing the herringbone basting, then go around and baste all the way around the edge, spacing the stitches more closely than usual. Or rather, this is what I wished I'd done when basting the current quilt!

Ergonomics: the Cotton Patch (and other places) have started stocking the Creative Comfort range of hand supports. They look most intriguing, but not terribly cheap, and no one is quite sure which would be the best for using while hand-quilting, especially with my RSI, tendinitis and ME taken into consideration. After spending a while looking at ordinary fingerless gloves and the like, I finally realised that the cheapest and easiest solution is to take a pair of scissors to an old sock. I now have a pale blue sock which I never really liked on my right hand, with the toe cut off (that's the elbow end) and a hole for my thumb. I've slathered red Tiger Balm underneath, though I managed to get a bit of that on the top of the sock - sorry, wrist warmer - when rolling it onto my arm. It's a bit early to tell how comfortable this will be, but it's allowing me to get Tiger Balm onto my forearm, wrist, and part of my hand, without wrecking my clothes or risking getting it in my eyes, and my arm is feeling less painful. I may be better off getting something with a proper bit that goes around the base of the thumb, though, as the thumb hole isn't wildly comfortable and I may want to put Tiger Balm around its base (or diclofenac gel, come to that). These, say. Do you think that one size fits all will be OK on small hands? I'm only 4'11 (150cm). And should I go for something that has little bits around the base of all my fingers as well as my thumb? The fingers on my right hand are now a bit cold, but I don't know whether that's from the Tiger Balm feeling cold or because I'm restricting my circulation in some way that I shouldn't.

For anyone who missed the announcements in elettaria and quilting, I won first prize for the Hoffman challenge. Photos here and here.

Not long ago, I fell in love with Welsh quilting. While America is undoubtedly the home of an incredible variety of patchwork blocks, the quilting, as in the stage when you go through all three layers with thread (let's call the overall process Quilting to distinguish them), has always left me cold. Modern free-motion quilters such as Leah Day are doing fantastic things, but the traditional quilting patterns are rather limited, sometimes twee, and designs such as the omnipresent feathers just don't do it for me.

I discovered Welsh quilting through a stunning red wholecloth quilt in one of Barbara Chainey's books, and was moved to buy Making Welsh Quilts. It's a fantastic book, containing a thorough discussion of Welsh quilting, photo gallery, projects, and a particularly useful bit at the back which assigns a page to each common motif, such as paisleys, hearts, spirals, leaves, gives a host of examples of how to vary them, and good clear instructions on pattern drafting. I've also found an excellent blog about Welsh quilting, Welsh Quilts, and you can see many beautifully photographed examples intelligently discussed there. The patterns in Welsh quilting really speak to me, being at once classic yet fresh and modern as well. The designs are graceful and elegant, with great scope for creativity yet easy to put together once you know the basic principles.

My second cousin is due to have a baby in about a month, and naturally it took me mere seconds to offer her a baby quilt when I heard the news. ( Plans for my first Welsh quilt )