One less UFO

Organizing one's sewing supplies is part of packing up house for a move. Completing unfinished sewing projects is part of organizing one's sewing supplies. Ergo, completing unfinished sewing projects is part of packing up house for a move. Ergo, spending an entire day or evening sewing is as necessary to the process as cleaning out cupboards, boxing books, etc etc.

Behold: "Silly Season" has moved from the list of Patchworks in Process to Completed Quilt Tops.



This joker started as an exercise in free piecing for Lazy Gal's winter class. I made serious progress on it in the lead up to Christmas, then I had visitors and began heavy travel and Silly Season languished in that black hole otherwise known as my UFO box. The words were supposed to be a border around a windsurfing Santa and two reindeer. However, when I finished the letters I loved them so much and couldn't bear to pair my beautiful letters with my crappy applique (Tonya: Can you hold a free piece applique class?!). So the letters went into a wall hanging of their own. Some people may find the simplicity boring, but it suits my aesthetic.

So why 'tis the season to be silly? In Australia the silly season includes the weeks leading up to Christmas and the month after. Lots of parties and barbeques, awesome beach weather, everyone goes on vacation so the office is quiet. Hence the play on the old saying and summery colors for my "winter" quilt.

Baby Boom

Five couples we know are having babies and all are due in August or September. Only one couple, a friend of my husband's from high school and his wife, have revealed the sex of their baby: Girl. I've finished the blocks for their baby quilt, which I am calling "Cotton Candy".



I should call this quilt "Flipped Seams" because there are about a million of them in this top. It needs a border, but I'm waiting until I get back to the States in a month to work it out. Fabric is so much cheaper there.

The other top I started this weekend is a baby quilt for my friends Allison and Ruben. Allison, Ruben, and I were graduate students together. Allison was a bridesmaid in our wedding and a year later we attended Allison and Ruben's wedding in France. I'm calling this quilt "Ruby Tuesday", and not because I like the restaurant or anything...I don't really know why I decided on this name...



The owl print is Japanese fabric I found in Hawaii in November. I love the owls!

What have I been doing with myself lately?

2008 has been a banner year for travel. January took me to Texas, London, India, and Thailand. February I found myself in Georgia. In April I went to Amsterdam and Paris. In late May and early June I traveled to Indianapolis, Washington DC, and back to Texas. Next month I will be going to Adelaide for a mini-break, and in August I move back to the USA. Apart from travel, the past 5 months have been devoted to job hunting/applying/interviewing/negotiating. It was a dry spell for fabric crafts at my house.

It hasn't really registered yet that I'm leaving Australia, but I'll have plenty of time to ponder it over as I start packing for the international move. Packing is the pits.

Here are a few pictures from the April Amsterdam-Paris trip.






Paris is my favorite city in the world. I could visit every year. On this trip this is as close as I got to the Eiffel Tower. I devoted my time to visiting some of the less-famous churches and museums, spent whole afternoons people watching in parks, and did a little shoe shopping.

I finished something!

"Fugly Granny Quilt"
2008

This quilt had another name, but I've decided to go with what I have colloquially referred to it as since I started it 18 months ago. I have a love/hate relationship with this thing. I hate the colors, but I'm so chuffed that I hand pieced it. The top was made with scraps my mom gave me. It's not very big -- only 48" by 48". I thought about putting a border on it, but I am going to use this top to have a first go at hand quilting, and I didn't want anything too large or I might never finish. I'm not sure how the hand quilting is going to work out because the top has a bit of puffiness and billowing going on in places. Some of my templates were not exact, but I'm ok with it.

My time for piecing is limited over the next 2 weeks. I have to travel to the US again for work, and have much preparation that I must do.

I spent 5 weeks and change traveling last month. I went back to the USA for 2 weeks, London for 1 week, India for 1 week, and Thailand for 1 week. I found the colors of the Indian women's clothing so beautiful. I could spend hours looking through bangle and sari stalls.

Back in Business

I'm so mad at myself for not getting pictures of the FOUR quilt tops my mom and I completed while I was home for Christmas.

Am home and just now getting settled back in after 5 weeks of travel.

Still gathering thoughts...

Christmas cards

Last year's Christmas cards

There is a Japanese bookstore I like that has a wide selection of origami papers. My sweet husband was kind enough to help me cut the paper into tiny diamonds, and then I glued each diamond on the cards in a lone star pattern. He made a card for his parents and one for my grandparents and then spent the rest of the afternoon lying on the couch and watching the cricket through his eyelids.

This year I stitched some tiny disappearing nine patch blocks. I haven't figured out how I'll mount them to the card yet, but I'll post a picture when I finish them.


Fun with paper


Cheering on the Green and Gold to victory

Riflemind is not recommended

Would I have gone to see this play had it not been directed by Philip Seymour Hoffman and if the lead was not played by Hugo Weaving? Probably not. The story is about a 40-something rocker who has been retired from the game for some years and is contemplating a reunion tour with his former band. Hugo Weaving's performance was great, as was Jeremy Sims as Sam. But the dialog was poke-your-eyes-out tedious to follow. A friend that went with us to the theater described it as sharks circling. The dialog never got to the point. And the ending was rather abrupt, leaving way too much unresolved and up in the air.

Santa's Sleighs

Today I pieced the boards for my windsurfing Santa wallhanging. I am creating a free-pieced quilt for Lazy Gal's Christmas/Winter group blog. Christmas means something different to me now that I celebrate it in the summer. I'm using a glass Christmas ornament as my inspiration, but I don't have a set agenda. I had a half meter of the blue fabric that I felt made a nice ocean background and I've created three boards for Santa and two of his reindeer using scraps from other projects. The photos don't do the colors justice, and they are much more vibrant than depicted here. I need to work on my photography skills.

Hawaii and my sister's wedding were lovely. It was my first time to Hawaii and Maui was much drier than I expected it to be. I had envisioned something greener and jungle-y along the lines of Moorea, which I went to five years ago. But it was nice to get away and spend time with my family and to meet my sister's new in-laws (New brother-in-law is the dude with the camera in the pic below). My parents came to Sydney after the wedding and spent a week with us. They left yesterday and now it's 2 1/2 weeks until my dear friend from San Francisco comes to stay with us, and four weeks until we go on our round-the-world trip. So much to do between now and then, and so little time to do it.

Chinese New Year

I love the colors from these pictures of the Chinese New Year parade we went to in 2006 and think about these pictures often when I contemplate new quilt projects. I am pretty knackered with getting ready for my trip and I have to keep my flat cleaned up because I have company coming the day I get back from Hawaii so I doubt I will have time to sew this weekend. But I want to post something for the week and have brought my Chinese New Year pictures out of the archives. Maybe the colors will inspire you too.

Not the usual flavor

This is 3/4 of Flying East of Denver, hand pieced. My mom gave me the fabrics used in the quilt. She gave me a whole suitcase of scraps because she doesn't do much quilting anymore. The colors are not my favorite and for a while, before I came up with a proper name, I just referred to it as "the fugly quilt". I finally came up with a name for the quilt on a flight from Salt Lake City to Dallas. I had a stop in Denver. As we ascended after take off I watched the farmland below and noticed the square and rectangular plots of earth were similar in color to the golds, greens, browns and purples used in the quilt. Voila, the quilt had a name.

The more I sew on it the more it grows on me. Maybe because I find hand piecing so satisfying. There are days I look at it and find it really ugly, and there are days it's doesn't seem so bad. But the whole point of this top was to learn and practice hand piecing, and I didn't want to use my best or favorite fabrics in an experiment with technique. It's a bonus that the quilt is a scrap quilt. Working with what you've got and putting it together by hand seems like the essence of the craft.

I've discovered I love hand piecing. I love how portable it is. Sometimes I don't feel like hauling out the sewing machine and parking myself at the dining table all day. Hand piecing is also very therapeutic. I started this quilt over a year ago when I was getting over the flu, and I work on it only from time to time. Usually when I just want something quiet to occupy my mind. Recently I bought some hexagon templates so maybe I'll try that next after I finish this top and a few of the others in progress.

Making progress on the No Rain quilt

I've been a bit heavy on recommendations lately - 3 posts in a row. I had to do a little traveling for work and haven't had buckets of time to sew. But I'm back on the wagon, so let's get to it. Here we have partially completed blocks for No Rain:



The yellow and black remind me of the bee girl in the Blind Melon video for the song "No Rain" (coming at you straight out of 1993). I like how the blocks are coming together, but I don't want to limit myself to the yellow/black/red color combination. I plan to get inventive with the border.

And here's the bee girl:



I don't know what it is with all my 1990s pop culture references lately. I'm not that old....Alas, I'm not that young either.

Chris Cornell is recommended

Chris Cornell did a few solo shows in Sydney this week as a side gig to his opening act for a Linkin Park concert. It seems like a real kick in the pants to go from fronting Soundgarden, one of the best bands of the 1990s, to being the support act for wannabes like Linkin Park. I was skeptical about whether Chris Cornell's show would be any good. I went in with expectations of something akin to Brian Wilson mumbling through Beach Boys greatest hits.

The vibe was a bit sluggish for the first couple songs, but then he killed it on Outshined and the place was blowin' up. It ended up being a stellar 2 1/2 hours with an acoustic solo set in the middle. By the end Chris Cornell and every member of his band were shirtless and fans were getting thrown off the stage by bouncers. The power and range that Chris Cornell has is really impressive, and it was surreal to hear such an iconic voice live. He can scream at me anytime.

Here's the set list:
Silence the Voices - Original Fire - No Such Thing - Outshined - Show Me How to Live - Spoonman - Hunger Strike - Be Yourself - What You Are - Rusty Cage - Billie Jean - Fell on Black Days - Call Me A Dog - Preaching the End of the World - Like a Stone - Dandelion - Doesn't Remind Me - Cochise - Ty Cobb - Arms Around Your Love - Black Hole Sun - Jesus Christ Pose - You Know My Name - Seasons - Out of Exile - Slaves and Bulldozers/Overfloater/4th of July/Whole Lotta Love

Peep this video I found on You Tube of Chris Cornell singing "Seasons". It's a great (and mellow) song.

Death at a Funeral is recommended

Dieting is the pits. I go to Hawaii for my sister's wedding soon. I'm not bothered by people seeing me in a bikini. That happens regularly enough that I don't care anymore. I just don't want a fat face recorded in wedding photos for all of posterity. My husband and I went to the show on Saturday, and if there's one thing I love it's that yellow movie theater popcorn. I knew the popcorn would be a huge temptation so I mentally braced myself for it. I made wise dinner decisions - Not a carb in sight, but the salad had enough feta to choke a horse. I had time between dinner and the show to hit up the bookstore and I bought myself a new quilt book (The Ultimate Log Cabin Quilt Book), bargaining that the book would be my substitute treat instead of the popcorn. But I got to the theater, quilt book in hand, and succumbed to the inevitable.

"Death at a Funeral" is recommended. Lots of laughs, mostly screwball humor. You have to wonder how many people can mistake acid for Valium, but the joke stays funny. I read a review that described Funeral as Monty Pythonesque, but I've never seen anything Monty Python so I can't comment to that.

Das Leben ist eine Baustelle is recommended (for drama)

After seeing a few German films with our very good Deutscher friend we noticed a pattern emerging. On the way out of the theater after watching a movie about the Stasi ("Das Leben der Anderen"/"The Lives of Others") my husband said to our friend, "Klaus, that was a good movie. But are all German movies so depressing?" Since then our friend has been on a mission to expose us to the lighter side of German cinema. The first "comedy" we went to see was "Ein Freund von mir" ("A Friend of Mine"). It had some funny bits, but perhaps my frame of reference for comedy is too American because I found the tone of Freund to be pretty somber. My friend thought it was a laugh a minute.

So last night we went to see "Das Leben ist eine Baustelle" ("Life Is All You Get"). Again, some funny bits, and artfully done, but there's a lot of heavy stuff that happens to the principal character, including an HIV scare. To me the tone of the film was the exact same as for Freund, but my friend said this film was not nearly as funny. Go figure. The significance of "Life is All You Get", as I understand it, is it was filmed in Berlin at a time when Berlin was undergoing a lot of changes after the East opened up. The film apparently gives very good insight into life in Berlin in the mid 1990s.

All of the films mentioned here are quality. I wouldn't recommend the comedies for escapism and chuckles, but if you are looking for quality drama then give them a go.

Bugged

The bogong moths are migrating and have taken over my flat. They are unavoidable, but they seem worse, more numerous, this year than in the past.

This weekend I had a million and one things that needed to be done for work.

I was able to accomplish exactly the following:
1) Cooked red beans and rice
2) Stitched very dispassionately on To Be Named #1
3) Watched a lot of television, but remember nothing I watched

And I think I'm developing a cold.

I'm feeling ambivalent about To Be Named #1. I love the white ground fabrics and bought a junkload of them when I was in the US in June. With this quilt I was aiming for thirtysomething masculine since it is for my new thirtysomething brother-in-law. My thirtysomething husband approves, but after stitching a few rows together I'm just not feeling it. I think I will jazz things up with some red and perhaps a border will make this quilt less boring.


At least the red beans and rice turned out awesome, which is quite a feat given I live as far from Louisiana as a person possibly can. I'm not an extremely sentimental or nostalgic person, but nothing is more satisfying than slow-cooked Southern food.

Guess what? I got a fever. And the only prescription...is more fat quarters

I have FQD. Fat Quarter Disorder. I never have enough fabric for a project. Often I come up with grandiose plans for a quilt, dig around in my stash, start slicing without bothering to calculate fabric needs, and come up short. But it's no drama. I just modify my plans and truck on. This weekend I started work on To Be Named #1. I laid out my ideas for my husband to get his opinion, and then set to work and discovered, per usual, I didn't have enough of one fabric. My husband came over to check my progress and saw I was working with a different layout. He said, "Why do you keep buying fat quarters? You never have enough. Why don't you buy more fabric?"

The next day we went to a fabric shop to find another print for Paper Lanterns because, per usual, I've come up short with the prints I have. I didn't find anything for Lanterns, but I did find some just becauses and two fabrics for Thalassa (or Coogee Beach). I laid the bolts on the counter and when asked how much I wanted I paused, remembering my husband's earlier admonition, and said "Just a quarter of each." I didn't have to look my husband in the face to know what he was thinking because his eyes cut through the back of my head.

I managed to get a little sewing done on Paper Lanterns.

My machine is still mad at me

Not much sewing accomplished this weekend. I figured out the bobbin thread tension is wrong. The bad news is I don't know how to fix it. I tug gently on the thread when I get the stitches started and that seems to correct the problem, but I need to look into getting it fixed properly.

I spent most of the weekend cutting fabric for Paper Lanterns, and did a little fabric shopping. Here are the main pieces for Lanterns (click on the photo to get a zoomed-in peek):


All but two of these fabrics were in my stash. If you knew how puny my stash is you would understand why I am so proud of this accomplishment. Here are examples of the blocks that will be made from the triangles. Pattern fabrics are paired with dark navy fabric.


Here is a close up of some elephant fabric I picked up this weekend. The colors in the photo are wonky, but I think the elephants are super cute.


And I found some cute cat fabric for the back of Chihuly at Night. My sister is a cat lady so I think she'll like it.

One (nearly) down, only eleventy billion to go

My Chihuly at Night top is nearly finished. My sewing machine and I are not speaking at the present time.

Chihuly at Night was inspired by a Dale Chihuly exhibit I saw at the botanic gardens while living in Atlanta a while back. It's awesome stuff. I went to an exhibit in Oklahoma City several years ago when I went to visit my sister at college. My sister loves colorful things and she loves Chihuly so this quilt is for her.

"Chihuly at Night"

In progress
2007 (hopefully)

The printed fabrics are bright and borderline juvenile, so I put them with solid black and have decided not to put a border on the quilt. It seems more adult to me that way. I don't know what the rules are for borders because I'm new to this, but I don't really care either. I read somewhere that you shouldn't put solids in with prints - who decides these things?

Below are some photos I took at the Atlanta Chihuly exhibit - 3 pictures from a nighttime visit and 1 photo taken when I went to see the exhibit during the day.

Bollywood Crafts is recommended

Over lunch I was perusing the bookshop when I came across this gem. I probably won't make any of the crafts in the book because they are a bit crappy, but the film synopses and recommendations have me over the moon. Featured are 10 films spanning 1951-2003 (and two craft projects per film), plus a list of 10 additional films listed for further recommended viewing. One of the films listed (but not featured) is Lagaan, which I actually own on DVD and love. I haven't seen a bad Bollywood flick yet (although my husband would beg to differ). Stumbling across this book was pretty auspicious. I'm going to India in a few months. I consider this book part of my travel research for the cinema references alone.

Chihuly Prototype

"Chihuly Prototype"
2007

I'm working on a quilt I call "Chihuly at Night" that uses the monkey wrench block. But as I was sewing my blocks for C@N I noticed they weren't coming out exact and I became a little afraid they wouldn't match up correctly in the top. I was using five different print fabrics for C@N, but kind of hated one of the five and decided I'd quickly stitch up a prototype using the fabric I hated. Once I put it together I decided to try my hand at free-pieced letters a la Lazy Gal Quilting and created a block with the year. Then I went ahead and put a border on it for giggles. I'm not totally pleased with my free-pieced two, but I'd try the free-pieced thing again. I was also too lazy to pick apart the half block at the top of the center column (seeing as it was supposed to just be a test quilt top), and when I whipped on the border I wasn't careful enough to hide my laziness, resulting in random color bits where there should be none. But overall, I was happy with the test and was able to get on with C@N.


Two too small


Laziness