Monday mystery solo robin
September 21, 2020It seems Monday morning has arrived again, and quite a misty one too. The seasons seem to be changing here. Generally this is a great thing in my view, this year I am a little more cautious. I am very pleased with cooler weather, but I know this will make outdoor socialising trickier and no I am not keen to have people in my house. So I am looking at firepits and temporary shelters to keep the rain off. I have some sheltered corners I think will be OK we just need to plan ahead. I am also concerned quite how much more cover will spread as people want to be inside with doors and windows closed. I understand the desire but at the same time it seems a way to accelerate spread. I am hoping a lot of hospitality will be making similar plans to me and make cozy outdoor spaces. In Prague that is very common and quite wonderful, maybe we will achieve the same here.
I suppose we had better get on and think about this weeks quilt installment. I am loving how these ideas trigger plans for people. Design ideas that had never been on their radar suddenly become the next project. That is something that really encourages me. I want people to have exciting new projects, and have that buzz on creation. This weeks challenge is
Half square triangles
Ah now to me these are exciting. They are so versatile and so underestimated. I have a similar feeling about checkerboard too. I think people largely ignore these very simple building blocks but you really can do so much with them. Of course that does somewhat depend how much space we have. Border size this week is,
Add 4″ to at least 2 adjacent sides of your quilt.
Nice a quite open border choice, that gives me some ideas. I am planning this quilt to work from a central hexagon, and last weeks option we thought would be good for turning the hexagon into a square. This border says yes that is the right choice as this would be such a good transition to having a square piece. Funny how things come together even with a random prompt each week.
Surprising uses of daylight lighting
September 20, 2020I have LED daylight panels in my sewing room. They were cheap and I like good light when I am working. For sewing and teaching I am very happy with them. Tonight I wanted to order my quilt jigsaws and discovered my best image of one wasn’t good enough. Having the daylight lights meant we could get the quilt out and take new photographs. It may sound a small thing, but in our previous house I have had to do some really bizarre things to photograph quilts for shows. Including laying them on my car bonnet on a sunny day. To be able to take a picture when we wanted, indoors and with good lighting was fantastic.
This weekend has mostly been dedicated to harvest. A small mountain of leeks were pulled and prepared. I think I now have a winters supply of leeks for soup. As the onions for the soup were already in the freezer along with some cream this feels like real progress. We do like our leek and potato soup in the winter and we are now set. I also grabbed more apples and made apple cake one again, Tet claims to have forgotten it so needed to try it again to try and pick our favourite. I will be trying number 2 again next week I think purely for comparison. We have to know which is the best recipe. I harvested more cucumbers beetroot and swede. I think tomorrow we have pies, probably with swede and cauliflower. Maybe with some beetroot too. I have another melon progressing well in the green house too.
Next week I have plans for more quilt binding (a never ending task I swear) and a quick quilt before loading another complex one. I have my posting gear now so should be able to streamline my methods for getting customer quilts back. Buying postage online and dropping them off when they aren’t being sent by courier. I am watching what new restrictions we get and trying to guess how that will effect shipping, but it is mostly guesswork. I hate guessing with customers.
For now I think it is bed time, night folks, lets hope for an uneventful and successful week. I know, I know, I am lousy at optimism, but hey at least I keep practicing.
The morning after the day before
September 18, 2020The start of term is always hard, apparently online doesn’t remove that feature. Today i have been exhausted, I wonder if the longer break actually made it worse. Like not exercising for too long. However, it was great to be back. It is differnt and we are all lewrning new skills, but it works. We have a solid proof of concept now. It is now opening up all manner of new possibilities too. A huge leap but I really think we can do great things. Unfortunately it is sounding more like this was the only way forward with the government agreeing cases are increasing again, but this time we are prepared. We will quilt whatever the world throws at us. I hope by next week I will have my teaching muscles more exercised, and won’t feel quite as wrecked on the Friday.
Half way round up
September 15, 2020The Monday mystery solo quilt is now in it’s 26th week. So it seemed a good time to give a list of all the parts so far. Remember if you do want to play along you don’t have to do every week or do them in the order they appeared. They were random so anything goes. Just have fun and give your brain something to play with.
- Begin with a block of straight sides – one dimension at least 9”
- Add 6” to two sides using a sew-cut-sew technique
- Add a total of 6” to two adjacent sides with appliqué
- Add 5” to two opposite sides using foundation piecing
- Add 4” to at least two adjacent sides using pieced triangles
- Add 6” to one side by including squares and triangles
- Add 4” to two opposite sides by including rectangles
- Add 8” to one side incorporating bears paws
- Increase overall quilt size by 8” by including a pictorial method
- Add 4” to at least two sides incorporating stars
- Add a total of 10” to two opposite sides using tradition patchwork techniques
- Add a total of 12” to two opposite sides incorporating folded fabric
- Add 4” to two opposite sides using modern patchwork techniques
- Add 2” to each side by including squares
- Add 4” to 2 adjacent sides using curved piecing
- Add 5” to two opposite sides using scraps
- Add 8” to two opposite sides with no piecing
- Increase overall size of quilt by 8” using English Paper Piecing
- Add 6”to two opposite sides by including flowers and leaves
- Add a total of 12” to two opposite sides using log cabin techniques
- Add 4” to two opposite sides cave man style
- Add 3” to one side by including flying geese
- Add 4” to two opposite sides by including embellishments
- Add 4” to two adjacent sides by adding another dimension
- Add 6” to two adjacent sides using storm at sea
- Add 6” to at least three sides incorporating triangles
Monday mystery solo robin
September 14, 2020Mondays appear faster and faster. Still we have something to look forward to. I nearly have a dog who can sit and be sociable while I write these now. It has taken six months, which actually isn’t bad. My little chap is now 10 months old, and I suspect will have a quiet first birthday when we get there. In our household he misses going out more than the rest of us. If he realised that is also why he has lunch with both of us each day he would be more keen, although being young he would probably want both the outings and his people at home. This week I restart regular classes, online not in person. I wasn’t sure i had made the right decision, but with the government tightening restrictions I am now certain. For now this is how we have to be. It will be different but we will cope. The sessions we have done of Tuesdays have really helped me a lot. I am confident we can get back the feel of our classes. I am looking forward to seeing what people are working on.
Out technique for this week is,
Include triangles
I have been looking forward to this one, there are just so many possibilities. Now we need to know how much space we have to play in,
Add 6″ to at least 3 sides of your quilt.
Wow, that’s a fantastic playground. I think I might actually try several techniques in that much space. I love that this one can work with very simple things or get really complex. Half square triangles count, but then so do some mariners compasses. Yup I am really excited and will happily spend a lot of time this week planning things with triangles.
Best laid plans.
September 13, 2020Friday
I really thought that i would finish the quilt on the frame today. I started early and it was going well. Then life and deliveries happened. Just after lunch I decided to admit defeat and not try rushing. Instead I did some work on the dining and games room. The first step was to sort and tidy my thread stocks. I then made a drawer insert to keep them sorted. I didn’t realise that the earlier numbers of masterpiece thread give you a lovely gradation. I currently have the perfect amount of stock, it all fits neatly. I am sure that won’t last once things settle and I will probably need to make another insert but for now this makes my life a bit simpler.
I also made a start on the bookshelves in the dinning room. The arrived Monday but this was the first chance to build them.
Sunday
I have spent the day on the dinning room. It’s not perfect, and it still has boxes in. It is now usable though and no longer annoys me when I sit in the living room. Without the small technical issue, we could have eight friends over for dinner or games, or I suppose both. Who knows when that will actually be possible, but I am now readyish, should it become possible. I say ish because the chairs don’t match and I am tempted to make a set of chair covers. Not only will it mean I can appear to have 10 matched chairs when I want to, it will also give me a chance to learn how to make them efficiently for when I start teaching in person again. I am sure the cleaning rules will be in place quite some time and the easiest way to clean chairs in rented spaces is covers. I am wondering what I could do with quilting for the home set, sorry but the class ones are likely to be simple so they are easy to launder. I should add not only do I have two sets of chairs that don’t match, I also have a boat shaped conference table as my dining table, it could do with refinishing, but I like it and it keeps your plate off the floor so works just fine for a dining table. It does seem to have shrunk in transit, it filled the room it used to be in, now I have space around it.
For storage I am using IKEA Billy bookcases. Apparently there are more than 60 million Billy bookcases in the world, the BBC says approximate per 100 people. We have far more than our fair share, and will have more at some point. This time I have gone for half height doors and we have the top lights too. I wanted a small tes of the lights before we decide what to use in the library. Yes we have so many books we feel we can call them a library, we still love our dead tree knowledge store. Today I got the first run of storage finished and filled with our board games and jigsaws. I am pretty sure we have more that I haven’t found yet but for now this is a great start.
The boards on the top are stopping cats falling down the gaps by the corner unit. I just know they would without the covering. That won’t be the final solution. When we have time we will make a shaped board to put up there instead. One of the things I found was my jigsaw of my quilt Prometheus. I have been meaning to get more made, would anyone be interested in buying a quilt jigsaw if I did? If so which of my quilts would you like to have as a jigsaw?
Argh
September 8, 2020I don’t go out much. I mean really really not much. So I am not terribly aware of how things work anymore. I know we need masks, and I am making myself more at the moment, but that’s about it. I know that a lot of places had closed but I was under the impression that most stuff was now open again. Certainly post offices and postal depots I assumed were. Turns out that was a terrible assumption. I needed to post a quilt today so having bought postage online the website tells me the closest place that can accept it is the depot because I want it tracked. That was fine by me. I know the parking is free, no interacting with a ticket machine. They had social distancing last time i was there which was quite some time ago and they always had screen. It sounds a fairly safe drop off to me. What I didn’t allow for is the are barely open. Today was 8am to 10 am, I arrived at 10.20. Tomorrow they are closed all day. I have my next chance Thursday morning. I am sure there are less people coming to collect packages, but I would think there are more people posting so is it really wise to put all your customers in such a small time slot. I guess I may be wrong and Thursday I can find out.
Monday mystery solo robin
September 7, 2020A new week again and I am trying something new, blogging with canine assistance. I normally make sure he is away so I can concentrate, but he has made a lot of progress and might be able to sit with me while I work. This is about the same as expecting that of a 6 yr old teenager ( yup odd idea butbthat kinda how dogs work). So let’s see how he does. Can he make it to the end of a fairly short blog post. So far he is clearly loving being a professional dog, I am sure that won’t last. I finally got us some more technique cards written. With the expended scope when I finally publish the decks of cards I will rename them something like design start points, but for consistency I will stick to calling them technique here. Like I said these have evolved and suffered some mission creep, so you sort of have to expect some blips.
The key point is we now have another 20 cards. Some of the ones we haven’t used from the original set are similar to ones we have had but I think we should now make the end of the year with no repetition. Without further ado, today’s technique is,
Storm at sea
Oooh fun, this has been used for one of the old idea reimagined books, and is what prompted me to have it here. It is an interesting, I would say block group and having grown up by the sea has always put me in mind of the real storm at sea. Ah, that’s the length of professional dog for today. A cat is far too exciting to ignore. Now we need to know how much space we have to play with. Today’s border size is,
Add 6″ to at least two adjacent sides of your quilt.
The cards seem to be on a roll with this adjacent thing atm. Which is fine, and 6″ should give some nice space to play. I am thinking diamonds in rectangles and some waves for this one, maybe a diamond in a diamond in a rectangle. Ooh or try to make the diamonds in rectangles look like waves, that should work and could be fun.
Where to start?
Wednesday was one of those bitty days. You know the ones where the doorbell rings, you go back to what you were doing and the phone rings, rinse and repeat. It’s not productive but some of the calls were great. It’s good to be getting back in touch with students. Some of them I have taught for years and they are rather like extended family. I didn’t get much quilting done but I did manage some paperwork.
Thursday was a bit more to plan. It was of course floors day, but I think I might be getting quicker at that, then on to quilting. I am still working on the one with lots of ruler work, but it is going well and I am really pretty happy with it. Despite losing some time to housework, it is likely to be finished sooner than I expected.
Friday had to be a domestic kinda day. We were out of bread and this seemed to be the last drying day for a while, so laundry had to happen. As I was going to need the oven I tried out apple cake 3. One of the nice things about making bread is it does a lot while you ignore it. By lunchtime we had bread and apple cake and clean clothes and a chicken casserole in the slow cooker. That last was the important bit, because by lunch time I was all cooked out. So an after noon of sit down sewing preparing bindings finishing curtains and dog training.
The Apple cake, much like the first two is more apple than cake. Its possibly the least sweet of the three and has a lovely lemon hint to it. The loaf was also an experiment. I managed to get some differnt flours, and thisnis one of them. Itis the best loaf i have made so far. Itis moist and soft and nicely malty. I am hoping i can get more of the flour as I see me making this quite a lot.
It all gave me time to think about the Monday quilt. I have said before I never expected this system to run so long, but I am pretty happy with how it is doing, even though we may get a few duplicated towards the end. However, I think I will end it after 52 weeks. I have a plan for what comes next though. Something similar yet differnt, and that will make one large quilt over the following year. Oddly enough having time to actually plan something like this makes for a more ordered solution. No I don’t in any way regret starting the Monday mystery solo robin. I am very pleased with it and thrilled that it has done exactly what I hoped for people. It has shown me that a design problem to think about is indeed helpful, even if people aren’t making it. So the next project will keep that element, but with a twist. That’s all the teasing for now, there will probably be more as we come closer to starting it.
ooops just seen I failed to publish this, oh well better late than never I guess.
Bank holiday? Who knew?
September 1, 2020I would love to claim Covid is to blame for me forgetting yesterday was a bank holiday, but I can manage to do that quite well without help. It is a bit more annoying when I has reminded the other half a couple of days before. However he then got to tell me which I am sure he enjoyed. Having worked out I wasn’t obliged to work I considered other things I could should be doing. The dining room curtains seemed to be a good starting point. Sadly the curtain we were gifted is just one about the size to cover a door. So no use at all for a 3m wide window. However I had seen a piece of fabric I thought might work when I had been clearing the room. It was almost 6m and the width I needed for the drop. So curtain making became the project for the day and I got both panels made. Unfortunately I didn’t have the right header tape so that is on order and I will attach it to the curtain panels next weekend. I am very pleased to have had the curtain fabric and the lining on hand. Of course it also means I don’t need to find a place to put away the fabric either. It is a medium weight patterned black velvet. It is a bit lighter than I would have picked for curtains, but I like very heavy curtains. For any normal person it is absolutely fine especially lined.
This morning has also been productive, I have harvested the first of my leeks and grabbed the last of my onions. they became leek and potato soup for lunch, and we have a large jar left for later in the week. I find it absurdly satisfying when I can clean up lots of odds and ends of food. The onions weren’t enough for a full batch, but neither was the cream, and I had the crust of the bread to dip in it. Very tasty and all tidy. Next will be our discussion class then paperwork and this evening early dinner (also leftovers 
and games night. Oh, and I got some quilting done while the soup was cooking this morning. So all in all pretty productive for a day with a lot of not work in.