Computers

Hmmm can’t live with them, can’t live without them. I’ve been trying to write this for nearly 24hrs now, but everything that can go wrong has. The computer I use to read the memory card from my camera decided yesterday that I had a 2 terabyte card. I wish. Sadly this was too big for the computer to read. So no pictures. I though I would wait until my pet geek got home and might be able to persuade the machine to behave. Indeed he did persuade it to give back a couple of pictures. Including the one I wanted here.

It was late so I waited till this morning to try posting. Today blogger doesn’t want to play. It won’t upload my picture Apparently an engineer has been notified. I guess the computers just don’t want you to see the back of the PCB, which now has almost all of it’s solder on I just have one large blob to go. I’m quite pleased with it. It is currently pinned down trying to become flat and square again. To top it all my ISP has ‘issues’ so I have no email. Of course there are several emails I am actually waiting for, and if previous ‘issues’ are anything to go by I won’t be getting them.

I also managed to get a quarter of the blocks done for gems 2 yesterday. Impressive when the studio is over 30 degrees and I have to iron things. Hopefully I can get the rest ready today and then Robin can get the quilt top assembled ready for me to start the quilting. Gems 1 is looking good the quilting is nearly finished, then we just need to think about the trimming and binding. I am thinking a Ricky Timms piped binding might be a good idea at this stage. I don’t know about Robin but I don’t fancy sitting for a day covered in a quilt to hand sew the binding so a machine finish would be great. I suppose we need to think about labels as well.

Why is it the more work you do on a project the more things you think of that you need to do for it?

Union Jack

Here is another of the quilts going to the Festival of Quilts. I made it a while ago as I intended to enter it into a different show, but I wasn’t happy with it. I still don’t think it is one of my best executed pieces but I like the design and concept. It is only going into the show because friends feel it needs to be seen. I think they have a point, there will be a lot of the same old at the show (some of which will be stunning I am sure) and it is good to offer lots of alternative pieces. So keep an eye open for it if you are going.

This quilt came about from the idea of punk quilts. Where does quilting meet punk? The flag seemed ideal, as it reminds me of a traditional quilt block, and is an important part of punk fashion. The flags are all quilted with song lyrics. The ‘normal’ flag has the national anthem on it. The others have punk songs. The black and white flag is made with zips as the diagonal black bars, and leather on the vertical and horizontal bars. Oh and of course it isn’t really a Union Jack but if anyone does want to buy it and hang it on a boat it could live up to it’s name.

Also if there are other bloggers going would you be interested in meeting up. I will be there for the whole event but I am going to some workshops. It would be good to really meet some of the people I have met online.

Sewing the world

This is blogging for health reasons. Have you ever blown up too many balloons and given yourself a headache well I’ve managed it blowing up this exercise ball for the second time this evening. The funny thing is, I was using a pump. Still it was worth it. First fitting the quilt was a bit loose on the ball, now it is really snug. I am especially pleased with Australia so that is what I have put in the picture. I still have to hand sew the poles closed but I think I need a break. It is hot here and getting hotter. I’m sorry but by 10pm I think the temperature should be dropping.

If you look in the background of the photograph you can see the globe that was the model for this quilt. All in all I am very pleased to have made a spherical quilt. I think I need to make more of them, and the more I think about the other planets, and moons, the better the idea seems. Now to cool down before I get to the hand sewing.

Hmmm, this spell checker has just suggested I didn’t mean blogging, apparently I should have typed flogging, the mind boggles.

Update:
I really wish you guys could feel this quilt, it weird. It is a quilt, but it is a beach ball, but…. weird I tell you. I like it but I can’t get my head around it. I’ve done most of the hand sewing on the top of the world. Antarctica can wait until I have the label ready as that is where I will put it. I figure it is as close to a back as I can get on this quilt. I’m not sure if I should completely seal the top yet either. This is one of the hottest days we are likely to have this year, so when it cools down again my globe will shrink a bit. I think I should keep the option of adding more air as late as I can. I really should do the maths and work out how much difference a few degrees will make, honestly, I can’t be bothered. It is too hot for serious brain work. The temperature has now dropped one degree, it’s 1am.

“You’ve stomped Hawaii”

I didn’t do it on purpose, it’s just in the wrong place. As you can see I have spent the day quilting the world. It was very odd listening to the news and having the places they were talking about just under my hands. Very spooky.

I had planned to make the footprints trapunto, but I needed to quilt the small islands into place. The islands are all in the wrong places so instead I used a very small stipple to mark the footprints. I wasn’t sure they would leap out enough, but I didn’t need to worry.

The background design is inspired by the oriental cloud and water patterns, hopefully it will convey both to different people.

I’ve marked up the panels, so tomorrow I get to try and turn this large flat quilt into a sphere. Wish me luck.

Is that an island?

Asked Robin as I pick a tiny oddly shaped piece of animal print from his quilt. Long pause, “no I don’t think so”. I think it was just an offcut, but if anyone spots something missing I will blame his quilt for stealing my islands. I’ve been wondering how small most quilter go with fusible applique. I drew the line at islands less than 2mm square. It was when the tweezer tips were too big to handle the fabric and I started wondering if you could get smaller ones, that I thought things might be getting a but silly.

here are a couple of slightly out of focus pictures of the world. Hopefully the countries can still be identified, but the animal print does stand out well. Doing something like this really brings home the relative sizes of different countries, and how remote some islands are. If it wasn’t so tricky and frustrating cutting some of the coastlines I would say this would make a great educational project for children. I feel a lot more in touch with the geography of my home planet now. Of course being an astrophysicist I am now thinking about doing the other planets

Can I just slip Spain in?

Two quilters one ironing board, there is bound to be congestion. I love the fact that quilting lets you ask some really odd questions. I can however state that not only is Spain in, but so is the rest of Europe. While I was making the master pattern this morning the quilt changed it’s mind. It didn’t want to be made of shards of brown fabrics. It wanted to be large areas of the animal prints I had collected for ‘Wild Africa’. ‘Wild Africa’ won’t be made for a while as it is one of the quilts I withdrew from Harrogate, so this seems like as good a use as any for the fabrics. I like the way the countries are disappearing from the map, it now just shows land mass and I hope it will make people think of all the endangered animals of the world. I am hoping to finish the top tomorrow, and will post a picture then.

These stripy sausages are actually the resistors for ‘See Sound’, to the right you can see the real thing. Yes all the bands reflect the real values of the resistors. I know how much little details being wrong bugs me, so I am trying to make this copy as accurate as possible. These have caused me a lot of trouble, well only the legs. I spent 3 hours yesterday trying different ways of doing them. I hadn’t realized how much extra friction there is on this shiny fabric when you try to turn narrow tubes. They were made rather larger than I would have liked so they could be turned and then filled with trapunto wool. I am sure I have trapunto wool in the house somewhere but do you think I could find it when I needed it. Of course this would happen on a day when I didn’t have a car too. A few frantic calls later and my LQS promised to get them in the post to me ASAP. Fortunately Robin managed to fit in a drive by wool collection. Without their help I’d still be waiting to make these. Thanks guys.

Measure everything!

Never ever believe what is written on packaging. I should know better, but when I bought an exercise ball that said it was 66cm diameter, I though it might be that size. I’ve spent most of the morning trying to scale up the map of the world to fit this ball. First attempt was too small. It would be I made it 70cm forgetting that I wasn’t going around the diameter but half the circumference. So I tried again, having calculated the circumference. Now it is way too big. Huh?!

At this point I thought of just measuring it. Now of course anyone who wasn’t so keen on maths would have done this first and got it right. The half a circumference is exactly 30″, not a nice metric number. By my calculation that would give a diameter of 19″ which is about 50cm. Nowhere near what the box claimed. Grrr. It doesn’t really matter I suppose to most people using it for exercise, but if you are going to put a measurement on a box it really should be right.

As it happens this is going to make my life a lot easier as it will fit on the fabric much better. I’ll try printing the map the right size now.

Sneaky Peak

I’m still behind on where I should be in preparing quilts for the Festival of Quilts, but here is one that has just got a step closer. I have done a little quilting on it just to stabilize it before Robin takes over and does the rest of the quilting. According to my diary this should have been done yesterday, but it’s not too far off. This is half of the ‘Pair of Gems’ entry. Yes you can still see chalk in the designs, I am hoping most of it will vanish while it is being quilted.

Next on my list of things to do is make components for the PCB. I also still need to find something to make 5 small LED’s look like one big one. Hmmmm.

Show Update

This morning in the post I got a card. Apparently someone had sent me a letter without enough postage so I would have to go and collect it and pay 1.05GBP to get it. Odd I think I wasn’t expecting anything, but off I go. Guess who. The show organizers.

When I asked them to “destroy the entry forms for Harrogate and refund any money” guess what I was hoping they might do. Nope they tried to send them back in the envelope they had for may judging sheets. The entry form all have photographs attached so are quite heavy and I had only supplied postage for the judging sheets Still on the bright side they have returned my entry fees, which came to nearly 70quid so I am glad to have it back. I guess this means they have my letter and have read it. There is no reply included.

The judging sheets show that ‘Loki’ was a flop but there are no comments so I can’t really tell why. Interestingly one judge gave 8/10 for technique while the other gave 4/10. So either I did it pretty well or pretty poorly. Who knows. I do find it interesting how people given the same judging instructions come up with wildly different marks. I assume there are guidelines for how you asses each aspect of the quilt so surely the results should be similar? According to these judges, ‘Loki’ is the worst quilt I have ever put into a show, based on the marks.

‘Miss Baltimore’ however did fare better and I even have comments I love comments on my judging sheets positive or negative. The whole point is they tell me what I could do more of or change. This one among other things comments on the fact that the background shows through the palest fabrics, which she feels mars the effect. She is bang on. It does, I don’t like it either, but I couldn’t think up a solution. I am pleased she paid enough attention to notice and cared enough to write it down. So if by any chance that judge reads this, thanks. Also both judges felt it was a very good interpretation of the theme, which means a lot to me on this one. The marks place this as equal top of my quilts, along with ‘Star of Scotland’ which is the rainbow star quilt I posted yesterday.

I’ve no idea about ‘Ginko Typography’ they didn’t send me any sheets for it, or for ‘Delta Blues’ which was re judged there. I could try sending them another SAE and asking for those, but I think I am going to let it go. I don’t want more charges. Keep your fingers crossed for a reply to my letter. It could happen.

Utility quilts.

I thought I would give you guys a chance to see the working quilts in the house. I do make functional quilts as well as the art, but at the moment I seem to have produced as many as we can use I like making big quilts but I guess I will have to wait until we wear out the ones we have. I have been toying with the idea of retiring a couple of them sooner rather than later. They were some of the first quilts I made and aren’t as well built as some of the later ones. Our quilts have a hard life with 6 cats who all love them, so really they need a lot of quilting to make sure they stay together. Also on one of them I used invisible thread, not a big deal, but it was the cheap craft stuff and it does have very scratchy edges whenever they escape, and I don’t like it. On the other hand I love the design and the brushed cotton backing. Maybe it would like to be thrown over a sofa or something.