Monday Mystery Solo Robin

March 15, 2021

Another Monday another step closer to finishing these quilts (maybe). This is the penultimate step of this one but don’t worry, there is a new plan. I have been working on the project for the next year and I have to say I am getting very excited. It will be block based rather than borders and will start mid April. I am taking a week or 2 off in between projects. There will be an actual layout design next year,  and I will still have the design sessions. The design posts like this one will still be free, but if you wish to join the design classes on a Tuesday there will be a fee next year. The fee will also cover the layout for three sizes of quilt. There will be less sewing next year but just as might thinking and designing. I would recommend some way to organize your design and cutting notes, so if you come up with a plan but don’t get it made in the right week you will be all set to make it when you can.

I guess we should get on with this week, the design technique is

Circles

I had to go back and check, I have done a lot of circles on the quilts, but apparently that was my choice not the quilts. Now it HAS to be circles. I wonder if I can come up with another way to do them. How many of these circles do I need,

Add 6″ to one side of your quilt.

That is quite nice enough space to play but not too much. Hopefully a way to start babancing things out on my oddity.

 

Monday Mystery Solo Robin

March 8, 2021

Yay, after a power outage last night I was worried the computer would be problematic. Turned it on and it came straight up so that’s a win. Something in the house seems to throw our trip switch sometimes which is a very annoying fault. Unlikely even a very good electrician is going to catch it unless it becomes a lot more regular. So for now we live with it and hope the computers behave. Don’t worry it won’t upset the longarm, I have that on a UPS. Yes that does say a lot about my priorities The computer will probably cope but I do not want the longarm stopping suddenly while I am working, that could be a disaster.

Last week we found a lot more options that I ever imagined for house and home. I can’t wait to see where this weeks takes us. For me this is still more important than the actual making. Having a design problem to ponder is great for keeping my brain busy and the discussion sessions always take me routes I don’t expect. So this week we will be considering,

Letters and text

Oooh another fun one. It reminds me of one of the things that came up in Celtic week, Ogham. Oh or the squares week when I suggested morse code. Oh yes this can be a lot of fun. Wonder how brave people will be with this. Let’s see how much space we are filling.

Add 8″ to two opposite sides of your quilt.

Um, well that is a bit more than I expected but I guess that really does open up the options. I was hoping for maybe 4″ on one side. I guess it doesn’t all have to be text, or maybe it is time to fit a whole story onto a quilt.

 

Monday Mystery Solo Robin

March 1, 2021

I am loving this early spring, I am worried what it will do for my harvest this year but the bright cool days are wonderful. We have managed to do some work in the garden including putting down grass stabilising mats in the swampy bits and planting the rest of the hedgerow for this year. My top excitement this week though was putting washing out on the line to dry. That is not something I expect to be able to be able to do that early in the year.  OK maybe not exciting to most people, but it was to me, it feels somehow illicit being able to dry things for free at the wrong time of the year.

We are now getting very close to running out of techniques, it makes the cards MUCH harder to pick they stick together now. I have managed to extract one, no help from the supervisor feline. This week we will be working on,

House and Home

This is one I would have liked much earlier in the quilt. I really fancied a line or maybe even a ring of houses. At this point I think one border would be enough. I just love all the quilts with rings (squares) of houses. Let us see what the cards think about how many borders we need.

Add a total of 6″ to two opposite sides of your quilt

Hmmm, OK better than all around but quite tight for some of the ideas I have. I have never made the traditional house blocks and I am not sure that is enough space to now. I guess I can look into it.

Monday mystery solo robin

February 22, 2021

So, you may notice this isn’t Monday morning. Today started with the other half telling me his computer was dead and he needed to use mine for his calls, not what I had planned but fair enough. 10 minutes later he comes back to ask if there is a knack to turning my machine on…Now the proud owners of 2 dead computers. We are working on it but this was delayed and is now happening on the tablet. At least I have that option. Today’s design prompt is,

Celtic

Ooooh, I have been looking forward to this and just been playing Irish themed special events in games, perfect timing. I just hope we don’t get another 2″, I know that is possible but I would like more space to play. Our border size is,

 

Add 6″ to one side of your quilt

 

That will do, being greedy I would have liked more but that is far from bad. So folks over to you, what can we do with this one, and in my case in shades of blue.

Monday Mystery Solo Robin

February 15, 2021

Having completed the massive spam clean up again. Seriously does spamming blogs really work? No vaccines cant be replace by plump fruit such as cherries and cranberries nor can a dog be replaced by maple syrup or honey. I admit those 2 did amuse me at least. The spammers also seem sure we all sign ourselves with three names every time. That is not only wrong but particularly funny when it is my blog

Having done that tidying up I think we should have some quilting. We are getting very close to a years worth now and I am busy with the plan for next year. Next year will be a slightly different format and you will start with some ideas how big your quilt will be and what shape it will be. I say some idea as I will leave it flexible enough for you to change your mind mid year. There will be access to the Tuesday sessions and some design sheets. If you are interested in signing up please do comment below, but don’t suggest I substitute honey for a dog

This week our design technique will be

Include squares

OK, now that really should be simple. So many quilt designs include squares. I guess if you wanted to be clever you could try to hide the squares, maybe some sort of block that looks curved but isn’t. Really this sounds like scope to do almost anything you want, but we will see what people come up with tomorrow. Our border size is,

Add 2″ to at least 2 sides of your quilt

Ahh, giving with one hand taking away with the other. That does make it a little more challenging but there are still some interesting options. Now I am very curious what people can come up with.  It just got a lot more interesting I think.

 

 

Monday Mystery Solo Robin

February 8, 2021

Slow start today. Other half stayed up to watch superbowl and I let Fenrir stay up late too as he was being very calm and good. He has come on a lot recently. We think a lot of it is age but we will take the results whatever. I hope by letting him have more of what he wants when he is good it will reinforce that behaviour. On the other hand we were very mean this morning, he got a very healthy breakfast no fun stuff. Having had a very party weekend he needed a grounded breakfast (it did have his favourite healthy food though). We have a lovely dusting of snow. Not enough to be really fun, just enough to be pretty. Mind you it is still falling and the flakes are getting bigger so maybe by afternoon exercise it will be settling a bit more.

Now time for our mystery quilt. Our technique deck is getting very small now, I can really see the end coming. Our technique this week will be,

On Point

Another very open technique. This might be the time for the blocks you haven’t managed to fit in on another week. I love blocks on point, but it can give scope for confusion and distortion so a nice one to practice. The borders this week will be,

Add 8″ to two opposite sides of your quilt

That’s decent. I was worried we might get 3″ which is possible but much more restrictive. Honestly I quite like working out how to do the really tricky ones but I think more options is really good for most people. So time to start thinking, what blocks would you set on point, or is there a more interesting interpretation of that?

Monday Mystery Solo Robin

February 1, 2021

As 2021 seems to be trying to keep up with 2020 we seem to still have lots of brain time to fill with quilting. While we are rapidly approaching a year of these posts I am working on the next years project. Nope I didn’t foresee this when I started I just knew we had time to make (or design) at least one quilt. I hope people are having fun and have found some new quilt ideas from this. I know I have seen far more design ideas than I ever would normally, even if I had been attending all the quilt shows. I didn’t expect I would get so much from this but I really have and I thank my regular participants for that.

This week the technique we need to work with is,

Pieced rectangles

Ahh, now this is an interesting one. We so often use squares and triangles as our units this will hopefully have us step out of the box a bit. There is a lot you can do with rectangles but I think we are often scared to try. Interestingly last week I ran across a couple of ways to make half rectangle triangles, maybe this is my moment to try them. Our border size this week is,

Increase the size of your quilt by 10″

Just to come clean, I cut the deck of sizes each week and we have the card revealed. This week I did that and got increase the size of your quilt by 12″. I am sure we had that very recently so tried again. I guess the deck is pretty determined as it gave me one so similar on my second try too. So we will work with that, sorry if it is a bit more than you really wanted.

Monday mystery solo robin

January 25, 2021

Yup this post is late, very late. Apparently when everything is booked to be done by 10am it really means 3.30pm. Who knew? Still we now have a sofa which will neither eat me nor dump me on the floor. We have a working kitchen sink, dishwasher still needs work and our food delivery made it to us. It could have been worse. Technically that is probably counted as a success. Now can we do something nice and simple like some quilting please?

This week our design technique is,

Amish

My brain is fried all I can think right now is Oh good I am working with plain fabrics. I guess that does indeed get me a step closer to Amish. I think this will be a lot of fun looking into which designs they have used and which are especially Amish. Do you suppose I can find any of my books on the subject before tomorrow? This week our border will be,

Add 8″ to two opposite sides of your quilt

Nice, not overwhelming but space to play. I am starting to think stripy triangles, that could work to use up some scraps which would be handy I think. I am not going to stay and blather, I really have a lot of work I needed to do today and now very little day to do it in. So have fun and I will see some of you tomorrow to discuss this weeks challenge.

 

The new year

January 19, 2021

This post was started last Tuesday, for various reasons it didn’t get published then. As it wasn’t time critical I decided it could go up now. Well not quite true I can now reveal what was taking all the time and energy I will add that at the bottom.

 

Yes I am late, why may become obvious soon. However I did want to share how much we enjoyed seeing in the new year. Going into 2020 we were in bed early ready to be up early to collect Fenrir. Going into 2021 we took him for a late walk in the village. We enjoyed everyone’s Christmas lights and the peace and quiet. Despite the new lockdown there has been a lot more traffic here, but new years eve was quiet.

We were home in time to see the clock change but were disappointed to not find anyone showing the London drone display live. So I waited up to catch the repeat of other news programs too see if any of them had it. They didn’t but the Metro newspaper online had a lot of it.

We had spent the day playing board games online with friends. Which was a lot of fun. We failed to get pizza for dinner which I had been really looking forward to. On the other hand it was great for the local pub who had been making them. He sold out of everything in under 2 hours. I hope that meant he made his profit AND got an early night. They had planned to do take away pizza for 5 hours but clearly I am not the only one who thinks they are great and the perfect celebration food. I can’t wait for the next event he makes them for. It is especially nice that they are made outside in a wood fired pizza oven and you can collect them from outside too. Maybe I could persuade him to make them for Valentines day?

Since then life has been crazy busy. I am sure there really have been over a week since then but it doesn’t feel like it. I have managed to get some work done but it has been crammed in around other stuff. Starting to think lockdown steals my time and dumps it on other people. I have heard so many saying they can’t fill the time they have yet I don’t seem to have enough hours in the day.

OK, back to now.

Well I say now, I was going to say I spent New Years day afternoon quilting. Each year there is a new year day mystery quilt, which I love doing. I love the lack of responsibility. I can usually get most of the quilt done on the day too. It is a very satisfying way to start the year. I did have to get a special dispensation to stay home though. Yup in a pandemic I needed to ask to stay home, weird huh. Well we were finally selling the house we used to live in. It had been under offer for months then on Midwinter our buyers got in touch and said they wanted to complete on the 7th of January. ( working days later. Um, eeep. We checked when we could get together people and vehicles to do the last bits of moving, and negotiated to complete on the 14th. As it turned out even that was tight as the lockdown on the 4th cost us most of our help and one of the vehicles. All dealable but rather than 2 or 3 days work it became a full time job going back and forth with our car. The trickiest part was getting my project car out of the garage there. It was tight when I put it in there, I had to get out of the window. It was much harder to get it out this time. Firstly it hadn’t moved in a long time, secondly the whole driveway had been turned into a sandy swamp by builders and finally everyone had moved their fences to the legal maximum. After the first day of struggle we bought a hand winch. Who says watching random youtube videos is a waste of time? It taught me a lot about moving difficult vehicles. We finally got it moved with a couple of days to spare. We got an appointment to take rubbish to the tip, and the sale went through smoothly. I hadn’t wanted to say and tempt fate. It feels great to finally be free of the house. No more worrying about squatters or other issues. The rebates on the utility bills are rather nice too. Now I feel  I can get my schedule back on track and really settle into this new life.

Monday Mystery Solo Robin

January 18, 2021

Monday morning and for the first time in weeks I am actually feeling awake and ready for the week. Apparently cumulative stress makes my function progressively worse who would have guessed It is very nice to be on a more even keel and planning good things again. Yes that does mean the bothersome pandemic wasn’t the main cause of my issues, do I get points for novelty. I do know a lot of you are struggling with that though, and I hope these quilt ideas are still a diversion for you. Whether or not you actually make the quilt planning how to handle these challenges seems a much healthier preoccupation than many in the world right now. This week our technique is,

Repeated blocks

Wow talk about enough rope to hang ourselves. This one should be pretty easy for any quilter. This is what we do most of the time with traditional patchwork. However, it can be an issue for some of us. I know i tend to get bored of making one block repeatedly. For me there is definitely a sweet spot between too boring and takes to long so I lose interest. I think my best bet with this one will be simple but jazzed up maybe with size or colour so I am not quite repeating myself but can production line it. So what space do we have to work with,

Increase the size of your quilt by 12″

Oh boy. Yup the theme this week is absolutely to give us scope to mess ourselves up. I am going to have to be careful with this one not to make myself too much work. On the other hand I do rather like the idea I could have a simple block changing size a lot within 12″. I might not even need that many of the blocks to make something really effective. Hmm, yes this is sparking some interesting ideas, probably enough to get myself into trouble