Ice for sale

I don’t know how many of you read Popular Patchwork, but the December issue had a journal quilt project in it that I wrote. Rather than have a couple of small quilts hanging around I thought it would be nice if they went out into the world to help people. Fire has already been auctioned by Ami Simms to raise money for alzheimer’s research. Ice is now up for sale. If  you would like to buy a little quilt and help a great cause here’s you chance.

Any drycleaners?

Does anyone in or near London know a really good dry cleaner? I went out to dinner last nght and the waiter managed to spill white chocolate sauce on my leather jacket. I got some off but the rest is going to need proffessional attention.

Learning from experience

Over time I’ve learned that some quilts are trouble, and I can usually spot them when I meet with the cutomer. However some of them I take on anyway. It might seem like this would mean I wouldn’t take them on, but actually I often do them. I do charge more for quilts I know are going to be difficult to cover the extra time and hassle, but quite often there is a good reason I am being asked to do them. I do now tell the customer when I taake the quilt in how much trouble I think the project will cause and why this might produce a result less good than I would like. It may not be what the customer wants to hear but I would rather they know in advance what to expect.

The quilt on the frame at the moment is one of these projects. I wouldn’t have worked with the front, back or wadding from choice, but it’s needed so I am giving it a go. It isn’t sewing up too badly either. It is causing way more trouble that I expected. It seems like my machine just doesn’t want to do this one. Actually that isn’t fair, it’t the frame that is having a bad day. It just doesn’t want to keep tension on this quilt. I could live with that, I was living with it, then the frame had a big strop. Nuts bollts and craching are not good. I caught everything, which was good, for everything except my muscles. I’ve been out and bought more nuts and now have everything back together and ready to go.  Why is it that these things are much more likely to happen on quilts that are already trouble? I don’t get it. I have quilts that I just know will work, and they do. I am starting to wonder if it is partly my mental state. When I know I have a difficult day ahead do I do something that makes the frame shed it’s nuts, the machine chew needles and the thread become fragile? Also if it is me, how do I turn it off?

As you may have gathered from the lack of posting. I’ve been working pretty much flat out the last few days. I’ve had another great machine quilting class, which I love teaching. Lots of customer quilts have been heading home, and I’ve been tidying up a few future bookings. I am thrilled to say some bookings are leaving more information. I’ve had emails and phone messages recently which I could reply to without having to first try and work out which booking I am talking about. You can’t know how much I appreciate it. Thank you so much.

How long does it take to drive 30 miles?

That would depend on which 30 miles wouldn't it. In the case of trying to drive from Harrow to Beckenham diagonally across London it's about 3 hours. That's with leaving early enough to miss rush hour and the schoolrun at my end. Fortunately I know London and had allowed more than that, so tonights talk will be on time. I am getting an urge to start on another heavily quilted piece. I think that is partly because I have just filled in the forms for Malvern and the wholecloth 'Greek Fossils' is going there. Of course I really need to get the Malvern quilts bound before I start thinking of starting new ones.Speaking of shows, 'Phoenix Rising' has headed back to America today. I managed to get the worst of the creases out of it, largely by rolling it badly and taking it out in my car. My car tends to be very humid (OK wet) and the combination of that and rolling about seems to have helped a lot. Not a traditional solution I admit, but if it works who cares. Sadly the show who put the creases there doesn't seem to care at all. I can't see me sending any more quilts to Road 2 California. It's bad enough having to ship uninsured quilts but not being able to rely on the venue to look after the quilts is just too much. Hopefully the Lancaster show will be better. Fingers crossed that the quilt arrives safely.

Chelmsford

I’ve had a note in two diarys that I am supposed to have a booking in Chelmsford on the 8th of April. Having spent the morning on the phone trying to track down any group in that area that might be expecting me. Thank you so much to the various ladies who have helped me with this endevour. However after all our efforts we can’t find any group who thinks I should be visiting them so I have removed it from my diary. If you are expecting to see me on April 8th 2010, please do get in touch as soon as possible. I am more than happy to be somewhere, but I need to know where.

I hope I am now fully up to date with paperwork, forms and booking emails. If you haven’t heard from me in the next couple of days and were expecting to I would dtrongly suggest phoning me. My number is on my web site. I say leave a couple of day as a lot of forms are going in the post today so will take a little while to arrive.

Having done the boring bit I can get on with the fun part of my job. Quilting. I have a very complex quilt to work on at the moment. Lots of different blocks and applique. Fortunately it is for a regular customer and I’ve just got to do what I think best, so I will love working on it. There will be a lot of thread and pattern changes thoguh, so it isn’t going to be quick.

Yesterday I had my regular book class in Purley. I don’t know how I manage it but I seem to attract groups of interesting quilters. This bunch are no exception and teaching them is a lot of fun. They like to keep me on my toes though and try and sneak in interesting design features if I turn my back. They are making good progress and I am really looking forward to seeing the finished quilts. I was especially pleased that the lady who had felt most behind last lesson has done more than I asked as homework and her quilt looks fantastic. She has also made the back of her quilt more interesting by piecing one of the borders. It does lift the whole thing. I suspect she will come up with other neat ideas as she goes on. If anyone else has finished a quilt from my book ‘Ferreting Around’ please do send me a picture I find it fascinating what people can do with the designs in it. I would also love to have a web gallery of your quilts, but to do that I first need the pictures.

One of those days and just what I needed.

I’ve learned quite a few things today. The sidewall of your tyre blowing out is very load when it happens but not that big a deal at 30 mph. After the tyre has blown driving on the rim isn’t as noisy as I would have expected. You can definately hear it, but I could believe for a non car nut with a stereo on they might not notice. I have wondered when I have seen people driving on completely flat tyres.

I was reminded that most men when passing a female with a sick car will shout abuse. However there are a few decent people out there and I am very grateful to the two people who let me use their mobile phones and to the man who leant me a decent wheel brace.

I’ve aslo learned how frustrating it is when your body lets you down. My knee has been playing up a lot recently and I am finding it very difficult to crouch or kneel. Even harder to get up again. As I couldn’t find the key to unlock my wheel covers I didn’t manage to get stuck sitting in a puddle next to a broken down car without a mobile phone. I did however get to feel pathetic for not changing my own tyre.I’ve also found out that my wheel size has become obsolete again. I replaced my 13″ rims with 15″ rims because no one was making tyres for them. Now they have changed back again to 13″. Strange. It also looked like my favourite tyres were no longer available for either size, but after a lot of searching we may have found some, keep your fingers crossed.

I returned a silk wholecloth to a customer today. Which was great. It was a stressful project but I thought it looked great when it was done. Silk dupion over wool wadding, just yummy. I have had plans for a while to make me a two layer silk sleeping bag. This has made me more tempted than ever.

Finally this was just what I needed to hear today. It has been a long and not terribly sucessful day. I love it when a student can take away something useful from a class. I really don’t mind what that is,  I do accept that sometimes it will be “this is not for me”, but it is nicer when it’s something really useful. Even if it wasn’t technically what I was teaching It also shows it is worth taking your sewing machine instruction book to class with you. Most tutors know a lot of machines but not all of them.

One last lesson, black cycle shorts, always black.

Ricky’s quilt made it back.

Ricky has his bag back, complete and intact. He thanks everyone who made a noise about this and made United Airlines take note. They have been speaking to him today and when they actually tried they found it and got it back to him very quickly. It shows that when they want to they really can be quite efficient. Shame it takes this sort of effort to make them want to.

Still the quilts made it home, and all is well.

Anyone work for United Airlines?

Ricky Tims needs a hand getting in touch with a human at United Airlines Chicago. He has had a bag go missing between there and Colorado Springs and well he would REALLY like it back. You can read the whole story here. If you can’t help directly maybe you can ask your friends to see if they know someone.

Back to the frame.

I made it back from Pearoom Quilters safely yesterday. It was a lively group and I had a lot of fun there. I am looking forward to getting some pictures of the samples they made in the workshop. It always amazes me how different they all are, even with the same instructions. The ‘Fur, feather, scale” class works best with a group who are happy to experiment, and this group really were. It is a class where I aim to teach three techniques. Some people will choose to finish one of more of the samples as wallhangings, others only use them as samples to jog their memory later. Whilst I am quite happy with this, a lot of groups perfer a finished project. Saturday there were 15 ladies, having fun and they produced some great pieces. I hope they will get in touch if they make a bigger project with any of them.

I should have taken the time to get some pictures around Heckington, but somehow it never quite happened. The village has a really nice windmill, and although the landscape is very flat (well what do you expect from fens?) it was rather attractive too. I am always a sucker for clumps of tree and large areas without humans. I also found out that the group too their name from their original meeting place, a pea drying hall. I hadn’t thought about how you would dry peas, but I was surprised that they were just laid on the floor of a large hall. To me that seems a very poor use of space, after all peas aren’t very tall are they? I would have expected lots of shelves or something. Still it seems that the method they used gave the community a useful resource, a meeting hall. I also learned that like Ireland the postmen in this area have to know which houses are were, as they have many roads called ‘Fen Road’. I got very lucky as my sat nav delivered me to the correct hall on the right ‘High Street’, many are not so lucky in that area.

On these longer journeys I now travel with some work. Usually some sort of design project. This time I took a quilt top with me to write up it’s pattern. I’ve found that it is the perfect break for me. I guess it gets my brain working again after just staring at morotway and I stay altert a lot longer after the break. Of course the real bonus is I get to make use of otherwise wasted time. I would have to add the measuring large quilts is a car is a challenge, especially when the car is full to the roof with quilts for my talk. It does mean I have another pattern nearly ready for typesetting and testing. I haven’t been able to work much on the Phoenix and Dragon quilt patterns recently. They are taking a lot more work than the pieced quilts. I am having to consider new (to me at least) ways of presenting the pattern pieces, and how to describe what I do. It’s funny vbut the more familiar I am with the technique the harder I find it to describe to other people. On the other hand. If I can get these two figured out it should give me an insight into how to produce a pattern for “Where is the north star?” an often requested pattern despite my best efforts to put people off. It really was a pain to put together. On the other hand for people used to doing hand work or any block with inset/partial seamsI guess it wouldn’t seem so bad.

It’s been great to have a day at home today to get some quilting done. I really do miss it when I can’t do it for a few days. I’ve finished one customer quilt and just loaded up another. I am very fortunate at the moment. I have a large stack of quilts I am really looking forward to. It always helps things go quicker, if I am enjoying the quilt. On that note I suppose I should get back to the frame and stop messing about on the computer shouldn’t I.