Failure

Just to show not all my quilts are something to be proud of. This is the back which looked quite good until I washed it. The yellow then turned a murky greenish greyish colour of yellow. The stippling wasn't fine enough to really put a red veil over the quilt and quite frankly the quilting wasn't too hot either. I knew the tension wasn't right and just kept ploughing on. Some how I felt it 'would sort itself out'. Where that thought came from I have no idea (grin)










The front is a piece of Ricky Tims hand dye. I wasn't happy about how the colour ran and wrote to them. Their reply suggested that it doesn't run with their hardness of water etc..
It went to a quilter's new grand daughter who has no expectation of my work. I'm happy to think it will be sicked over, pee'ed and pooed on (very very big grin)

How very cool is this?

This is a photomosaic done of close up of one of my quilts. Click on it to see how clever this is. I've wasted so much time today playing with this, be warned.....
Here is the photo before treatment,

New little quilt

This is a sneak preview as this is to be entered in a competition. The photo is of about 6" of the little quilt. The whole thing is only 24" square. The echo type background quilting was the first time I've played with this. I love it and will use it again. Perhaps it would be good to give the impression of one of those linen 18th century quilts.
If you click on the photo it will show it up about 4 times life sized.

Yeah! Poo!

The camera has arrived but it runs on different memory cards than the ones I own so hopefully tomorrow I can play with it.

Waiting in for camera delivery

I've included this photo of my helper, Sinclair who last year decided that my Nostalgia quilt was just the one he wanted to get involved with. You can see the temptation, that little silver thing going up and down. And why is it he only wants to sleep on my best works, never the ones I just run up to go on the sofa?

New Camera Ordered

For my sins, I've just ordered an Olympus SP510. I can only hope I've done the right thing. It works in low light conditions, it has 10 X optical zoom weighs only 300gms (without battery and card) and takes AA batteries. The guy I was speaking to thought it absurd to have AA batteries as part of my criteria, but I got caught out before with running out of battery charge and having no way to re-charge or buy a new battery. With AA batteries I can buy them almost anywhere on the planet, even on a Sunday. His answer was to buy more of the specialist batteries at £30-40 a time. I don't think so.
I nearly bought the Fuji at a similar price but it was nearly twice as heavy and I couldn't find any reference to low light conditions.
So I have a camera which cost £100 less than my last one with over three times the optical zoom.
You may get photos tomorrow if it arrives as stated.........

Bad blogger

My apologies. There's not a lot worse than checking blogs only to find there is no new post. I promise to try harder in future.

My little quilt is coming along nicely now I've decided to use YLI Soft Touch. Many thanks to The Tabby Cat who got the thread to me in less than 24 hours. NAYY. Bad news is that I've heard YLI are discontinuing doing the 1,000 yard mini cones except in the basic colours so the search for the perfect thread for my quilting shall go on.
I'm thinking of biting the bullet and buying YLI 100 weight silk for my next big quilt. Though as I use up 13,000 yards on my big quilts, we are talking serious money here. Probably by the time I pay duty and postage, it will be well over £150 for one quilt. This I could live with if I didn't have the worry about the longevity of silk. Silk rots with exposure to air and light. It might have amazing strength but it's lifetime is limited.

Can't give you any photos as I still haven't stopped procrastinating about which camera to buy. Once I've made up my mind on that, I'll be better placed to decide on the thread. I have to save some cash for the show at Sandown next week (grin).

A little something amusing

When my daughter was about 4, I was driving round a particularly nasty round about when she asked,
"Did you buy me Mummy?".

Did I buy you what darling?

"Did you buy ME?"

Buy you what darling?

"Did you buy me?"

It clicked.
No darling, I made you.

"Oh goody, I like all the things you make"

A conversation I shall treasure forever.

Ideas?

I've twenty or so of these blocks done about 5 or more years ago. I don't know what to do with them. I tried taking photos of each block individually and then the plan was to print them out and play with various ideas. The camera kept compensating for balance and the colours went so far off what they really are that this didn't work at all. (BTW is there a way I can get blogger to spell check in English English rather than USA English, I hate it telling me I don't know how to spell colour (grin)).
This was one idea. By the way I have no more of the background fabric and can't get any more.
And another idea, think this one is totally yuk!!

This is marginally better.
Any thoughts anyone? Should I just donate them to Project Linus?
This quilt was made as a solution to the problem, it was going to be the centre (Apparently I can't spell centre either!) with one row of blocks around it. Needless to say this didn't work either.

When you can't do much of anything

Today I woke up after having 8 hours of delicious sleep. I felt great, I'd shaken the cold off and then just three hours later I was back to square one (grrrrr).
XXXXXX my XXXXXXX always says I send myself backward by doing too much as soon as I feel a little better. I'd barely done anything so bang goes his theory but to keep peace and harmony I promised to do nothing today. Well almost nothing.
I designed this little miniature wholecloth. It don't know what the definition of miniature is so maybe this doesn't qualify but it gave me something to do whilst just sitting at the kitchen table. The brown marks look terrible, I starched it and didn't wait for it to soak in. It looks worse in the photo than in real life.
It will wash out along with the markings. I find it quite hard to look at in the photo. The extra lines round the outside of the feathers confuse the eye, but when it's white thread on white fabric and texture rather than colour, it calms down. I also find it quite difficult to draw these organic feathers, my hand keeps wanting to make them even and more formal looking. There's also the thing about keeping it vaguely evenly uneven (grin).
I'm not even sure I shall ever get round to quilting it but it could be worth doing as something to play with. Perhaps over dyeing? Perhaps painting?

Given up and unstitched

It took all yesterday evening and most of this morning but it's done.

On a more cheerful note, even my garden shed looks good on a cloudy day in June. This is the year of the foxglove. Last year I left one spire after the flowers had died and waved it all over the garden, they've come up in all the beds but the best are in a shade bed. Unfortunately today is the day my camera has decided to die so I haven't a photo to show you of these. It started to go through batteries at a rate of knots but now it has used up four new batteries in five minutes so I guess it's time for it to hit the great camera graveyard in the sky. It's served me well and even survived a short dip in the garden pond a year or so ago. And it will cost about a third of it's original price to replace. I don't need anything more than 4 X megapixals though more optical zoom would be lovely.

Tension problems and Bottom Line Thread

I ended up with the top thread tension at very nearly zero and the bobbin quite tight. (It wasn't going to drop easily like it normally does when you test it).

This worked, lovely even stitches with perfect tension top and bottom. Played for a while on my test sample piece then moved over to the quilt. And it worked, then it didn't. I stopped reloaded, did a bit on the sample, went back over to the quilt still it worked, then it didn't. This is very very frustrating. I found the thread every so often was winding itself round the bit of the thread guide which goes up and down (I'm sure this has a technical name but I haven't a clue what it is).

I've found out that this thread is just too springy to go in the top of my machine. As I don't have an alternative thread in the same colour. It's all going to have to all come out and because it's very very fine, the stitches are very very small. What fun......

Bad quilting day

Some days things just don't go well. I don't know if it's because I've a cold or because I've been drawing with a pencil rather than with a needle for a few weeks, or because it's humid or it's just a bad hair day (grin). I tried with Bottom Line in the the top and bottom, then I tried changing the top thread to 50 Madeira, the to YLI Softtouch. Nothing was playing nicely.
Then I tried Bottomline again but this time a cone of it. This was the best I got out of the machine today, so I'm going to stop.
Tomorrow is another day..............

Bottomline Thread

I'm trying to use Bottomline Thread in both the bobbin and as a top thread for freemotion quilting. I'm sure I've used it before but this time I've been fiddling with the top and bottom tensions for about an hour, does anyone have a magic formula?
Sally

More on the 'Perfect Quilt' (see previous posts)

I rang the company selling them and they put me on to the company they buy from. All they knew is that they import them from China but not how they are made.
So a dead end has been reached.

Freemotion couching

As far as I know this foot is only available for Berninas and then not every model.
It's so much fun to play with though finding suitable things which will fit through the hole can be difficult and then one which don't unravel make it even harder.
You can tell I'm new at this blogging business, the photos are in the reverse order I wished and not within the text. I might get better (or not).
The top photo was my very first play with the foot. The next one is a work in progress which I'm feeling in two minds about. The 3rd shows the foot and the 4th is a lovely soft knitting yarn.
It doesn't seem to matter too much what thread you use as it gets buried in the yarn.

Perfect Machine Quilting Photos

^
The ruler is a 6" square

Perfect Machine Quilting

A friend is an interior designer. Ages ago she told me of some commercially available wholecloth quilts, she said they were good. I thought I know she likes machine quilting but she cannot have her 'eye' in properly. This week she told me they were reduced to £39 (about $80) for a kingsize. She has so far used seven of them in various houses she has decorated. I like her taste, so I thought I'd get one for our bed and wouldn't worry about the cat leaving hair or foot prints on it.

It arrived yesterday. It is an ivory, off white colour and machine quilted perfectly. I mean seriously perfectly. Not only is the backtracking exactly on the line but most of the time the needle has gone in the exact same place. Only Diane Gaudynski quilts to this level. The stitches are a little big but I hey, I would be proud to have quilted it. It even has grids about ¼" apart and parallel lines even closer together. It must have been made on a computer driven machine but even so the registration it must have to keep 'on the line' is very impressive. I suspect if it were entered in a quilt competition it would win the machine quilting award.

It has left me wondering 'why strive for perfection'? (I'm a long way off). Perhaps I should concentrate on design and just get these guys to make the quilt up?

I'll post some photos up later today.

It was 40 years ago today....

Sgt Pepper taught the band to play...

I remember it so well, and how wonderful and new. From the cover to the music. Energy.

My 18 year old daughter loves it too.