Granny's Garden done and dusted.

My Granny's garden is now done and dusted. It has taken me a year and a week to complete this quilt. This is quite fast. I needed a quilt to use all of the gorgeous Jelly rolls that I have been given as presents. I found this a great way of using up the fabric, though this was supposed to be a subtle pastel quilt. It is quite soft but not what I had envisioned when I started this project.

I started quilting on this on the 4th of April, so the quilting took me  71 days. The picture below shows my thread before and after the quilting process. I used up a whole sheet of needles and seem to have lost my thimble.
        

I used a butternut binding. I draws out the yellow. The whole quilt is hand pieced and hand stitched. I used silk batting and the quilt is amazingly warm due to this. 

Tomorrow I will start on quilting a poor quilt that has been ignored since 2011.

Have you have an excellent weekend.

Have a good one.

Friday- stuff Done

As I said in my previous post. I am planning on being so busy this weekend. I have been saying for months now that I really want to make mug rugs. Well now I have made one. I have a whole lot more that need completing and then I will be doing some applique ones as well. I was quite happy with how this one turned out. Quilting was fun again except the thimbles that would not stick on my finger.

Eventually I just gave up and used my rubber based thimble. Possible it was the waterproof plaster that I had put on my finger to aid in pressure release. I found that it was two stitches, pull through and then pick up the thimble off the floor where it has rolled to. 

I have finished the backing for my Granny's garden. It is really delicate flowers. I needed to enhance the photo so the the colours could be seen. Without the enhancing it looked like I had taken a photo of a whole lot of white blocks. I think it is pretty.

Here are the bindings that I bought yesterday. Are they not the most fabulous colours. The mug rugs and quilt will look quite handsome wearing these. I made the binding for my Dear Jane . It was actually quite a task. Eventually my whole family was involved in the production. We made about 20 meters, so I still have enough for another quilt.

Hope you all had a great and productive day.

Have a good one!

Dear Jane - quilting completed

 I have just stitched the last stitch of quilting on my Dear Jane. It has taken me 203 days to do the quilting. I had a goal of doing 1 block a day. In my estimation there are 281 blocks that need quilting. This is including the triangles. I sped up with my time off work in December and yay I finished 78 days early.

I like the graph it shows the speed up. I also think it is easier to quilt the closer to the edge you get.

I have used up 1.5 spools of YLI and whole lot of boxes of plasters. I put a plaster on my centre right finger so that the metal thimble does not hurt. I also put a rubberised plaster my pointy finger to improve grip. I like the fact that plasters have become part of craft supplies.

I have been working out numbers for doing the binding. I think with the curves on each block at the most it will be about 4 metres a side. So that is 16 metres of sewing on the bias. 16 metres of tacking the quilt in place and then 16 metres of sewing the bias binding on the back. This makes 48 metres of stitching.

 If I aim for 2 metres a day then the quilt should be finished on the 6th of May. With Easter and all the other holidays that we have in this country this month, I will hopefully finish it before then. It is times like this that I really do question not using my sewing machines to just whip on the binding.
I like being doing it all by hand so I must take the fun of stitching on the binding, just the same as I have with the piecing of the quilt by hand.

The spider is inspecting the work. Please note his hairy legs.

Have an amazing day!

Happy April Fools Day

Welcome April, the only month to start with a Fools Day.

I love the fact that even though we all think we are so advanced in our concepts of civilization, we still practice so many of the Roman holidays. So much of the symbolism that is attached to religious holidays comes from the original Roman holidays. So next time you eat a chocolate bunny, just have a think about why you are doing it. Well yes it is in the very question... chocolate... duh.

March whizzed by with much comings and goings. My daughters’ wedding was lovely. She looked lovely and I did the silly thing of tearing up when I saw my husband walk her down the aisle. She looked beautiful. Yesterday for the first time I saw that she had changed her name on Face book. That was a bit of a moment. I try to be a non-clingy mother and allow her to be an adult, (She is turning 30 this year) but sometimes it is a bit difficult.

Our ASDL line went down for 4 days. Oh the horror! I tried with a 3g USB stick, but the slowness was too much. I was going to use it today if I had to, but, thankfully the line came back last night. First world problems are such a bother.

The weather is getting to be the way I like it. Just the way that goldilocks liked her porridge, neither too hot nor too cold. We had 3 weeks of rain and that was lovely. I know that most people were getting grumpy about the moisture, but I love it and so did the garden. I hope we get a bit more before winter sets in and then we have to hold our breaths until we get rain at the start of summer. Living with no rain for many months is really not nice. Eventually there is soo much static, that you can believe that you have a new super power, and that your name should be either Shocky or Sparky. 

  Progress on the Dear Jane is occurring. I have less that 10% to go. This means that I have 21 blocks left to quilt. Yay! It seems that the closer you get to the corners, the easier it is to do the quilting. I am so excited to think that the end is nigh... LOL. (This is my youngest doing a Kilroy for me)

I finished another YLI quilting bobbin, that makes it number 2. 

I have started have stress however, about the finishing of the quilt. The question that is currently plaguing me is the sequence in which I should do the binding. Currently I think I will stitch on the bias binding, then cut the excess fabric. Then roll hem the cut edge and then finally wrap the binding over and stitch it on the back.

This past weekend, my family helped my make the Bias binding. I think we got just a bit carried away as we made 27 meters of the stuff. I bought polka dot fabric from the one fabric store which is 75 km away and then when I popped into the fabric store that is 2 km away I spotted this fabric. I think it is lovely. I think it will frame the quilt nicely.

The other thing which I have to resolve is how I am going to Label the quilt. The two options are, sewing on the corner like Jane did, or put the label on the back. Which way are you going to do it?

Hope everyone has an amazing April.

Have a good one.