still here – still crafting and researching

Well, I may be a bit quiet on the blog front but my computer time has been swallowed up by a resurgence in my interest in researching my family history. Anc*try is always adding new databases but recently they have added the London Electoral Register and I’ve been searching for where my family members were living. In Australia, home ownership is the norm so it’s strange to find people living in the same few rooms for upwards of twenty years – but that’s the nature of the place and time, I guess.

Anyway, I have also been sewing – I have almost finished a quilt top that started out as a scrappy coin quilt but has turned into something a little different. I have learnt a bit making this “flimsy” but I’ll post about that when I complete the top.

As for knitting, I was shopping at the Big Box Store for fabric but "just happened to wander through the yarn department. A ball of Moda Vera Noemi caught my eye. It was a little more expensive that I would normally pay for an acrylic/nylon blend but the long colour repeats got my attention so I bought one ball and cast on for a simple garter stitch shawl – letting the bouclé type yarn do all the work. I soon realised that one ball (273 yards) wasn’t going to go very far so added another five balls to my collection: one in the original colour way (“turquoise mix”) and two each of “purple mix” and “red mix”. I started the second ball of yarn at the opposite end so the colours change more logically.

I’m reasonably happy with the result but have cast on a second shawl (using the “purple mix”) using needles three sizes larger (6:00mm US 10) and like the drape better.

Happy Second Birthday Darling Boy

Yesterday was our Older Grandson’s second birthday. We didn’t get any photos of him yesterday but I couldn’t resist this one today!

Feeling flat? Finish something!

 eta: I'm linking this post with Thank God it's Finished Friday seen this week at Quilt Matters. This is my first contribution - I hope it won't be my last.


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Last week, the constant grey skies were making me blue and I lacked enthusiasm to do anything much.

So I urged myself to finish something.

Look-ee here!

A bound flannelette quilt (36" x 54")

I finally found some dark flannelette (black to be precise) to do the binding.


But wait – there’s more:

a finished blanket (afghan)

 All the ends from those one, two or three rows of colour have been tied off and hidden inside the binding! (A trick I learnt in a workshop last year with Liz Gemmell.)

The grey skies are back but I’m too busy to be feeling flat!

testing

Carol, at Fun Threads, suggested I try Windows Live Writer to publish my blog posts since I have been having so much trouble with B**

So, this post is a test to see how it works. This is a photo of Younger Grandson taken in November 2011. It loaded to Writer instantly – let’s see how it goes when I post to the blog.

Fingers crossed!

eta: It took less than a minute to come across to Blogger as a draft where I have edited to add this sentence! Man, if you have a Hotmail account, you should really give Writer a go! I'm very impressed (mind you, I have only used it this once!)

Thanks Carol!

PS My previous post, about our first attempt on the quilting frame, has been edited to add photos. The hyperlink will take you to the post with photos. The text is the same as the original but it is a different post because the original post had comments but I couldn't add the photos to the original post!

quilting at last (revisited)

Edited to add photos! Hurrah for “Writer”!

After illness in the family (they've all had colds or respiratory tract infections), DD and the grandsons finally visited our place yesterday. It's only been two weeks but it seems much longer!

DD and I finally got to the quilting frame! We adjusted the way we had loaded the quilt (aeons ago) and taped down the pantograph (thanks C.). It didn't take long before we realised that neither of us is capable of sewing a straight line across the top of the quilt to hold it in place! Much unpicking ensued! (This happened to me two weeks ago and to her yesterday).

So, rightly or wrongly, we decided to pin the quilt top instead of stitching it -- I think hand basting would have been faster since we pin head-to-point!

Then, we both took a deep breath, I put my foot on the pedal and she guided the machine.

The first run (across the width of the quilt) took longer than expected but turned out beautifully!

The second run was good but the last couple of inches (on the right) looked a bit wonky! As you can see, I was able to get my stitch ripper into the little pocket we accidentally created!

We thought it would be okay when the binding was put on so we did a third run. The bobbin thread ran out about two thirds of the way across so we had to stop and wind a bobbin - but why stop at one? We wound five (that's all the empty bobbins we had).
We finally finished the third run (in very poor lighting conditions) and it was then we realised that all was not okay - things on the right side were getting progressively worse and by the time we did the ninth or tenth run at the bottom of the quilt it would be a very big mess.

When we unrolled the already-quilted section I could see instantly where we had gone wrong - we had not pinned the top edge of the quilt top square and straight. Because it curved where we pinned it, it curved all the way down the right side leading to bunching and buckling!


And so, with another big breath and a deep sigh, we did the inevitable - we began unpicking those teeny, tiny stitches!
We will see if we can get away with just unpicking the blocks on the right rather than undoing all our work.

But -- the good news is: the machine behaved beautifully and our tension was spot on! Once we iron out the basics, we should get better (and quicker) at this!