Buy it or Work out how to Make it?

The obsessive rabbit hole that I fell into this week was all to do with Travel Journals. I have been accumulating stationery for my (grown-up) children to keep holiday diaries like they did when they were little. Obviously, I had to watch copious Youtube videos and several of the channels recommended a pouch by Delfonics to in which to keep all of the bits and bobs. Those pouches are Japanese and cost a minimum of £40.00 so I decided that I could make my own. Firstly, I ordered a pdf pattern which cost me $5.00 then I had to watch 4 painful episodes on YouTube in which the maker kept apologising for making mistakes like the pockets being too small to hold pens. I got the gist and make my first prototype. 

I used very heavy duty canvas which was not conducive to making square corners so the next one I had a go at had rounded corners. The thing was getting the zip band to fit the circumference of the bag panels. It has to be considerably smaller and my maths is not up to figuring out ratios so I worked by trial and error. I spent FAR more time figuring out this project than I should have so if I had bought the Delfonics pouch for £40.00 I would have been quids in;) Well, now I have drafted a pattern which I will refine further to include pockets with gussets and a super-neat lining.  Eventually I will make a Youtube video which I hope will be easy to follow!

Nella had asked if “we” could make her a quilted jacket which meant could I order the fabric, quilt it, cut it out and work out how to put it together. I spent a long, stressful day figuring out how to put the relatively simple jacket together so I could post it to her in Norwich. She is delighted with it but has not sent any photos. My selfie does not really show it off properly…

Since I was spending so much time in the workshop, I managed to get a couple of customer quilts done in the background:)

Time to Redeploy a Planner

While my kids were still at school, Life was pretty busy, getting them to where they needed to be, running a business and entering quilt competitions but at least there was a schedule. These days, I don’t have many time commitments so I can please myself how much work I do. The trouble is that I make myself try to get too much done, all at once, so I hardly ever allow myself any down-time. I felt so harassed that I dug out a planner that I used to have in 2019 up until Life came to a grinding halt when Nella was ill. I don’t know whether keeping a planner again will help but I think it is good to see what can be done realistically when it is written on paper. The thing is – I do keep a notebook where everything I think of gets jotted down but it is a bit messy and difficult to see what are appointments in amongst the scribbles.

I have in fact got all sorts of things done work-wise but I have not brushed Nessie every day, gone swimming, caught up with friends or done any fun sewing! That is not a good balance between Life and Work…

The BIG job that I had to do this week was a custom red and white quilt. The blocks were too big on-point to quilt in one go so I decided to use triangle blocks instead. These had to be precision placed so everything would line up. I also had to fit in a border and corners, do stitch-in-the-ditch and a million one-inch circles. It all took almost 20 hours!

It was a relief to go from that to all-over basting a quilt that a customer wants to tackle herself with straight line walking foot quilting on her domestic machine. 

I had to finish making and photographing samples for my Zoom lecture for the Scottish branch of the QGBI next weekend. I also had to write instructions in case anyone wants to make the whole quilt. This involved working out fabric quantities which I did not do in advance when I made it;) Two slideshows will accompany my lecture; one of step-by-step photos of the construction process, the other showing the development of the original ”Help ma Boab!” quilt.

The other major task was to sort out all of the “Tech” that I plan to use for my lecture. I have a lot of Tech but I needed to round it all up, charge it up and work out how to place it. My plan is to have a laptop so I can speak directly to it and show slides but also a wireless mic so I can move around and 2 other cameras (with lights) at my cutting table and sewing machine! The Go-Pro cameras also need battery packs because they use up their batteries too quickly. Of course, it should all be straightforward but isn’t – despite having the correct cables the laptop would not pick up the mic I wanted to use so that took a lot of time faffing around until I found the solution. Afterwards I had a whole lot of reorganising to do. My plan is to practise on Tuesday so I can sort out any glitches.

I hope this week is less frenetic – I have even managed to write a meal plan to take out the stress of deciding what to cook at the last minute. One thing to be positive about is that we have now passed the darkest 10 weeks of the year and there are signs of Spring:)

In the Pink

I was 56 on Monday which means it is almost 16 years since I started blogging! I have been thinking… do I have a good work / life balance? Am I creating enough? Am I having fun? Does any of it even matter?! I certainly don’t seem to travel as much, mostly due to Nessie, costs and probably the state of the world. I am trying to be more focussed as I am easily distracted and that can be overwhelming.  

I “allowed” myself some time off for my birthday and had a lovely lunch out with a friend but I still felt guilty for not being busy all day.

I guess I made up for it for the rest of the week. I tentatively started the pink iris panel with its computerised designs. The advice had been not to move anything on screen and there was actually only one place where the designs overlapped a tiny bit. It was tricky, not placing the designs using markers and there were often undefined areas on the fabric where it was difficult to see if there was an actual petal. It does look good though and I would like to do it again if I can source the panel. It only seems to be available from the USA at huge shipping costs. Speaking of which – the Tula Pink butterfly quilt kit that I ordered from America cost me £68.00 in post followed by the same again in customs so I probably ended up paying the equivalent of the £300.00 that Cotton Patch UK charges for the kit!

I plan to make another short Art & Stitch video, mostly so it sinks into my own brain. I have read the manual and watched all of the available tutorials but the programme still confuses me sometimes. I am trying to learn it inside-out to become an expert well before my teaching retreat in June.

In February I am giving a Zoom lecture and demo about “Help ma Boab” to Region 16 (Scotland) of  the QGBI. Apart from checking that my tech all works, I need to write clear instructions on constructing a block. I had my usual rough notes and some photos but I had to start from scratch in order to write a pattern. I suppose I don’t know at the start of a quilt project that it might become one that I need to recreate;) I discovered that the blocks are far more complex that they seem at first. First there is the reverse appliqué hole, then the rickrack and silver lamé attached by tiny, accurate blanket stitches. Then there is the cutting and placing of the vinyl circles, decorative machine stitching where all of the thread tails need to be sewn in, followed by kantha-style hand stitching!

February starts next week – as well as keeping on top of the projects that I have started for Art and Stitch / Qmatic consolidation, I need to pick up the pace and get back onto customer quilts. No wonder I have to write basic things like, “Brush Nessie” on my do list or they just would not get done!

Allsorts Achieved

It was a snowy week – not that much snow to be honest, although the roads were bad but it was COLD in my workshop. I have just got a digital thermometer out there and yesterday when it was beginning to warm back up it was only 5 Celsius! I was not out there very much unless dressed like an Arctic explorer. I managed to quilt a second sofa cover from fluffy fleece and anti-slip-rug-stuff. I had a bit of a panic when I got an error message that the Q-matic system was not recognising its motors but I discovered that cables had got dislodged by accident when I left a drawer open underneath so it was easily fixed.

I have loaded a digitally printed panel to practise using complex Q-matic designs. I am following the advice of a closed Facebook group and have basted it with a million pins which took me hours. I have even ordered a suede welding apron so I don’t snag my clothes on the offending stabby pins every time I lean over it.

I spent a lot of time on my computer this week which always feels a bit of a skive because it is so easy to get side-tracked by Youtube and online shopping. However, I did reorganise lots of documents, sent some files off tho Quilt Direct relating to the Art & Stich retreat in June and I made a video explaining how the backdrop tool works:) I “wasted” some time figuring out how to customise the boring blue folders on my Mac desktop but now I can easily find the folders I want. I admit to doing some procrastinating as I actually sorted out the pantry where everything just gets piled on top of each other (by other members of the household).

I had a blustery but lovely day in St Andrews with Freya. It is such a nice small town which even has a seaside and she enjoyed reminiscing about her Uni days there. I left early to beat yet another storm home. Hopefully it will not be too bad this far north – fingers crossed that any rain gets dried up quickly by wind because I can’t stand the thought of mopping up yet again.

Crunch Time

I drove back from Norfolk listening to an audiobook which passed the time easily – Kate Atkinson’s “Normal Rules Don’t Apply”. Even though I had taken some craft projects with me I did not even look at them. I made a slightly rash purchase of the Tula Pink butterfly quilt kit and companion digital designs. I think it was due to a combination of not having a planned project and feeling that working with the digital patterns would be a good learning curve. 

Freya was home when I got back to get her broken front teeth fixed (again). I had been meaning to book a dental appointment myself as I have not been since 2019 and one of my molars has been bothering me. I was angrily crunching breakfast cereal and thought there was something hard in the mix. A large chunk of tooth had broken off! Fortunately, the dentist was able to mend it the next day. My hideous 1970’s metal fillings were the culprit. These were liberally used as a preventative measure if any sign of decay was spotted in children’s teeth but they expand and contract, causing cracks. It is a crying shame that there are so few NHS dentists these days as it is so expensive to get check ups and treatment.

I used the excuse of having a visitor for not getting back into my workshop which feels COLD. I eventually gave it a surface-level tidy and plan to get back in on Monday, starting with an easy second sofa cover. My main focus is to put together course-work for my classes and retreat at Quilt Direct in March and June and promote it on social media. Firstly though, I have an online talk and demo on Zoom in February so I need to practise setting up all of my Tech. It feels like a lot to get done but if there is a List then I can work through it;)

Woeful Weather

Nessie and I travelled back to Scotland by train which is a long way with a dog on your lap, sometimes the floor. She was very good, especially at Edinburgh Waverley where we had 10 minutes to change platforms. Thistle (Fizz) was delighted to see me and was especially pleased that she could get access to my bed. Meanwhile my room had been turned into a recording studio and Nella’s room seemed to have been filled with the junk that everyone else had decided they no longer wanted in their rooms. It seems that I will have some serious sorting to add to my list of pre Christmas preparations and my general ever expanding To-Do list. 

We had extreme weather again this week with temperatures so low that it was minus something in my workshop. Since I had received chase-up calls from customers wondering what had happened to their Christmas quilts (they did not say they were Christmas quilts), I had to wrap up and get on with it. I am so glad that I was on top of things before I went away so I “only” had to quilt 2 and bind 5! I have now declared that I will not try to do any more customer quilts this side of Christmas:)

After the freeze, we had rain and more rain and I had to put sandbags outside the workshop door as the water was rushing off the field and 6” deep in the trench outside. This used to happen occasionally but now it happens several times a year and I have to shift everything and hope for the best that I just have to dry the carpet out afterwards. 

I caught up with Mo and asked her very nicely if she would be able to staple some scrap fabric onto a swivel chair that I found in the yurt. She found some fabulous leopard-print corduroy and I had the chair back together later that day.

I have been frantically doing some online shopping without any success for Nella then realised that I had intended to make her a bunny cushion from an Elizabeth Hartman pattern. Luckily, I had already cut out the 60-odd tiny pieces to make a small bunny in dungarees. I took most of Saturday to do the single bunny block then I made a random patchwork cushion back in case she does not want to see the bunny all the time. 

Jings, Crivens, Help ma Boab!

Since the nights are light and none of my kids are home just now I have been working long hours on my Circles quilt. The deadline for the FoQ competition entry is midnight on Monday and the quilt has to be finished and sent to the show by about July 24th. 

Suddenly I needed to get it going and order the backing fabric and decide on further embellishments. I had to decide on a name, write an artist statement, list materials and techniques, declare the size, and upload a photo – all on an unfinished quilt. 

I used my industrial heat press to flatten the blocks in case I stretched them with an iron. I defied Quilting Law by pressing the seams open and decided that they were definitely flatter and easier to line up. I had made the blocks deliberately oversized but some of the rings were JUST outside the seam allowance after being trimmed so I decided to gloss over that by couching some sparkly yarn down the seam lines. Laying out the blocks on my table was mind boggling. I could not work out whether to group the blocks according to colour or try to make a regular pattern. In the end I went as random as I could. I was very careful to pick the blocks up exactly as I had set them down and joined them in diagonal rows to create an on-point layout.

While I wait for the backing fabric to arrive I will get on and make some fancy prairie points and see if I can be bothered to make many, many tiny tassels to insert into the binding. I have also ordered some tiny bells (but no tiny pompoms)…

“Jings, Crivens, Help ma Boab!” is a phrase used by Scots cartoon characters in Our Wullie and The Broons to express exasperation, frustration and / or amazement. It is thought by some linguists to translate to Jesus, Christ, Help me God. Modern texters might just type ffs!

The quilt has now been named “Help ma Boab!” Perhaps it should have been something more arty like “Glimpses”? but the first idea appealed to me more.

Finally got a-ROUND the circles!

Almost my whole week was spent stitching around a seemingly never ending supply of circles. Some of the circle-squares had 8 processes – reverse appliqué circles, stick silver lame to reverse (some with ricrac), blanket stitch around the silver circles, sew in thread tails, cut and heat press coloured and metallic rings, zig-zag or triple stitch around the coloured rings, sew in thread tails, stitch around the big zig-zag rings twice with silver thread, kantha-style stitching around many circles. Finally they can be carefully pressed and trimmed, then pieced together. 

The next dilemma is whether to add blue sashing as “punctuation”. The trouble is that I will feel compelled to embellish the sashing in some long-winded way… I was getting quite bored with the hand-stitching by the end!

Two customer quilts got done and I had a day in Edinburgh giving tuition to a new Q20 owner. That machine was fixed in a table, not moveable on a frame so it was not my usual longarm quilting skillset. I know how the machine works, of course, but the method of quilting and some operations are a bit different. 

Summer is racing on now that June has arrived. I need to decide if I can get the quilt ready for FOQ and I must work out a rough plan for Nella’s summer holiday. I can’t work out where the time goes!

Don’t Make Me Paint the Kitchen!

My wonderful blue fridge conked out after 26 years and I got fed up with traipsing across to the garage every time I wanted milk so I ordered a new, orange one. It is NOT the same. I guess I will get used to it eventually but it has reminded me that the last time I painted the kitchen was 23 years ago. I really ought to freshen it up but that will highlight the disgusting ceiling, covered in stains and cobwebs, and that is a job I do not wish to tackle until it collapses.

I had also considered painting my room but I decided an easier way of cheering it up would be to create a plant window. I hope I can keep them alive – some like water while others do not.

I don’t know why I never thought of it before but this week I watched some telly on my iPad while the quilt machine was running. I avoided stuff with foreign subtitles and managed to do some hand-stitching. While The Coronation was on I stitched around 100 reverse appliqué silver lamé circles with a machine blanket stitch. The Bernina knee-lift was marvellous for lifting the sewing machine foot every couple of stitches. I have set myself the task of sewing in all of the thread tails which is not something I would have bothered to do previously. 

I spent a whole day cutting out and heat-pressing circles onto 100 more squares. As usual I thought this would take a couple of hours at most which just proves that I always underestimate how long things really take;) Since I seem to be steaming ahead with this project I should really get around to entering it into FoQ, particularly as I have not made a competition quilt since 2019!

We’re Gonna Need a Bigger Boat!*

I made the long solo trip back from Norfolk on Monday, helped along by a packet of M&S giant chocolate buttons. I unloaded the car but still have not unpacked. Before I left I had prepared a customer quilt with a tight deadline so I had to get straight on with it the next day. It was a hexagon quilt that 2 sisters had completed for their 92 year old Mother. The layout was unusual because instead of a simple flower-garden layout, it had random patches of colour as it was actually a herbaceous border, which I thought was very clever. 

The next quilt was HUGE at 110” square and it only just fitted onto my frame after I removed a couple of fittings at each end. I had a 14 ft. quilt frame for years and rarely needed that extra space but now that I have a more modest frame I have had 2 enormous quilts arrive within days of each other. I am told that they were lockdown projects that just kept getting bigger. The pineapple log cabin quilt looks fantastic but it is really heavy and I am not sure I would like to make a bed with it on a daily basis;)

While the quilt machine was doing its thing and I was keeping a close eye on things, I did some hand-stitching on my circles. I have no idea whether I will finish this project in time for Festival of Quilts but that is my intention. 

On Saturday a customer brought in a wedding quilt with a stained-glass central area. She wants to add embroidery later but she was not keen on the easiest / quickest option of simple background quilting. We settled on a leaf motif in the HST blocks which I had to edit in ArtnStitch to remove its pantograph tails. The central area was quilted stitch-in-the-ditch with invisible thread. 

I have a few more quilts to do next week – it seems to be either feast or famine. I have not made a video for a while so I should really do that if I hope to get more than 300-odd Youtube subscribers!

*In the 1975 hit movie “Jaws”, Martin Brody, the Police Chief of a small summer resort town in the northeastern United States, utters one of the most quotable lines in film history when he gets his first up-close look at the Great White Shark.

Going Round in Circles

The trouble with having a phobia about Maths is that I can waste a lot off time trying to work out a simple problem. I wanted to cut out a lot of concentric circles in t-shirt vinyl that were either ¼” or ½” wide but I had to convert them to decimals and factor in gaps. Long story short – I tried to come up with a new set of circles, even though I already had a perfectly good set of circles because as usual, I was over complicating matters. I eventually spent a whole day cutting out a life-time supply of circles which somehow I have to share equally between the inset circle-squares that I have made. 

It has been rather chilly for April but finally we had a decent day so we headed to Stonehaven for a dog-walk and takeaway coffee from a wee cafe near the harbour. 

Nella has been busy working on Uni projects during her holidays and I have gone from hardly any customer quilts to half a dozen, including a couple of really big ones. I have loaded one up to get started straight away when I get back from Norfolk as I am taking Nella back to Norwich for Term 3 of first year. I am taking some of my circles project with me but it is unlikely that I will have time to work on it but at least I can if I have the opportunity;)

Project Samples

As well as dealing with admin and having the girls home for part of this week, I got a customer quilt done, joined the Caravan Club, and worked on sample blocks for the quilt that I might make next. 

I am still not set on exactly what it will entail. I think it will probably feature silver only centre circles. I have not yet decided whether to stick to one size or whether to make smaller 4-patches. I don’t know whether to keep complementary colours for each block or allow a rainbow of coloured rings. I could also stack the rings without any gaps. I have to choose between neon quilting thread or multi-coloured. I feel that it needs some hand quilting and for some reason I want to quilt solely with straight lines… 

The other idea that I had is still very much in the background – it was to do something using zeroes and ones, like binary code. I think I will need to make a batch of blocks and see where it goes;)

Ultra Bunting

What would you do with 2 weeks to go until an exhibition? Tackle the jobs that need doing OR suddenly decide that you need to make 12+m of over-the-top bunting to hang across the front of the stand? I had a few blocks left from Rainbow Warliors that I sewed together, some leftover squares that I screen-printed, some sequins and pompoms that I attached to bells nylon thread and then I “had to” make about 20 large pompoms from wool! The resulting bunting echoes the theme of Rainbow Warliors and is fabulous but worryingly heavy. I have visions of visitors to my exhibition being garrotted by low-hanging bunting.

Another part of my week was filled with doing a rush-job quilt for someone who wanted to take a quilt to friends in Australia. 

I also gave a Zoom lesson on how to quilt lettering using Q-matic. This is quite a tricky topic and I will need to make accompanying videos but won’t have time until the exhibition is done and dusted. I fully intend to work my way down a comprehensive to-do list;) 

One of the things that is taking a long time to achieve is putting together a slideshow to accompany a talk that I will be giving about competitive quilting. I have had to go back through 15 years of photos. I am appalled at how blurry some of these are – it could be that they have become compressed after being stored on 3 different computers, they were taken in low light indoors without a tripod, and the camera/ phone quality was not as good as the photography gear that I own now. I have had to search for images through obscure folders, assign titles and put them in order, which all takes ages. It has been fascinating to reflect on quilts that I thought were pretty good at the time and also to appreciate just how many quilts I have actually made!

Tinkering with Tech

I probably spend as much, if not more time, researching and messing about with Tech than I actually DO anything with it. I have become a serious Nerd about tripod ball heads, cold shoe mounts and “overhead rigs”. What this really means is suspending a camera above a table in order to get a birds-eye view of a project. The main issue is that even small cameras will weigh down articulated camera arms. My solution was to attach a straight arm to a pole clamped onto the table and use a tripod ball head to change the camera angle. 

I made 2 videos this week that I have yet to edit on sewing scrap strips with the Bernina L890 to make new patchwork “fabric”. It all takes longer than you would imagine to make a short instructional video – to practise the technique, make sure the film and sound gear is working, then edit out the pauses and bloopers.

I also had a haphazard list of things to do at some point this week, some of which actually got done. I had bought a mini Dyson second-hand to hoover up fluff around my sewing machines but it did not have a charger. I got a non-branded one from Ebay but the battery kept dying, I was ready to chuck it out when I came across a Youtube video advising me to wash and dry all of the filters. So far, the issue is resolved! 

I have an exhibition coming up in March – The Creative Craft / Scottish Quilt Show in Glasgow. I have a generously sized space but the quilts that I want to take are all large and will soon fill up the wall space. I wondered whether I could make a slideshow of the rest of my quilts and play it on a digital photo-frame. Most of those have small screens which would not have much of an impact. I was rooting around in cupboards upstairs looking for a backpack when I came across the old family iMac computer. It had become very slow and semi obsolete but I wondered if I could use it for a slideshow. I fired it up and experimented with moving some photos into an album and as long as I can find something to balance it on at the show I will be able to show my quilts off on a big screen. I have already googled vintage tea trolleys, antique plant stands, bar stools and fake Greek columns…

When I managed to avoid spending hours pointlessly researching on the internet, I have done some stitching on the crazy coat. I have got the pockets done, even though the prairie points are not facing the way that they were in my head. I made a bit of a hash of trying to do lazy-daisy stitch until I watched a tutorial where the Stitcher used an embroidery hoop, After quite a while my “daisies” became a bit more uniform. For me hand-sewing is awkward and anyone watching would wonder how I could be so cack-handed. Some of the stitching looks awful but I am working on the premise that nobody will squat down to peer at the bottom of the back of my coat to scrutinise;)

Haggis Collection

I am back home after a quiet week in Norfolk where I spent some time settling Nella back into Uni life and taking my folks out for coffee. Time passes weirdly quickly without anything much happening there. I did some hand-stitching on my quilted coat pieces and some mending on my Mother’s 50+ year old Bernina Record. 

My sister asked me to help run up some haggis-style beanbags for her Cub Scout group. They are going to be used to play some sort of “catch” game on Burns Night. I made a prototype which passed muster so she did the cutting out while I sewed up 4 more haggis friends. I have no idea what the plural for Haggis might be or even if there is a collective noun;) Their snouts are gathered and tied with linen thread then secured with cable ties. I have visions of them spewing rice all over the village hall if they burst!

Nella and I had a road-trip to North Norfolk one dreary day for a change of scene but we did not go and visit baby seals down the coast since we had Nessie with us. 

The journey home took under 10 hours in my lovely Volvo which is really good going. I am getting used to driving up and down – the next visit will be in just 3 weeks’ time for my Mum’s 80th birthday. We used to visit once a year but since Nella went for her Uni Open Day last April, I have already made 5 trips!