Australia day long weekend progress

What an eventful long weekend. On Friday night, we had DH's wine tasting. Cyclone Oswald was just starting to make an appearance in SE Qld, so it was raining, but not too bad. On Saturday, I continued to quilt motifs on my sister's quilt, but kept having trouble with the washable marker, as the marks disappeared soon after marking, due to the constant rain, heat and humidity. Sunday morning was no better. It started to rain very heavily throughout the morning and I had to stop to dig trenches in the front yard to get rid of the water pooling on the high side of the house. I also moved lots of things from a concrete ledge to the floor under the house, as lots of water was coming onto the ledge.

In the early afternoon, we went to see if our neighbours needed help moving furniture, as their bottom floor was going to flood. By the time we got back, the bottom of our yard was a foot deep in water and was rising at a rapid rate.

Went into high drive after this, as we were worried that under the house might flood and moved the washing machine, sewing machine and a million other things upstairs. By night time, we were both very tired, but glad to see that the water was draining away and would not reach the house.

Another flood is about to hit Brisbane, while further north, lives are likely to be lost from more flooding.

Today, I moved things back downstairs, as our flooding comes from a local creek in high rainfall and not from the Brisbane river, which is due to peak tomorrow. We have had about 300 ml of rain in the last couple of days, with almost 200 ml on Saturday.

I really needed to do some quilting, so started stitching in the ditch of the GMFG hexi quilt for my MIL then quilted some of the flowers. I know lots of people think that hand pieced hexis should be hand quilted, but ..... Forget it. This one will be hand pieced and machine quilted and bound.

Pics are below. Good luck for tomorrow everyone and I hope not too many houses are flooded. Many have already lost power and phones.

WIP Wednesday

Quilting of the white blocks continues.  I drew a couple of motifs for my sister to choose from and ended up going with this one.

Given that there are 6 x 5 white blocks, and the linear nature of the motif, I decided to quilt this motif on alternating white blocks and maybe use a wreath type motif on the other white blocks.  This would help to disguise any wonkiness in my quilting the first motif as I wouldn't have to line everything up perfectly.

 

I quilted the large motif five times in the first two rows and then thought, why not use the central part of the motif for the other blocks?

Using Don Linn's method to mark the motif onto tulle and then onto the quilt, I tried out the smaller motif.  I didn't quite like its placement, so removed the marks with water.  To my horror, some of the permanent marker was left on the fabric!   I emailed Don to see if he had come across this and he replied that he had not.

As the quilting is nowhere near finished, I tried to spot remove it, to no avail.

I decided to try and hide it by quilting over it and I've now almost completed two rows.  Here are pictures of the quilted motifs.  I'm going to have to try and find another method for marking motifs without a template, as I just can't run the risk of this happening again.  I had the same problem on a section of the border of my mother's quilt.

Finishes or WIPs

Hooray
On Wednesday, I had a few completions.  First, I finished the continuous curves on the double nine patch.  I've now also finished off all the SID in the borders and basted the outside border.  Here is a pic of the basted and continuous curves.  The basting of the nine patches was done with water soluble thread, but with the heat and humidity we've been experiencing, I had a lot of thread breaks.  Hopefully it will wash out.

I hope the basting washes out!

continuous curves

I also finally finished adding the last row of flowers to my grandmother's flower garden.  It has taken ages since we got home, as I have only worked on it on the train to and from work.  Next up is basting it.  I have to have both quilts finished before the upcoming birthdays in late March and early April, and have to send the late March one off to ensure it reaches my sister in time.

I'm glad to have finished this flimsy.  So, two sort of finishes and WIPs this week.

I'm now planning possible quilts for my niece and nephew, both young adults.

Lying on a queen size bed

Hanging in it's own glory

The last stitch

Done on the train home today.  Have to iron it before the pretty pic goes up.

Double nine patch update

I gave my mother the Dresden plate lap quilt yesterday.  I think she liked it.

In the last week or two, I've done lots of utility stitching for my sister's red and white double nine patch quilt, set on point.  I had basted the blocks on my old sewing machine, but simply couldn't do the main quilting on it, as it didn't fit into the harp space so I could move it at all.

I unpicked the couple of continuous curve blocks i had already done and redid them on my new machine.  I have now basted the large nine patch blocks and some of the small nine patch blocks, as I wanted to see if "every stinking seam" did make a difference.  This basting was done with water dissolving thread.

At the end of the day, I don't think my original basting was good enough to warrant basting the small nine patches.

I have now done continuous curves on 37 of the double nine patch blocks.  Only five left to do!  Then 30 white blocks, 22 half triangles, 4 corner triangles and three borders.  There are over 2200 pieces in this quilt, excluding the back.  

Here is a picture of the utility quilting (and the continuous curves). I didn't bother trying to get the utility lines too straight. Hopefully they do wash out :)


I still have to decide what to quilt in the white blocks.

Pictures of Kentuckii Botanica

I finally gave this quilt to my friend for her 50th birthday, a couple of weeks late as they were away on holidays.  I hope she likes it.

I finished it in 2012 and I still love this quilt.  Most of the blocks have been quilted using different fillers from Leah Day's website.  She has great tutorials and helped me immensely in quilting my first bed quilt using Fmq.  I cannot thank Linzi Upton (the maker of the original quilt) or Leah Day enough.

Photos of each of the blocks are below, just so I don't forget the variety.  Rather than a label, I quilted the details into the border of the quilt, surrounded by the January FMQ leaf pattern.  My crazy feathers block was from the Diane Gaudisky challenge.