What's on my new design wall

Hooray, I have made a design wall, following the not very successful flannel backed tablecloth pegged to the wall. This was simply too mobile and fabric kept falling off when i turned the lights off or on, so I headed to the hardware shop to see what was available to build a cheap semi rigid design wall.  For the spiderweb quilt, I really need a design wall, as my dog loves to walk on the floor, and ther are too many sections of this quilt to keep picking them up and relaying them again.

In Australia, we don't have the same products that everyone seems to use to make design walls. I ended up buying some sheets of 3 mm mdf, cutting them down to size, and supporting them in a cheap pine frame which I glued to the back of the mdf. Photos in my next post.

Once I covered one with the vinyl tablecloth, I went to a fabric shop to find something for the second panel of the design wall. Bargain - the flannelette was on sale for $3 metre, so I bought 10 m of plain white and 5m of a cute typewriter print. I now have two panels measuring 2.1m (7ft) high and 6 ft wide together. I need to make one more panel to make the whole thing big enough to lay out a full queen size quilt on its side.

As soon as the panels were up, I laid out the finished sections of my spiderweb quilt. They don't all fit! I've still got a couple of webs to lay out and strps cut for another ten. :(. Seems I've made too many, so I have to decide what to do with them. I've made 7 kites so far and they are much slower than the web sections, as they are paper pieced with eight sections for each kite block. I love how they look though.  I'm linking up with Wip wednesday at Freshly Pieced.  http://www.freshlypieced.com/

I have to decide whether I'll make two lap quilts or a super sized quilt and use some of the strips for the kites.

Above is my design wall so far.

Another finish!

The improv star quilt is finished - in plenty of time!  The binding went on today and here it is, still damp, hanging on the clothes line.  I was in a rush to wash it, as a large skink has now pooed on it twice and I managed to scorch the backing fabric when I put on the binding.

Thank heavens, both came out in the wash.

Pictures of each of the corners, and the middle, are below.

Sun/fire

Water

Wind/air

Earth/plants

Middle

There are two swathes of bubbles, each done in a different green.  I think of them as space dust.

I'm linking up with Leah Day's FMQ Friday finishes.

http://freemotionquilting.blogspot.com.au/2013/04/fmq-friday-closet-design-vs-quilting.html

Spiderweb and stars

I saw a lovely spiderweb quilt on-line, but can't find it again.  It is similar to the spiderweb quilt in the Material Obsession book that some people on line have made, but the kites are pieced in circles, similar to the spiderweb section.

I decided I would make a quilt in this style, so raided my fabrics (I only have one box of fabric :)) and have been cutting them up for a week.

Here is the start of the spiderwebs.  I am trying to achieve colourful and varied webs, with nothing to rest the eye on.  My design wall was put up tonight and is a flannel backed tablecloth.  I know that this won't last long, as sections of fabric have already fallen off!

Here are my messy scraps from these blocks.

 I'm not paper piecing the webs, but making them as strip sets and then cutting them.  This gets two different looking webs from one strip set - I'm really happy with how they are turning out.   The fabrics are being auditioned by hanging them off cheap old coat hangers under the house where I sew.  I'm not happy with all of them so am leaving them to hang for a few days until I decide.  Most of the fabric that I haven't used is green and I don't want to buy more fabric for this quilt - so somehow, I'm going to have to make the combinations work.

Some of these combinations are blah, or boring

The improv star quilt is about 2/3 of the way through the quilting - the dark mark is where a lizard pooed on the quilt while it was on the floor overnight.  GRRRR to the skink.  I've tried to wash it out, but will have to wait for the quilt to be finished before I can give it a good soak.  The other marks in the top left corner are just from water to removed the soluble marker in the outer circles.

I'm enjoying this quilting which is unstructured after the last couple of quilts I've made.

Prizes received and finishes achieved

My little prize packet of Aurifil threads arrived.  Lovely colours.  I also won a $50 voucher from the fat quarter shop, through the 2012 FMQ Challenge hosted by SewCalGal.  Sadly, postage to Australia has increased a lot, so I had to pay about another $20 to get a colour card for Kona cotton and two charm packs of Kaffe Fassett fabric.  All the prizes have lovely bright colours.

A couple of weeks ago, I finished my sister's quilt, a red and white double nine patch on point.  It's taken about five washes to try and get the dissolving thread out, and the lines from those stitches still show.  Hopefully a few more washes and they'll be completely gone.  My sister will be coming up for a visit in a couple of weeks, so I won't post it to her but wait to give it to her when she arrives.
Here it the back of the quilt, hanging on the clothes line.  Its the first sunny day we've had in a couple of months.

Here it is lying on the floor - the ripple in the side is only due to the clothes line.  The border is actually flat - hooray.

Border quilting

First alternate motif

Second alternate motif

On the train to work yesterday morning, I also finished hand sewing the binding to my mother-in-law's GMFG hexagon lap quilt.

I also started an improv star quilt as a present for someone.  It didn't take long to piece and I've started to quilt it in the last couple of days.  Progress to date.

OMG

My goodness gracious

I won a $50 prize from the Fat Quarter Shop on Friday, in the 2012 Fmq and then today, won some Aurifil thread from Always Quilting!  I haven't won anything since I was a teenager and got a really cheap &
nasty can opener at the Ekka!

What lovely surprises.  I'm grinning from ear to ear.

More progress

The week didn't start off very well, with my bad Billie dog pulling me off my push bike and slamming me into a wooden bollard.  I suspect I might have a small fracture in my ribs, although they didn't find anything in the x-rays at the hospital.  I've also got skin missing all down my left arm.  Bad Billie.

Today I finally finished quilting the blocks in the body of the double nine patch quilt for my sister.  Hooray!  I've started on the feather border, using high tech tools to mark the curves for the feather spine.

 I've sewn one spine so far and one side of the feathers.  I'm still undecided on what to do with the corners and whether or not I should complete the other side of the feathers.  I quite like it this way.  Maybe piano keys on the inner side of the borders or maybe nothing.  I'd love to hear your suggestions.

 I've also quilted some more of the GMFG blocks.  The real colour is somewhere between these two photos.  I think my favourite quilting block so far is the green one, which I quilted using a chrysanthemum quilting design by Angela Walters.

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.