By sion, on March 28th, 2009%
Today we got to give one of these a test run:
Stupid name, fairly nifty gadget. Took a bit of getting used to, that’s for sure – it would probably be easier to get the hang of it if you’re a freemotion novice, I think. I had to keep shaking myself out of stuff that’s become second nature, and I don’t do nearly as much quilting as some! I did quite a lot of swearing at first, mostly because I kept jamming up against the limit of the opening (eventually I figured out how easy it is to move it along to the next section. Duh. It’s really easy) or was putting too much pressure on and it was obediently skating away. Once I figured out what you’re supposed to do (um yeah no, I did not RTFM, which actually is not like me, so yes it does serve me right) it was fun. I decided to give some twirly vines a la Patsy Thompson a whirl, and sacrificed a semi-ugly piece of fabric and a buttload of thread to the experiment.
 
Far from perfect, but it looks pretty good (better than these pics would indicate, actually). I think I’ll turn it into a cushion.
By sion, on March 22nd, 2009%
not that I don’t enjoy occasionally reading about the minutiae of other people’s lives, including what they eat, but this rather tickled my funnybone.
By sion, on March 22nd, 2009%
Glenny is having a 600th-post giveaway and she wants more entries, so please go visit and leave a comment on this post or this one. The bags look pretty groovy to me!
Ol’ Warty (I do wish you’d give yourself a nick that resonated more with your personality, girl!) has dinged me with this:
The rules are as follow:
1. Put the logo on your blog or post
2. Nominate at least 10 blogs which show great Attitude and/or Gratitude!
3. Be sure to link to your nominees within your post.
4. Let them know that they have received this award by commenting on their blog.
5. Share the love and link to the person from whom you received your award.
I’m kind of going to cheat by saying that she’s on my list, and by also totally not caring whether somebody has already been gonged before. I’m also going to say that I don’t expect the people I ding to follow the above rules, since they’re all busy doing awesome things. So, I’m going to put down the immediately-springs-to-mind names for now (these are also, probably not coincidentally, people whose work I would – in some cases do, even if only by way of an exhibition postcard – totally hang/display/wear) … there are actually more who deserve a gong, but I need to get off my bum & move some furniture.
- Warty Mammal because she makes me laugh and her work is inspiring and because if she lived within cooee we could totally hang in the studio pretending not to hear our nutso kids jump on each other’s heads.
- Kathy Nida, because she makes me laugh and because she works so hard and because I envy her talent and because I wish she lived near enough to have a coffee & a bitch with on a regular basis.
- June because she’s lovely and steady and brave enough to move in an entirely new direction, and even though I’d have loved her to keep making crows and dragons quilts until I could afford to buy one *G*
- Susan Lenz because her grave rubbings are beautiful and the Cyber Fyber postcard exhibition was inspired and CF#2 could be even more exciting.
- Melody Johnson because she’s generous with her techniques and she’s such a great colourist her work literally makes my mouth water and because she contributed to my getting the hell over myself re fusibles.
- I was predisposed to like joanie san chirico because of the name (de chirico being one of my favourite artists and one whose symbols I’ve played with a fair bit), but it turns out her work is just luminous (man, I would kill for that triptych she did a year or so ago), so she gets a gong for that. And because she is apparently awesome at promoting herself and scoring commissions, probably because for starters she spends far more time working than yabbering about stuff, which I really should emulate.
- Ruth de Vos, whose work I’ve only recently discovered. I’m just awed by all that piecing and the beautiful transparency effects she accomplishes.
- Susan M Hinckley‘s blog is terrific and her work ain’t half bad either. Another overachiever.
- PamDora because, well, you all know exactly how groovy her stuff is. Another one who mostly just does the work. I sense a theme developing here …
- Jane Davila because not only does she make gorgeous art, she builds her own studio furniture and stuff, and while I’m a DIYer I’m more of a DIY-bodger than a DIY-legend. My grandma could make furniture, and my dad can, but until they figure out a kind of wood that lets you fudge like fabric does, I can’t.
Grandma was a real doer. Bit of all sorts of very cool stuff; carpentry, lapidary, rockhunting, travelling, stone carving, embroidery (OMG the embroidery), sewing, etc & so on. I keep saying I need to do less yabbering & thinking and just MAKE more work – ie do more making, as against make more (house)work that I will then whine about & avoid, which appears to be the chief skill both my daughter and I possess – so i won’t say it again.
I’ll just think it. And envy those people to whom the just-do-it seems to come naturally, or who at least figured out how to make a habit of it.
oh, sod it, one more. Just because she is the funniest blogger I’ve ever read, and rude in the exactly proper way to make me absolutely roar, and I can’t really share her most hilarious posts with anyone I know in real life because they’re all a bit too old to have peed themselves listening to Derek & Clive. She probably thinks these award things are totally dicky but tough titties: I give you Antonia.
By sion, on March 20th, 2009%
After dropping E off at school and coming home to rinse the sweltering ick off from swapping out the home readers (OMG with the muggy today, bleargh), I made my way down to the showgrounds for the senior cits … whatever it is, show thingy. Expo or something I think they’re calling it, mostly an informational thing but with some stuff for sale. U3A and various oldefarte activity displays as well as a show of art by various locals (seniors, one assumes), people from the council & the library & centrelink, a security systems guy and a woman who vanished before I got around to seeing what she was selling (hrm, maybe that’s where ma got the scooter infobag?). Oh, and quilties, of course, which is why we were there. A bunch of the girls were putting together charity quilts, and they had some stuff for sale and an assortment of quilts on display.
 Mudder figured it would be dead, so we took a bunch of sewing stuff down with us (it wasn’t bad at all really, esp given that the stall was free! heh). She made her first postcard with her first freemotion quilting the other day (and I forgot to get a pic, dammit) and wanted to make some more, so that’s what she did. Despite having left her darning foot at home and nobody else having one that fitted :/ You can do a fairly convincing landscapey-wriggley-lines thing with an ordinary foot though, esp if you lessen the foot pressure, so that’s what she did. I ironed a bunch of scraps to batting, and when she went off to talk I had a crack at the machine and made the centre of this. It was going to be an abstract, just colour exercise really, but it kind of turned into a tree. Well, a bit of one. So then I decided I didn’t want to cut it down so I’d make it up to journal size, which I did, but then I trimmed chunks off because the wide frame was overpowering the centre a bit. I used a lot of holy fabric scraps in this one, and I’m pretty pleased with the result. I may add a little more quilting, but the binding’s on so I guess it’s at least temporarily finished …
By sion, on March 19th, 2009%
By sion, on March 11th, 2009%
 Finished drawing the giraffe at the club meeting today. Isn’t he cute?
After the meeting we went to Connie’s, where I played with some babies, chose the new binding fabric for the club’s member quilt blocks, and bought most of these to (maybe) add to the grandbaby quilt stash:
The star and the odd-nifty mosaic print I grabbed at Big W the other day, the rest from Connie’s today. Not sure how I missed them before, but the oversight’s been remedied now.
thought I’d share the pieces from the other day’s dyeing that I nabbed for myself. The browns lost a lot of colour; that peculiar yellow really isn’t satisfying at all. The last time we used it & it went all washed out I assumed it was because of the absolutely horrible water at sis’s place, but it’s obviously just that dye. I need to make a note of the code so we never buy it again – and if Batik Oetoro ever send it by mistake again they can bloodywell take it back, & on their own dime too! lol Anyway … so I’m going to have to do some browns research using the other yellows and try again, because it was truly droolworthy. The technique itself worked beautifully, and the piece of fabric is lovely, it’s just not as deep and dark and marvellous as it would have been if that yellow didn’t suck. Here are a couple of fat quarters showing back & front because I was experimenting with stripes. I like (not sure why I didn’t grab the rhubarb pink & green one), think I’ll do some more experimenting along these lines.
 
 
 
I totally love that last one. Much brighter green than I’d originally intended, but it looks magical. I need to do some more forests this way, I think – what do you reckon?
There are also a couple of our usual dyepainted FQ which mum did, but one of them is too dark to photograph successfully (I’ll try again in daylight) so I can only show you this really awesome piece:
and then there’s the giant rockemsockem bright I did (1.5m x 1.1m), which also hasn’t photographed very well – there’s a lot more subtle green, and no visible banding IRL – but the pic at least gives an idea. I might have to try it again in daylight conditions:
ok, I’m off to bed.
By sion, on March 9th, 2009%
I always forget how much I love the dyeing when I haven’t done any for a while. Absolute heaven, if you discount the stupid mozzies and sweltering and occasional bastard bloody march fly. Yesterday I rediscovered, with the help of a very peculiar yellow that Batik Oetoro sent us by mistake last year, an absolutely stunning range of rich, warm browns. Toffee, butterscotch, burnt sienna, burnt umber, rust, mahogany; those sort of colours. So yum, especially with hints of greens and golds and magenta/violet. I was just going ooh brown, brown, brown, let’s have some more brown! I didn’t get any pics of those or the bits I experimented on using paintbrushes, but I thought I’d share a couple I took while I was still clean enough to handle electronics. They’re cropped to detail level because despite being overcast good grief it was a BRIGHT day and the camera just could not cope with the shadows & lights, not even with the flash on. I toyed with the idea of taking a supplemental pic of the really groovy fake varicose veins I somehow gave myself, but decided to spare you the sight of my ungroomed extremities. Since they didn’t get dry enough to bring home with me, Mum finished up the washing & ironing (how unusual … not) and I gather now I might have to fight her for my favourite piece. I obviously need to make more so we can bear to part with some (Judy said today “you know you are supposed to actually sell it, right?” heh).
in other news, how lucky am I? I’ve been geeking out a bit lately trying to set up Ken’s new computer and wipe the laptop so he can pass it on to the next NSAA secretary, and they bought me Jane Davila & Elin Waterston’s Art Quilts At Play. So stoked. I rarely buy books, but I had decided I was going to get that particular one, so how cool is that?
(PS Matt, I emailed you, so if it disappears into the spamfilter abyss let me know)
By sion, on March 7th, 2009%
 How do grandparents avoid going completely bankrupt? Every time I go to the shops there’s something else so damn adorable I find myself squeeing. Actual out loud squeaking “oh my god how cute it that!” and I’m not actually a squealy kind of person. Sorta the opposite of a squealy kind of person actually. It’s lucky they’re not expecting a girl, or I’d be in even more trouble. It’s also lucky I’ve completely forgotten how big babies’ feet are and stuff, or I wouldn’t have been able to resist the little camo baby tennies or checkerboard pseudo-vans. So much deadly cute stuff now that wasn’t available in oz even 5 years ago. So far I’ve resisted the fake fur vests and stuff because I realise that my particular weird for fur is not everybody’s, but I REALLY had to struggle not to buy the teeny tiny little lumberjacket because OMG. Teeny little lumberjackets, and teeny little flannies. I actually went “eeee!” And then kind of hid around the corner from the deadly cute in case anyone heard me, how embarrassment (BTW, I can actually speak the Queen’s properly, we just play sillybuggers with words in my family. I ain’t that particular kind of stoopit, sorry if it irritates anyone). Anyway, so I resisted mightily and just grabbed a few cuties that were on sale –> I don’t know why I have a thing about camo, but I do. Also about overalls, and stripes. How cute are those overalls going to be over the striped T?
since I haven’t done anything exciting, I’ll leave you with a couple of examples of my daughter’s drawings on this week’s homework. I love the glimpses into her noggin … salad and (making a nutella) sandwich for S are a long way from easy subjects, and the candle-blowing profile blew me away. Seems like only yesterday she was still drawing stick-figures with lollipop heads, you know?
 
By sion, on March 4th, 2009%
we had a mad, mad thunderstorm here tonight. It was a while after sunset, but the sky was so full of clouds that it was white from reflected light instead of dark. I was sitting here watching the lightning and flinching at the thunder and an eagle flew past my window! Awesome. You see them around a bit, but usually so far away I can’t even get a recognisable photo even at full zoom on one of the good cameras. Seeing one about 10 metres away, dead on eye-level, was pretty damn cool.
I did a bit of work while my shows (House & Life) were on tonight, after the storm blew over. Tortoise is ready to plonk on his block, giraffe’s got a bit to go – I need a couple of new pens, which hopefully Connie has in stock.
By sion, on March 4th, 2009%
I’ve been struggling this week with the whatever-it-is that wipes me out semi-regularly, so not a great deal accomplished. I’ve had a headache for over a week now, really giving me the pip. I think it’s my old friend the sinus boogeyman, and given the occasional stabbing possibly his friend the inner ear greeblie, and I’m waiting to see if it resolves on its own. I’m pretty over that feeling of having been punched in the eye from inside, I tellya. Anyway, so this week’s kind of been a bust so far … Monday I spent at Judy’s fiddling with computers and eating barbecued roast, yesterday was quilters and I actually made it along (I get a bit hesitant about going if I’ve got a cold or anything, given the number of antique attendees – I’d hate to be responsible for killing off our old dears!). The gang from Quilters World was there doing a talk & selling some stuff, which turned out to be as entertaining as it was expensive. Pauline & Sue both bought some of our fabric – Mum was uncharacteristically disorganised and in a dither about it, so I hope they were impressed enough by what they bought to overlook the lapse in professionalism *G* – and then we spent a bit more than we made on an assortment of products (12″ nonslip ruler, 1/4″ seam ruler, gloves, ceramic marker, glue, special paper, a new teflon mat, and I can’t remember what else). Pauline did say she’d know where to send people now for beautiful hand-dyes, so let’s hope, hey!
Mother got her convergence top done, so you can have a photo of that:
 Scuse wonkiness; it’s in the camera, not the quilt top. She’s not sure what she’s going to do sashing/border-wise yet, but I think it’s going to look awesome. She’s making noises like she’s going to quilt it herself, too – usually she tells me I have to quilt things when she’s finished, but she bought those fawncy quilting gloves and mumbled something about Judy telling her she has to do some quilting …
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