Where in the world…

Only one more sleep until we set off on our home exchange adventure to England and France. Shame about the long haul plane journey to get there. As a child, when we used to go a family holidays (to much more modest destinations), we would often play “I’m an Ant” to pass the time. The game involves one person selecting a location somewhere in the world and everyone else trying to guess it through an elimination process of questions that must be answered with yes or no. An extra degree of difficulty was usually added with the very young members of the family answering the questions somewhat randomly. Anyway, I won’t make you play “I’m an Ant”. Our broad timetable is:

29 - 1 May: London
1 - 17 May: Axat, France
17-19 May: Edinburgh
19:31 May: Yorkshire Dales
31 -2 June: Kent
2-5 June: London

I will endeavour to update the blog from time to time but do not expect to be able to include photos until early June. I’ve added some weather links to my blog side bar if you are interested in seeing whether the European spring is treating us kindly. A toute a l’heure…

Digital Photography for Textile Artists

Quilts can be pesky things to photograph well but your chances of getting good photos will be enhanced if you read and heed the thoughtful guidelines of Holly Knott and Andy Laird which are posted on Holly’s website at: www.hollyknott.com/stq/index.htm I’m sure that many of us will find this a useful resource.

Who needs a gym?

when your local council provides your very own stairmaster:

Actually, there are many sets of steep stairs around Copacabana connecting those from the “dress circle” to the beach. This particular stairmaster has 58 steps conveniently spaced a stretched stride apart with a wicked incline from about step 32. It seems like no matter how many times I bound up the stairmaster each week, I am still panting and breathless at the top. It’s great aerobic exercise.

Oh, in case you’re wondering, I don’t live on the dress circle (more like tucked behind the cheap seats where someone could still come along and spoil the showview) but have incorporated the stairmaster into my daily constitutional so that I can feel virtuous now and then. But enough of the halo polishing, back to my “to do” list.

A Quiet Weekend - Well Kind Of

Twas a quiet weekend - at least all quiet on the sewing and packing front. Back in Guild Exhibition Secretary land, it was a flurry of activity as we have allocated quilt numbers for this year’s record 377 (count them!) entries and I am now able to generate a bunch of different spread sheets, letters, catalogue lists, reminder e-mails etc etc. Oh and update some html folders for the guild’s website and liaise with our new photographer. This show business is an ENORMOUS logistical undertaking. I’m not looking for violins, but next time you go to a guild show, spare a thought for all those volunteers behind the scene. Off to the city today to do lots of printing on the guild’s nice new laser printer and to prepare a handover folder for my guild colleagues to refer to while I am gallivanting around France and England. I leave you with a picture of this year’s raffle quilt Daisy Meadow:

Quilting in French

I am indebted to Francoise from Belgium for coming out of lurkdom to introduce herself, her new blog space AND for letting me know:

“To quilt” translates into “matelasser”. But for the craft, we say “quilt’ or “patchwork”. And “quilter” for the verb. “Quilteuse” for the (usually old) lady who does it.

Francoise also writes that the quilting scene is fairly traditional in Belgium “apart from a few renegades”. Watch out for those quilting revolutionaries!

Some reasons to celebrate

Yesterday was our two year anniversary of taking up full time residence here at Casa da Praia (Portguese for beach house) at the “other” Copacabana and our five year wedding anniversary. To mark these two occasions, and to prepare for exploring the Pyrenees and the Yorkshire Dales, David and I decided to take our new hiking boots on a test run in the nearby Bouddi National Park. The boots performed well in all test conditions - including sloshing through mangrove swamps at one point. The only problem was that some pesky mosquitoes thought they would come along for the ride so we strode quickly rather than meandering. And stopping to take photos would surely have meant death by the blood sucking bugs so here is a photo of a beautiful angophora tree that I had taken on an earlier hike:

Another reason to celebrate is that our new water tank, that has been languishing for weeks as a monument to optimism, has some water in it at last. Not much, but enough to know that all the new guttering and spouting connected to the great expanse of our ski jump house roof is working. Maybe we will return home from holiday to a full tank - that would please David as he doesn’t like rain much.

I’d Rather Be Quilting

But the time has come to tackle my “to do” list - it keeps getting longer and there are only a few more sleeps until we go on holiday. An unexpected (and unwelcome!) item appearing on this list was having to migrate my website to a new web hosting service. So that consumed a great deal of time yesterday. The good news is that the site seems to be up and happily running with the new host so my technical skills have risen to the occasion. Thanks to everyone who visited my website at www.serendipitypatchwork.com.au and reported that they could see the reference to my blog in the middle of the page. This means you can see my site on the new server.

So Close & Yet So Far

So here is the quilted masterpiece sans binding. Hmmph - while I can live with the overall effect, the quilting does not bear up to close inspection. I have learnt that quilting STRAIGHT and PARALLEL lines over long distances is actually a very tricky thing to do. I tried not to obsess about it in the hope that an illusion of regularity would emerge but some lines of quilting were unpicked and there are holes in the quilt top accordingly

I reinforced the top edge with timtex plus some template plastic in a couple of strategic spots so it had better not flop over. Next time, I would probably leave the template plastic out or choose a different quilting design. The template plastic immediately blunted every needle that came near it and also created unyielding edges that got caught up on the machine, dragging the quilt. Grr!

I was proposing to simply zig zag/overlock the edges (see lower right corner) but cannot create a neat enough finish for my liking so I may revert to a binding. Just have to find my notes from a binding workshop that I did last year before I try to tackle all those inward corners…

Encounter with King Neptune

While swimming around the rocks this morning, I got to follow an enormous blue groper for several minutes. See the Australian Museum website HERE for images of this magnificent creature. And we also have a new SMBE (smallest mouthbit ever) record - so small that my digital camera can’t cope with a closeup of this shell. Otherwise it has been a day of quilting the hot cross blocks quilt. I’m not thrilled with the quality of my workmanship - quilting through template plastic (used to reinforce some of the jagged edges) played havoc with the sewing machine needles. I’ll post pictures when I have finished burying my thread tails.

New Zealand Quilter

When Annie Smith described me as a “New Zealand Quilter” on her podcasting website, Annie’s Quilting Stash, it provoked a brief identity crisis on both a personal and artistic level. I grew up in Warkworth, a small town on the main highway about an hour’s drive north of Auckland. At least, it used to take an hour - these days an extended motorway system cuts the drive down to 45 minutes unless you get bogged down with traffic. But I digress…

I have many family and friends who live in New Zealand and I try to get back there at least once a year. I even manage to vote in most New Zealand elections. However, I moved to Australia in 1989, carry a kiwi and an Aussie passport and have lived almost half of my life outside of New Zealand. Increasingly, I regard Copacabana as my turanga wae wae (Maori for “place of standing”) and my sense of belonging in New Zealand is more diminished.

Against this background, I’m not sure I can claim to be a “New Zealand Quilter”. I hasten to add that I regard the appellation as quite a compliment. As Anne Scott, editor of New Zealand Quilter - my FAVOURITE quilting magazine, remarks in her most recent editorial: “Our quilts are distinctive because they speak of our country - in colour, design and pattern” and what wonderful quilts they are. When a Mary Metcalf quilt graced the cover of the latest issue of Quilters Companion magazine, I immediately recognised it as a New Zealand design even though it was ostensibly “made with the Australian landscape and colour palette in mind”.

Quite where my quilts belong in the spectrum of Antipodean design, I don’t know. But one thing is certain, my favourite colour is GREEN. I leave you with this photo of “lime hills” taken by my guild committee buddy (Pamela) who recently made her first trip to New Zealand and was astonished by the colour of the landscape.