I lost one…

For a while now, in the interests of time management, I have been a subscriber to Bloglines. This service lets me know whenever one of my blog friends has added something new. Then I followed Deb’s tip and subscribed to myself via Bloglines to see how many people have signed up to be notified of updates to my blog. As at today, I have a modest 23 Bloglines subscribers but before that I had 24. I wonder what happened to that reader. Did they find my blog boring? have they found some other non-textile interest? Or have they found that blogs are utterly addictive and decided to go cold turkey to pursue a life away from the computer? Whatever way, there’s no hard feelings.

Circles of Inspiration

When I flew into Pasco airport in Washington State last month, I was fascinated by the shape, texture and colour of the irrigation crop circles:




I have so many ideas about how these circles might translate into a quilt. Free cut pieced circles are one possible interpretation:

Thank goodness for digital cameras which capture different layouts:

Or maybe split the quilt into two. One with dark circles:

The other with light:

I think I am just going to keep sewing circles and see what happens. This might just turn into a series…

A Man and his Shed(s)

If previous years are anything to go by, sometime in the next 24 hours I am going to witness an interchange along the following lines:

• Radio/TV/Television Announcement - “and for the first day of spring we are expecting a very pleasant temperature of…”
  
• Outburst from (American) David - it’s not spring! it’s still 3 weeks until equinox. Why do Australians think that seasons coincide with calendar months?

Why indeed? In any event, David is eagerly anticipating the warmer weather so that he can return to his “office” down at the beach. Not that he has been slacking off over winter. While I was in America in July, David was building a ramp under the house to his workshop. While he was at it, he installed a shed for overflow from his workshop. Here is the undercover ramp:

The shed is the corrugated section in the middle of the picture. Here is the inside:

And lest you think this state of organisation is preternaturally neat. Just check out his main workshop:


With standards like this, there is no way I am showing photos of my studio anytime soon.

Sleeping In

I’m an early to bed, early to rise kind of person. When I was lawyering, I much preferred to be at my desk at 7 in the morning and to have some quiet time before my colleagues strolled in and the phones started ringing. So when Jonah Keegan from The Blog Reader proposed a 7am appointment for a telephone interview, this was fine with me. Except in all the excitement of last week with teaching, having my Mum to stay and getting my new website out live, I neglected to put the appointment in my diary and decided to snooze a little this morning. Whoops!

However, Jonah and I did get to talk and I understand that the article/interview will appear in a week or two. I’ll keep you posted.

Update 4 January 2007:  You know, I never heard from Jonah again and the Blog Reader website seems frozen in time.  Another blogging enterprise bites the dust perhaps.

Surfing Around

I did get some time at my sewing machine today but not before I had spent just a little time at the computer. Thank you for all the kind comments on my new website. While googling my name to see if the new website has established any presence with search engines yet (the answer is no), I stumbled across the Australian craft portal craftHEAD.info which happened to refer to my workshop at Terrigal last week. The portal makes for quite interesting reading but it was a reference to Craft Australia’s National Craft Mapping Project that really caught my eye.

According to its website, Craft Australia is the national peak industry body advocating and lobbying for Australian contemporary craft and design. The National Craft Mapping Project was undertaken by Craft Australia to provide a needs analysis of what makers require for the ongoing professional development of their careers and to scope the breadth of the services available to them through professional craft organisations. I’ve downloaded a copy of the 40-page report for later reading but a quick search reveals that the word “blog” does not appear once!

Back to sewing these blocks which were (very loosely) inspired by the crop circles I saw from the air when flying into Washington State last month:

Trumpets Please - my new website

For some time now, I’ve been wanting to set up an additional website with a focus on my contemporary and experimental quilts. So I am delighted to let you know that www.brendagaelsmith.com has just gone live:

I’ve had a great time building upon my web design skills and following my own advice of getting up close and personal with html and css code. I hope you like the result! There are still some refinements that I plan to make to the content, images and links but the basic framework is in place.

I will still keep my existing website www.serendipitypatchwork.com.au but hope to take this in an increasingly commercial direction for promoting patterns and kits of my original quilt designs. Watch this space!

Spreading like Bushfire

As many quilting teachers will attest, one of the most rewarding aspects of teaching is seeing sparks of enthusiasm and understanding ignite and ripple through the class as students “get it” and surge to do more. It’s also a thrill when students return with more advanced projects incorporating the techniques or designs they have learned in your class.

In yesterday’s Colour Rhapsody class, there were a number of students who had previously attended my Making Waves workshop. Many had completed quilts and quilt tops to share but Pat’s bushfire quilt is the only one that I managed to get a photo of:

Popping in…zipping out

Welcome to all those new readers who are popping over from visiting Melody Johnson’s blog. Fibermania features a fabulous new banner (designed by her website guru David Walker) that I helped Melody tweak so that readers using browsers other than IE don’t miss out on seeing those wonderful character lines under her eyes!

Following my post on how to create a personalised blog banner, I’ve helped or heard from a few people who have successfully inserted customised headers including:

• Erica Spinks who has set up an editorial blog for Down Under Quilts magazine to capture all those interesting items that might otherwise get lost between publishing deadlines;
• Leah - who apparently has the logic of a Puggle; and
  
• Judy Coates Perez.
  

I’m about to zip out the door for a day of teaching but you might like to pop in and say hello to these fellow quilting enthusiasts.

Other FMMQ Queens

Whether you are new to free motion machine quilting, or an old hand, there are some great resources around. Here are three domestic (cf longarm) quilting resources that I refer my students to:

• The FMMQ chapter in Free Expression: The Art and Confessions of a Contemporary Quilter by Robbi Joy Eklow www.robbieklow.com
• Helen Godden’s - The Secrets of FMMQ; and
• hot off the press, Dijanne Cevaal’s Seventy Two Ways Not to Stipple or Meander ( Ideas for Free Machine Quilting)

I enjoyed a very pleasant day of teaching with the Arcadian Quilters yesterday. My route to Galston from the Central Coast took me through Berowra Waters where my little car got to ride on a punt across the water:

Successful Quilting Collaborators

Congratulations to Nic Bridges who has, together with Gay, has won third prize in the two person quilt category at the Birmingham Quilt Festival with a fresh looking quilt incorporating a leaf motif and units in various scales.

Nic is the (longarm) FMMQ Queen and has also successfully worked with Lisa Walton on many occasions. My personal favourite Lisa/Nic collaboration is the Power of Three which, as I recall, one first prize in the commercially machine quilted quilt category at the 2004 Sydney Quilt Show:

Other successful quilting collaborations that come to mind are:

• Kay & Bard Haerland - Kay does the construction but Bard often provides valuable design input including the factually accurate star constellations that feature in one of Kay’s owl quilts;
• Weeks Ringle and Bill Kerr - the dynamic duo behind www.funquilts.com; and
  
• Nancy Crow and her handquilters including, in particular, Marla Hattabaugh.

Can you think of any other successful quilting collaborators?