Summer feeling

A long weekend; blue skies; surf patrol back on the beach; dandelions going wild:

Grand Designs

Being creatures of habit, Thursday evenings will usually find us watching Grand Designs, a Channel 4 (UK) production that screens our “our ABC” [national public broadcaster]. Each GD program tracks an unusual home building project and you can vicariously enjoy the trials and tribulations of a “build”. Typically the program is served with a small a dash of schaedenfraude - cue images of damaged interiors because the hapless owner/project manager insisted on proceeding with fitting out before the house was watertight; cue windows that don’t fit due to the absence of proper building drawings: cue timetable and budget blowouts and so on.

Meanwhile, we’ve been experiencing our very own community Grand Design here at Copacabana in the form of our new surf life saving club building. For several months, the building team has been concentrating on earthworks and foundations. Yesterday, before we left for the city, there was just a concrete slab. Look what we woke up to this morning:
  
This could take some getting used to.

Off to town

I’ve got a big day in the city today: a lawyer’s meeting to sort out our wills; a long lunch in a posh restaurant; an overdue visit to the dentist (gotta find a new one locally); a viewing of the Earth from Above exhibition; a spot of Christmas shopping (how many sleeps is it now Sheila?); and all wrapped up with my last Guild committee meeting as Exhibition Secretary.

I know how much Helen enjoys a good consumer story. With a tale like this from Force Majeure Farm, as always, I’ll be giving those glitzy cosmetic counters a wide berth.

Done

I’ve finished quilting my dandelion thread drawing:


The end result is probably overly subtle. Next time I will have more confidence to experiment with threads offering higher contrast.

Rippling along

My Ripples quilt features as a project in Issue 113 (October 2007) of Down Under Quilts magazine:
     

Stephanie’s Challenge Quilt

Some of you may recall that Erica, Monica, Stephanie and I participated in a challenge to make a quilt drawing inspiration from the Quilts of Gees Bend. As Stephanie does not have a blog, she has let me display her Gum Leaves on Gees Bend quilt here:
Inspired by the housetop quilts (see, for example, Martha Jane Pettway and Sue Willie Seltzer), Stephanie used a quilt-as-you-go method with hand dyed blue fabrics representing denims and black representing wool. She has hand sashikoed (spelling?) gum leaves in a grey green. The backing fabric also features aqua blue gum leaves and gum nuts.

Me? I’m still waiting for my Firebrand quilt to tell me whether it needs to be squared up or whether I should leave the edges wonky…

Screen Printing

No, this blog post title does not indicate that I am taking my quiltmaking in a new direction. Rather I want to let you know about a nifty computer tool that I read about this week - Gadwin PrintScreen.

As those of you who played around with making Simpsonesque avatars will have discovered, the Windows printscreen function is kind of clunky and captures a full screen of data which is not always what you want. By contrast, Gadwin PrintScreen is an easy to use utility that allows you to capture any portion of the screen, save it to a file, copy it to Windows clipboard, print it or e-mail it to a recipient of your choice. What’s more, there are six different image formats to choose from and each one can be resized. You can even convert the screen shots to grey scale (although it’s better if you hide your cursor out of the way before you take your screen shot!):

You can also add a “watermark”, although this seems to work better on bigger images (click below to see what I mean):

I am about to prepare a manual for the yet-to-be-identified, incoming Exhibition Secretary for the Quilters’ Guild of NSW Inc (anyone want a job!?) and know this new tool will be very useful. It’s freeware product, and only a 2.75MB download. You might find it handy too.

Press’n Seal

It appears that I confused at least one person with my dandelion thread drawing post and the mention of Press’n Seal.

Press’n Seal is a plastic wrap product that is readily available on supermarket shelves in the United States and online in Australia. In my dandelion piece, I followed these steps:

• created a simplified black and white line drawing from an enlarged photo (I am way too artistically challenged to, gasp, do the drawing myself);
• traced the line drawing onto a square of Press’n Seal with a fine tipped permanent marker;
• stuck the Press’n Seal onto the top of my prepared fabric sandwich - the product is mostly see-through which allowed me to easily position the drawing over the light area of my hand dyed fabric; and
• used the marked outline as a guide for my the main flower of my thread drawing/quilting before ripping out the Press’n Seal.

If you don’t have access to the plastic wrap, you can do the same kind of thing with tissue paper. (I know that other quiltmakers use Press’n Seal for marking their traditional quilting designs. Personally, I prefer no-mark free-motion quilting motifs as my quilting lines are much too wobbly and I could not be bothered playing with the plastic wrap or tissue paper over a large area.)

So, when you look at the last photo on my previous post, what you see is my B&W drawing in the bottom corner and, above it, is my thread drawing with the Press’n Seal still in place.

Dandelion Thread Drawing

I’ve got so many dandelion-inspired quilts floating around in my head that I am not certain what I will ultimately submit for the purposes of the first Twelve by Twelve challenge. Here is the start of a thread drawing that I did today. The first image is the “front” with the next showing the reverse side.
   
The last image shows the drawing that I then traced onto Glad Press’n Seal. For the dandelion flower, I used a size 16 topstitch needle and No 8 DMC perle thread. This system worked well for the main outline. However, I should have removed the plastic before doing the middle tufting. I fear there are still small pieces of plastic caught in the quilting so I’ll be keeping the iron well away!

Think Pink

I’ve spent the past week in a highly perplexed state due to the mysterious disappearance of the spare set of house keys. These keys have a bright fluoro pink tag and rarely move from their “home” but last Monday I noticed they were gone.

As I had actually used the keys in the previous week, and am known to be the untidiest least domesticated member of this household, I was the obvious culprit. Yet, and I didn’t want to be too emphatic about this, I could distinctly recall returning the “pink” keys to their designated place. And so the frown appeared on my furrowed brow.

I searched all the obvious places; turned my studio upside down looking in all the non-obvious places; checked all my pockets; dreamed of pink keys; imagined pink keys; pink; pink; pink. All to no avail and I declared the keys officially lost.

Yesterday, the pink keys reappeared. They were carefully wrapped in a pair of the Laundry King’s denim cutoff shorts in his wardrobe which I never go near. Hmm….

PS: On a more worthy note, you might like to Go Pink for October to raise awareness about breast cancer.