The Blue Quilt – Finished!

It turns out I’ve been doing binding wrong. Well, not the usual way for quilts. I’m supposed to be making a wide strip, ironing it in half, sewing the raw edges to the back of the quilt, then folding it over to to the front and sewing it down. I’ve been making a narrower strip, sewing one raw edge to the back, folding the other edge over then sewing it to the front.

I tried this new method and it is slightly easier. However, I forgot which side of the quilt I was supposed to be sewing it to first, and wound up having to hand stitch it down. Never mind. I do quite enjoy hand stitching, even if it sets my back off.

Here’s the back of the quilt:

Here’s another shot of the front:

It’s far from perfect. On the other side of the galaxy from perfect. But I actually finished it, which I doubted more times than I can count. I’m calling it the ‘learner quilt’.

A Week Down South

Last week I went to King Island for a week. The same sketchbook I used on Lord Howe Island and Norfolk Island came with me, and I painted in it every day. I was hoping to finish it, but I came four spreads short. I guess I’ll have to go on a long weekend trip to another island to finish it.

Though I did take a small watercolour set, it was a backup. My intention was to use acrylic gouache. In the two weeks leading up to the trip I painted with watercolours and then acrylic gouache at a plein air outing, to warm up and decide which to take. The latter won by a mile. Though I to like watercolour, I can’t escape the fact that working dark to light, and layering paint, suits me better.

My kit consisted of an A4 piece or thin corflute with a metal strip stuck to it. My water jar and bottle of drying retarder have little magnets from an old phone cover on their bases, so this keeps them from tipping over or blowing away (the latter was very relevant to King Island). Everything but the corflute fit into an old “bum-bag”: paint tubes, brushes (in a toothbrush container), clips, rags, pencil, pens, eraser and sharpener. I cut down the weight and bulk of them by using hat elastic to hold the sketchbook and palette to the corflute.

The palette was the main mid-holiday tweak. During the plein air session I testing the gouache at, my paints were drying too fast despite the retarder medium. One member suggested I create a “stay-wet” panel out of a plastic container, sponge and baking paper. I found a little container that fit into the front pocket of my bag perfectly, but it proved too small. So I found a sandwich box at a supermarket that proved to be a much better size.

I expected the spreads to take more than an hour to complete, but they usually came in under that.

Walking along the beach near our accommodation, I thought I would paint the waves and sand, but I was utterly charmed by the local copses of tea tree, with their pale trunks against the shadowy interior. The island was very dry, but as the week passed and rain fell overnight, a little green did start to return to the fields.

The Boathouse, also known as “The Restaurant With No Food”, at Currie Harbour. It contains tables set out with cutlary, etc. so you can BYO your own meal, and presumably wash up after. When we first visited a gathering was underway, which turned out to be a group of artists on a tour. The teacher and of the students were outside. The student was old, male, and talking to the teacher in a grunty way certain men have when they feel they are an expert. As I painted the building with the lighthouse in the background the other artists emerged and set up to paint, and he began moving about giving uninvited advice. Later, I mentioned this to a tour guide and she said “Oh, yes, I know the one.”

One of the artists sat down directly between me and the Boathouse, which I would have thought was the height of rudeness among plein air artists. Thankfully, I was nearly done.

Grassy Harbour. Penguins roost in that long jetty.

Cape Wickham Lighthouse from the road to the golf course.

Seal Rocks. It was so windy I gave up after doing the pencil outline. But as I stepped off the viewing platform I found myself in a sheltered spot with almost the same view. So I sat down and painted, doing the lower half mostly from memory. When I was done I compared the remembered bit with reality and was surprised to find it was fairly accurate. Maybe all this plein air painting is improving my memory. Well, my memory for scenes, not people’s names or where I put my phone.

Yellow Rocks River, where swans kept drifting past hoping to be included in the picture.

The one I did have to give up on doing in person. Because of march flies. Those little blighters are Nasty. I’d only encountered them once, the day before, when I was bitten on the knee through my pants. so I think I caught the very beginning of march fly season.

King Island is lovely and there were so many more views I wanted to paint. I’d love to return with a small groups of artists one day. Though it was early autumn and the weather was still warm, there were no crowds of tourists. The food was fabulous – it is best known for it’s beef, dairy and seafood – and the people friendly. I think I chatted to locals more than I ever have on a holiday before. The only down side was that there was a lack of reliable tourist information – and at one point we retreated from a road that was described as “an easy drive with caution” that turned out to be a 4wd track totally unsuitable for our hire care. Most attractions required driving on unsealed roads, some which might be dangerous in wet conditions. There are tour packages, but if you want to visit independently you’ll need to do a bit more work than usual and a bit of double-checking to be sure of the actual opening hours for the time you’re there.

SketchBox March 2024

This month’s box was all about GREEN.

It was also a marker-based box. One thing I’ve learned from the thirteen boxes I’ve received, is that I’m just not into making art with markers. But I do like these Acrylograph pens. The ink is lovely and opaque, and though they tend to spatter a bit if you draw quickly, it does make for an interesting effect. Hairy lines, I am into you.

The theme was “succulent” but drawing plants seemed a little obvious, so I went for something sitting on something succulent.

What I found, though, was the lack of any other colour made the green less satisfying. It needed a pop of complementary colour. A dash of pink or crimson or a reddish ochre would have given the frog more oomph.

The Summer of Quilts…

…is done.

When I started, all these boxes were full of flannelette strips and some uncut fabric:

And this is what I have left:

Whatever I do with the leftovers, it’s not going to be quilts. I might make fabric-wrapped rope baskets from it. I might made fabric pompoms. I might use it as stuffing. I might just send it all to fabric recycling.

What I do know, is that a bag of scrap fabric can go a loooooong way. That huge bag of flannelette pieces I bought for $100 in early 2020 became five woven floor rugs and nine quilts from knee to double bed size. And that’s after a third of pieces were culled at the beginning because they weren’t the right size and shape to become strips.

I won’t be buying random bags of fabric again!

I also won’t be making flannelette floor rugs again. There’s too much time spent ironing the strips to conceal the raw edges, and I don’t think my body (or even my loom) is up for the pounding of the beater to get a tight rug. That’s fine, because I have three big rugs in my storage chest ready for when the one I’m using wears out, which is probably a lifetime’s supply considering how good the current one looks.

I might make a flannelette quilt again. The fabric does make a cushy quilt. But it wouldn’t be a big one.

I’d like to try making a ‘normal’ cotton fabric quilt one day. But not for some time, I think. I’ve had enough of quilting. It’s time to get back to the sewing I meant to do before all this started.

But wait, I hear you say. What about the topstitching and binding of all those unfinished quilts? Well, I decided I only had to get the flannelette strips made into quilt tops by the end of summer. My plan after that is to tackle finishing one quilt a month, and hopefully have them all done by the end of the year.

Making it Easier – February

In late January I seriously considered buying a property a friend was selling. On a block a quarter the size of ours, with a three bedroom house on it but with room to build my dream studio and Paul’s dream garage, it would have made life easier… once the work required to fixed it up was done. But there was an issue with an easement. And the thought of all that work and moving house was deeply offputting. Still, it had got us thinking more about what we will want when we inevitably downsize.

Buying the more portable Jenome Juno will definitely make going to sewing days easier, though buying another sewing machine isn’t exactly downsizing.

We also gave away our organ bar.

I seem to have developed a mild intolerance to alcohol, and Paul isn’t interested in making cocktails, so we spent a couple of days redesigning the interior of the old TARDIS pantry. It has been a wine and whisky cabinet since we made the bar, and now it has a three tiered spirits and liqueurs shelf.

The organ bar will go to a friend who loves it, which I am glad of because I do still think it’s the most quirky, fun piece of furniture we’ve made. Apart from the TARDIS, of course.

The Blue Quilt – Part Four

I was a bit fed up with the numerous problems this quilt kept throwing at me, and tempted to pack it away for a while, but I knew I’d probably forget how I was fixing the rows of blocks so I had to get that part done. To preserve my will to live, and because the Sew Mini was old and I didn’t want to overheat it, I also decided to fix no more than one row of blocks at a time. I got distracted by the Purple Quilt top, but once that was done I returned to the blue quilt and finished the last three rows of blocks one hot Sunday when I just wanted easy, brainless sewing to do.

Then I did put it aside. Using a walking foot would make the topstitching much neater, and I didn’t think the one I had would fit the Juno. Instead, I made the Square Cat Quilt and Crayon Quilt.

That left me with this:

The leftovers from the Blue Quilt.

And everything else.

I didn’t want to do anything with the blue leftovers it until I’d finished the blue quilt in case I wanted to add more sashing and patchwork to the sides. The mixed leftovers batch didn’t inspire me. Not even the skull-themed fabric strips. I was almost left with nothing to work on.

But then the Juki was back and working beautifully. I launched into finishing the Blue Quilt. The quilt-as-you-go method is designed to lesson the time you spend wrestling a big, heavy quilt. But the more you add, the bigger it gets and in the final stage you do have a big, heavy quilt to deal with. During the break I’d had an idea to lesson the strain. Instead of just adding rows of blocks and it getting bigger and bigger, I could work from both sides simultaneously, creating two smaller sections that would be joined at the middle. Only when the middle section had to be top-stitched would it be a PITA to handle.

To add the middle section, I sewed it onto one already quilted part, then sewed the other side of the top onto the other already quilted part, then hand stitched the backing in place.

Then I just had to top stitch it. Yeah. What a monster. I had to unpick nearly half of it and sew from the other end to try and smooth it out, but I tell you, if there were quilt exams this one would get an F-.

But it was assembled at last.

And I hadn’t needed to put aside the blue batch of leftover strips. There wasn’t any way I was going to wrestle the monster Blue Quilt a minute longer. Well, except for the binding, but that’s another story.

Squares & Borders

When I considered what quilt to make next, I considered the leftover strips and asked myself what I would hate to toss out. My eyes went to the crayon and psychedelic fabric, and the uncut pieces of fabric with feathers and cat-in-a-garden designs.

I started playing and found myself making borders around a white square. I’d seen this method of building blocks in videos, and it looked simple and fast. I began matching solid coloured strips and chose three that matched well, and I was ready to start the construction.

I began with the squares, which I fussy cut. I wasn’t able to get one of the types of cat cut from the fabric and managed 8 squares. But when I laid them out it seemed obvious that a 3×3 grid would work best. So I cut around the cat an appliquéd it to a square cut from a plain garden part of the fabric.

Next I laid out coloured strips for borders. Then I took three of the multicoloured fabrics I liked – feathers, dots and psychedelic stripes – and added the next round of borders. Then more colour, and sashing in white.

And I got sewing.

I’m calling this the Square Cat Quilt

I really enjoyed the patchworking method, so I decided to do another quilt using it. This one used the crayon, dotty and thick stripe rainbow fabric cut across not along the stripes. I was able to make twelve blocks before I ran out of fabric.

This became the Crayon Quilt

At this point, I was also spending time cutting backing, batting and allocating fabric for binding. By the time I finished the second squares and borders quilt, I had five quilt sandwiches ready for top stitching. Add to that the Blue Quilt, which used the quilt-as-you-go method, and I had six quilts to finish.

And one or maybe two more quilt tops to make before I was done for the summer.

Bookcase Quilt

So, thanks partly to the Juki requiring a service and repair, I have a new machine.

I’d had a shop web page for it bookmarked for many months – maybe even a year – as a machine for taking to friends’ houses or lessons. When the Juki started eating needles I checked on the web page and to my delight it was on sale, reduced by 33%.

So the Sew Mini went back in the cupboard and I put the Juno to work. Oh, it was nice to have a variable speed foot pedal again!

I turned my attention to the batch of striped fabric strips. I discovered three things: firstly, I had leftovers from the Snakes & Ladders quilt already sewn together; secondly, the overall combination of stripe patterns didn’t combine that nicely; thirdly, it also contained some uncut pieces of fabrics.

Regarding the already sewn pieces, some were in pairs, some were several pairs sewn together in a short column. They were of similar widths so if all the pairs were joined I would have a longer column. Four of the fabrics – about half of them – were a combination of strips cut along and across the stripes, and could be sewn together the same way. I could do a column of each, then join them all together with a strip of white between. So I did that.

It’s a good knee rug size.

SketchBox Catch Up – December, January & February

The last SketchBox post I wrote was published back in November, but I completely forgot to write about them since. Something must have happened in December and January to make me forget about them until now. I wonder what that could be?

Hmm.

Well, better late than never. Here’s my report on the December, January and February boxes.

December:

I was expecting a Christmas-themed box of green and red so I was relieved when the colour range was broader. You could make a red/green dominant artwork using the pencils if you wanted to, but the blues freed you from seasonal overload.

The prompt was “snow globe” and, with the box arriving well after most recipients who are going to post or vlog about them, there were plenty of literal snow globe artworks already. I went for The Globe instead. Then some fruit so I could experiment with getting yellow by scribbling on the palette with the gold pen and painting with the residue. I like all the supplies, and the Stoneground Gouache – the hero of the box (according to vloggers) – is lovely to paint with.

January:

It was winter over in the US, where SketchBox comes from, so the box was full of brown and orange shades. Here in Melbourne it was warm and humid. Maybe that’s why I thought of south to central American design terracotta pottery – I was longing for some dry heat. The prompt was ‘flame’. Pottery comes out of flame. Is that reaching too far?

I was expecting there to be a box with pastels eventually. I love and hate pastels. I have come to hate dust-producing art materials that set off my asthma. They seem to like me though – I get good results from them and am rather chuffed at how this came out.

This was definitely one of those boxes that seemed to have a smidge bit too much in it. The charcoal wasn’t really needed. The white pen is great, but the white pencil went better with the other supplies and the box didn’t need two whites. I think I’d have liked some smudging tools instead, or a kneadable eraser.

February:

It’s easy to imagine these colours were inspired by a late-winter northern hemisphere longing for spring. But they are very garden-like regardless of season. At the moment my crepe myrtle is in bloom with magenta blossoms, despite (or perhaps because) I pruned all the branches off ready to dig it out of the ground because it had looked mostly dead. It doesn’t look this good, though! The prompt was ‘fantasy’, so this a fantasy of the crepe myrtle I wish I had!

This was the first time I redid a SketchBox artwork. The first piece became very muddy after I added another layer of watercolour and discovered the first one was not as dry as I thought. I also did a piece where I puddled, dropped and splattered the supplies, but didn’t like the result.

I think I had these false starts because there was quite a bit of scope for different methods and styles of artwork in this selection of art materials. The bleed-proof white made lovely opaque hues when the liquid watercolours were mixed in. The pencils added texture and interesting gradients when used under or over the watercolours. But I felt the vivid saturation of the three watercolours was the most exciting aspect of the box.

I have one more box to go to reach a year’s worth of SketchBoxes, and I’ve ended my subscription after that. That includes one I ordered separately, not as part of the subscription. It’s been a great deal of fun, and I’ve tried art materials I’d never have bought, or ones I use but different brands to what I usually buy. I’ve tried combining materials in new ways, too. There comes a point when the novelty wears off, though. There are only so many kinds of art supplies so eventually the types will start to repeat (and I certainly don’t fancy getting another box of markers!). I’m planning to do a summary of the twelve boxes after I receive the final one, choosing the most and least favourite materials, and reviewing the artwork I did.

Posted in art

The Purple Quilt

Midway through fixing the rows of blocks for the blue quilt, I got bored. So I took the batch of purple strips, ironed them, removed those with selvedges, and sorted them into stacks of the same fabric and laid them out in an appealing colour sequence. I had near enough to twenty of most of the fabric designs. So I cut in half a few strips of the ones that were less than twenty, then got to sewing it all into one long strip.

With that done, measured, counted and did some math and worked out that if I cut the strips 120 cm long and sewed them together lengthwise I’d get a quilt top around 180 to 200 cm long. So I started doing that. 2-3 days sewing later and I had this:

Which I’m pretty happy with, and put in the pile of quilting to do when I get the Juki back.

Next!