Been a While....

Well, not sure if anyone reads the blog, so I have stopped for a while :) Thought I might start up again and show my work in progress.

I entered two quilts into the Queensland Quilt show and my daughter entered one too. I didn't win but my daughter won for secondary student category with her own designed quilt...

And I got an email from the owner of  a big craft store here in OZ and she wanted to put one of my quilts on her blog!! Have a look here. It helped me feel better about no sales on my etsy store :) and not placing at the show. I love this art quilt and I am real happy with the quality of my machine work on this one.

I have made a pieced quilt for the first time in years!!:) and I loved it and it isn't perfect but I am proud of how well I did :). Now I am doing the free motion and loving it. I would loooove a long arm still, especially when it takes me weeks and weeks to do the quilt when I know it would take a few days on a long arm. But that's life :).

Have a look...

I love the difference between the plain quilt and then the machine quilted part. You can see how much impact the machine quilting has and how it makes the quilt look so much better.

Went to the craft fair and got a few things, it was so fun to shop for thread instead of just viewing it on the internet :) I wanted to see if I could find something new (to me) and see if it would work. And I did :) I went to one stall and found this...
It is a sewslip mat and it is tacky on the underside so it sticks to the board and the top side is all slippery. It is fantastic... except that it is already curling at the edges and when that tacky underside hits the quilt it sticks and I am stuck!! It is real annoying. I have tried blue tack but that doesn't work too well. I don't want to sticky tape it down as when you go to sew normally it won't move. So I need to remove the mat at some point :).

 

This is the annoying curl where it should be flat.


And this

Now the ring is made by Sharon Schamber and is amazing!! I no longer have to pull the quilt through the machine, I can just use this metal ring to manoeuvre the quilt around. It is fantastic and I am glad I paid $30 for it. The only thing I would have liked is for it to be a larger circle, so that you don't have to stop so often to move the circle and then have that stop start point in the quilt. Otherwise, it is great.



Houston quilt festival was just on and I love trawling the internet reading everyone's posts about the show and the quilts. I will go one day and spend a fortune :) and it will be so fun. I love seeing the photos of some of the quilts and just staring at them trying to work out how they did them!! That is cool. This was one that got me...

Hurricane by Jancke De Vries Bodinga

And this one, love this one...  Margaret Solomon-Gunn
It won judges choice.

I think all the quilts entered are amazing, and they all look so much better in person. All the machine work that has gone into the above quilt just can't be seen properly in this photo. I need to go :)

I am having huge struggles with my machine!! the thread is breaking and it is skipping stitches. I have spent hours cleaning and changing needles and checking tension and threading on the machine. Now I have found a checklist and am going through that. I didn't pay very much for it, so it isn't worth servicing. I think a new sewing machine for christmas might be a great present :). Anyone got any great ideas on how to fix these problems ?:).

Just tried some coconut and mango ice cream.... soooooooo good!! my fav flavour at the moment :)
Jane

So Much!!

Just came back from the optometrist so much poorer!! Wow, I shouldn't be shocked by how much everything costs and how every child costs me a fortune. Silly me I still get shocked.

My daughter needed some special focusing lenses, which I am very happy to know that it will help her. Her comment was "Wow everything has stopped moving around and I can read it so much better". So it is all worth it of course.

So I have finished the client order for a pillow/quilt. They look very cute :)

I finally listed the swirls with the inktense pencil, I ended up calling it Happiness With Colour. Trying to be more indepth and creative with my titles. It is a bit tricky sometimes :)

So I am really happy with this and love the colour that I get from the inktense pencils, just so vibrant.

Another big storm a while ago and can you see what I see ....:)

See the nose and the mouth and the eyebrow and it even looks like there is hair streaming back :)

And I have also finished my other piece, I did all the machine work first on this piece and then used the inktense pencils to colour in and shade. Love this one too, just need to bind it and this will be going on etsy too. 

You can see the S before I coloured it...

Now coloured, so fun!!

All Done :)

So now the bigges challenge is what next? Need an idea I think.
About to start the new Louise Penny book, so I could just disappear for a while, mmmm that sounds good :).
Jane

A Few Things.....

Life is a blur sometimes :) I think what adds to it is the endless washing and other repetitive chores that you do as a mother :) each day seems the same. We are already half way through the last term of school, that has definitely gone so fast!!.

So instead I enjoy moments like this.... gorgeous isn't it.

So now to enjoy every moment I can get before I blink and I am 80 :) Halloween was fun here. I put on a Halloween night at our church and it was great fun. Games and trick and treating car to car and boot decorating all added to a great night. The kids love dressing up.

I think my friend really looks like a witch :)

And this is what I have been working on

 So these are the bags that I have made with the gorgeous beading and trimming. I managed to find all the organza and fabric in my cupboard :) And yet it still hurt to cut up the fabric too :)

This is a small wholecloth quilt I am experimenting with, I have traced the design on with a template and then will colour in later with my inktense pencils and I bought some more gorgeous colours - a pink and another gorgeous green so I am excited to try them out, oh and some metallic colours but I am not sure they will work with the fabric medium, experimenting is fun though.
Love doing all the filler work.. oh and this is on gorgeous raw silk, it so beautiful.

Inner circle

Some lattice around the swirl

 This is the finished swirly inktense piece, love love love it. I am enjoying it for a while before I put it on Etsy. This is on raw silk as well. Better photo to come :)

Just love how vibrant the colours are, they really pop!!

I have just finished another really lovely book called The Wedding Bees by Sarah Kate-Lynch and it was really lovely. The book I am reading right now is called The Monuments Men and it is a non fiction book about ten men who repatriated stolen art from the Nazi's. It is brilliant and I love it. 

Thank goodness for the weekend and sleep ins and no exercise. Here's for a relaxing one.

Jane