Category: Holidays

Merry Christmas

On By DendariaIn Holidays, Quilts, Works in ProgressLeave a comment

Merry Christmas to everyone! Happy Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Festivus, Yule and/or Solstice if that is more appropriate for you.

I haven’t been able to do much lately — I do have the Janome 9400 back at last but I haven’t been able to set it up due to a plumbing incident that left my sewing room carpet saturated. The carpet is finally dry but I need to do a lot of re-organisation before I can start machine sewing again.

In the meantime, I have some more hand-sewn hexagon flowers:

I figure I’m about 20% of the way through — I need 365 of them for my quilt and I have 74 so far. I’ll need about 1800 more papers, but I can reclaim some if I start sewing flowers to large background hexagons soon. I want the lightest flowers in the centre and the darkest around the edges, and I was toying with the idea of a similar gradient in the background fabrics — white in the centre, moving through progressively darker shades of grey to the black edges. Now I think it would be better to have all of them on black, just lots of different black fabrics so that I can leave the final arrangement of flowers until the end. I may change my mind again, of course. I have plenty of templates for the moment and a punch that can make more so I’m not desperate to reclaim papers at the moment.

We are expecting a lovely day tomorrow — my city will be sunny with a top temperature of about 30°C. To all those in the northern hemisphere struggling with the cold, I hope that you can stay safe and as warm as possible.

Happy Worldwide Quilting Day!

On By DendariaIn Holidays, Works in ProgressLeave a comment

Worldwide Quilting Day logo

I didn’t do any actual quilting today but I did do a fair amount of piecing, both by machine and by hand. The machine work was for an Aussie Hero quilt so no pictures. The hand work was finishing tier 3 on my second Penrose tiling quilt, Flame Rose.

I finished tier 2 on 30 October last year. This is the central portion of the quilt.

Fiamma Tier 2 rose
Flame Rose centre, 2018-10-30

Today I finished tier 3. The picture below shows only one “petal” — there are five altogether, arranged around the centre portion. It looks a lot darker than the centre because it’s photographed at night and on cream, whereas the centre was shot in the day and on white.

Flame Rose Tier 3 2019-03-16
Flame Rose Tier 3 2019-03-16

I’m actually impressed that I managed to get so much done in only four and a half months. I have to admit, though, that my wrists are not happy so I’m going to try and take it a little more slowly for the next section. There’s no more yellow/orange/red in the top, the next part is green, and then there will be some browns in the corners. I’m not sure how much I’ll get done before it’s time to switch to actual quilting once the weather cools down, but it doesn’t really matter anyway — this is a personal project with no deadline so it will take as long as it takes.

Happy Australia Day!

On By DendariaIn HolidaysLeave a comment

To those in Australia: stay cool, drink lots of water, use sunscreen. To those in the northern hemisphere: stay warm, drink soup, wear socks.

My Australia Day will be very quiet, sitting in my flat with the cats and doing a little hand piecing. I finished my current Aussie Heroes quilt last weekend and sent it off on Monday, and since then I’ve been finishing the quilting on some ex-demo pieces that will eventually go to a homeless shelter. I want to cut some fabric for my own projects, but I need to do some cleaning up in the sewing room first, as the cutting table is piled high with stuff.

I’m about to start a more-or-less monthly retrospective on all the quilts I’ve done to date (which isn’t very many, actually). I’ll try to do them in order of commencement, but I’m the queen of UFOs so the finishing dates will vary a lot.