Today was Anzac Day, and my SIL and I went to the Dawn Service at the little war memorial in the main street. We drove down in the chilly dark before 6 a.m, passing groups of people walking along huddled in their coats, seeing the lights of other cars converging around the shadowed park. It was very moving, standing beneath the trees and thinking of the Australian and New Zealand soldiers who landed at Anzac cove all those years ago. I looked up at a little sliver of a new moon lying on its back, cradled in the arms of a gum tree, and listened to a bugle playing The Last Post- one of the most poignant memories of Australians everywhere.













Don't you just love old houses? In the back hall is a huge floor to ceiling cupboard, which we hadn't opened until today, and then we found a little door at the back of it. Wouldn't we have loved this find when we were children, raised on a diet of Enid Blyton's Famous Five books. Would there be a secret passage beyond, an old trunk full of treasure, a faded map with an X on it? Or, in Daphne Du Maurier mode....a huddled skeleton sitting in the corner.....















Of course I took one look at the cobwebs and sent Matt up instead, and listened to his crashing and clattering and shouted comments, contenting myself with a peek from the top of the ladder. It must have been a storage space under the original verandah roof and there are boards laid across the rafters so that matt could crawl along quite comfortably. Nothing came to light of any interest, but it kept us all occupied for a good half hour, a change from our cleaning and painting and shifting.














Here's Bev sitting in the window seat, in our nice clean lounge room, having washed the walls down, scrubbed the skirtings and the window and polished the floor. She's exhausted, and I was up a ladder painting or I would have helped. But I'm tired too!

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I feel so guilty that I haven't posted for a while, but life is as hectic as you could imagine. There is some painting going on- the brown sample square has been voted blehhh and the wall may end up green, who knows. The rest of the room will stay cream, this is a very long sunroom built on to the main house and I think it needs to be light and airy. It's 32' 9" and 11'9" across, so it's going to take a lot of furniture to fill it up. The other end has a slow combustion stove, and we lit it and sat around it last night, after a busy day of shifting.






This is the fireplace in Mum's room, bit over the top do you think? Or just plain gorgeous.





















This is a small top I made from leftover strips that Keryn gave me. She usually passes on the bits and pieces that she's sick of, and I love getting parcels of scraps and strips to play with. I've got the backing and batting folded up with this and it would only take a few hours to quilt, but it will have to be after we've all settled in at the new place.








This is the side view of the house, I can just imagine sitting on the verandah, or on the bench under the tree, looking at the roses that line the path. I do love gardening and there's lots of scope for flower beds here, I can hardly wait.

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We've been shopping for some things for the house, and the spare bedroom looks like this now........

The bolt of curtain fabric will end up as curtains and table covers and perhaps cushions for a comfy chair. This will be the guest room for my brother and sister-in-law when they come to visit and SIL did a good job of choosing things without having seen the room first. (They live in Western Australia)

Check out the fireplace in their room, very nice!

Here's an old Weathervanequilt I made out of dressmaking scraps, many years ago. Some

of the fabrics are very unsuitable, seersucker, twills and even some rayon. Nevertheless, it's stood up to repeated washings and is still my favourite quilt to have on my bed, because it's so soft and cuddly.

I'm also lovin' my stripey socks, perfect therapy for a too-busy mind. I don't have time to sew at the moment, but I can pick up my needles and do a few more rows here and there. It has a very calming effect on me at the moment.

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Guess what I'll be doing over the next few weeks?

This is the house that my mother and I are going to live in, gulp, Together! She's 84 and needs to be with someone so we're setting up home in this large Federation style house. It's just around the corner from where I live now, and I'll leave all my sewing there for the time being, so that I can go and escape the throes of shifting Mum's stuff.

Son Matt will continue to live where we are now, so I'll have two homes virtually- lots of room to spread out.

This is me opening the door for the first time- Yaay!!!!

There are some rooms that need painting, so it will be a fortnight or so before we really move. There's not a lot of sewing going on at the moment, just a bit of pottering with the leaders and enders and sorting of old projects. So I might have to resort to ancient quilts if I want to post photos.

The house is set on half an acre, so there's lots of lawns, garden beds and trees all around. Fortuneately I love gardening and I can hardly wait to get stuck into all the pruning and tidying and digging and planting.

Don't worry, there will be plenty of quilting going on soon, even if I've got all this other stuff to do as well. Just as well I get up at 5.30 in the morning!

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Hmmm, what to do with all the off-cuts of the little squares from my bowtie quilt? Common sense would dictate that I throw the little blighters away, wouldn't it?

Am I known for my common sense? In most matters, but not when it comes to even a whisper of wasting fabric.

So the 396 pairs of tiny triangles are becoming.....

...tiny pinwheels. These will finish at 1 1/2", which means each triangle will be 3/4". I don't think that's being too obsessive, do you?

I suppose if there were only a few of them I could chuck them away, but 396 pairs? That's quite a pile.

I don't know what I'll do with them just yet, but they're being leader-enders at the moment, which suits me fine.

Because I've realised that I'm in a self-perpetuating top manufacturing cycle here.

These are 30 crosses and losses blocks, enough for another top, and they were effortless, because they were leader-enders. I can't produce another set of blocks for every project I finish, or I'll feel like I'm running on the spot.

So I'll have to choose patterns like Bonnies that use squillions of little pieces and take ages to accumulate enough bits to set into a top.

And does anyone else have leader-ender guilt? Sometimes I get so excited about the little pieces that I find myself sewing the leader-enders after the other project's done. I feel guilty because I'm only supposed to do them in between the main piecing, and if I use up all the cut bits for the leader-enders then where will I be?

I find myself sewing away surreptiously and telling myself to stop it at once.... Just another example of how I can get distracted. Bonnie must have heaps more discipline than me.

Sigh.

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The borders are done, so another top joins the pile. I like how this one turned out, even though blue and yellow isn't a colour combination I have much of in my house. When this is quilted I may even put it up for sale in our local art and craft gallery. I'll be happy if I just have the photos to remember it by.

It's not a big top, and I think it would look nice hanging on a wall, so I'll have to make sure it's got a sleeve on it when the quilting's done. I've already made the binding, I like getting a bit ahead of myself like that.

As soon as it gets cooler here I want to really start quilting up a storm, or everyone will think I never finish anything. I have a pile of tops it's true, but I've also got lots of finished quilts on the beds ( there's 13 piled one on top of another on the spare bed!) and I've given quite a few away and sold some. Keryn's got a heap more though, it's almost embarressing!

I've got another set of blocks almost sewn too, I was using them as leader-enders. They're just blue and white Crosses and Losses, so they were simple to keep track of. I like lining all my patches up on an old plastic lid and putting it next to the machine, it all looks so organised. I've got 20 of these blocks cut out but I might do more, depending on how I decide to set them. My drawer of blues is overflowing and won't shut without a struggle, so I might hack a few more bits up.

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This is the little Singer I do all my piecing on. It's sort of in between a Featherweight size and a normal sewing machine. It does a marvellous straight stitch and purrs happily away for hours on end.

Yesterday I was forced to try and piece on my Janome 4000 and it drove me bats, chewing the end of triangles, and not sewing the proper seam allowance no matter how much I fiddled. I gave up in the end, no wonder I just keep going back to this uncomplicated little darling.

It cost me all of $25 in a secondhand shop, I've had it for about 7 years and have sewed on it nearly every day since then. I have to love something this reliable and sturdy. I do adore my Janome 6500 for my quilting, but for piecing this is my little sweetie.

Today was a non-sewing day, that always makes me cranky. Tomorrow I have to take my elderly mum shopping, but I should get some early morning stitching done and then some late afternoon time. People think I get a lot done, but I probably sew at least two hours during the day (I get up at 5.30 to sew) and then I handsew for three hours every night. It really does mount up, so no wonder I've got a pile of tops to be quilted and all my stacks of blocks waiting to be set.

Lucy wanted to know how much fabric the little triangles in my bowtie top require. You'd need at least 20" of the two colours - 10 strips 2" wide in each of the feature fabrics. (That's about 52 cm if we're talking metric.) You need 198 squares of each colour for the 99 blocks that I did: phew, it sounds a lot when you add it all up.

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The blocks are in one piece and looking quite lively.













There are borders being pieced and the dreaded maths being done to make them fit. That's the worst of not planning ahead, you have to fudge measurements and do the calculations in the middle of the project. The star blocks are 6 and 3/4" finished, a really odd size, but I probably thought I'd set them straight so it wouldn't be a problem. Ha! I can be relied on to do things arse-end round, as we country persons put it.

I think I'm still on a book-bargain high, and I'm being quite a bad sport over my luck ( as in "Nyah nyah, lookee what I got for a DOLLAR!!) No-one likes a Gloater, as they said in Blackadder, but now that my friends here have displayed suitable envy and teeth-gnashing, I'll condescend to share my bounty. Only a lend of some, mind you; I'm still in the stage of hugging certain volumes during the day, so they won't be prised out of my possessive little paws.

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Em..... the local library had a book sale on today, and I may have bought a few things. This is the front seat of my car afterwards.

How could I resist, all hardback books were $1 and paperbacks were 50 cents!

Lookee what I got!

Art books.

Craft books. The russian embroidery book is wonderful and the Country Quilts one I must have borrowed about 10 times over the years. And now I get to keep it for a buck!

I got heaps of decorating books that are just crammed full of gorgeous photos and wonderful colour schemes. I'm going to get so many ideas from all this.

This is a huge cookbook by Stephanie Alexander and it cost $65 a few years ago, and.....I got it for $1!






















What a haul, and it all cost less than the price of one new hardback book! I have a huge collection of books now, bookcases in every room and yet this sight warms the cockles of me little heart. I think I'd rather have books than material right now, and I certainly don't feel guilty about this "personal library enhancement".














There may be something occurring in the star department too.....

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Borders are on and the top is in the huge pile waiting to be quilted now. Everyone seems to like this pattern, and I may try to explore the idea of emphasizing the circles, and using scraps in the corners.....when I've got some spare time.

I don't worry much about placement of fabric in scrap quilts, apart from trying not to have two adjacent pieces the same. I just noticed there are three fabrics in the third row together- two for the bowtie and a scrappy block of leftovers next to it. I had the block rotated, but when I was sewing it together I must have flipped it to get the seams to nestle. This will irritate me a little bit, but I hardly ever unpick things. I really don't care enough. Or I'm just lazy....

It's the first week of autumn here in Aust. and I thought it might cool down a bit, so I started a sock from an old skein of three ply wool I found in an op-shop. That was the signal for the temperature to climb again, and it just somehow seems wrong to knit in front of the airconditioner. Bit like Matt in his quilt.

The book is from 1953, so it's 5 years older than me. The basket was my great grandmother's sewing basket and in it there's a row counter from a knitting machine; Keryn found it and sent it to me as a little oddity but it's very cute to use. I love collecting old stuff but I like it even better when I can find uses for it.

I think the next project will be some of that gi-normous stack of 8-point stars, I've got something in mind for the blue ones.

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This is my latest scrap project. I was looking at Bonnie's star quilt made with Indian Hatchet blocks and wondered what would happen if I just sewed a triangle across one corner. Four of them rotated with the triangles to the centre make a sort of fancy Bowtie.

I used 3.5 " squares with a 2" square for the flippy corner; the block ends up 6" but would also work in 4.5" squares and a 2.5" corner, to finish at 8".

This must be one of the most mindless blocks to sew, it goes very fast and is perfect for chain piecing. I used lots of little odds and sods bits that were clogging up various containers, but even though I made it 9 x 11 (99 blocks) there doesn't seem to be any appreciable difference in my scraps, there never is. Just once I'd like to see an empty space after I'd finished a quilt, but the leftover material just seems to shuffle in to fill up any gaps.

I'll probably put a border on this and give it to my son Matt as his tv watching quilt. He's using an Ocean Waves quilt I made about 6 years ago, and it's definitely the worse for wear. ( As I write this he's asleep on the lounge underneath the air-conditioner with the quilt wrapped around him. I don't know how he can stand it, I'm too hot with a t-shirt on. Guess he must love the quilt!

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This is the knitted dress of our Mum's that Keryn referred to in her blog yesterday. I think it was made of 3 ply wool and it was knitted before or during the second world war. There are two lacey vine stitches and waist and yoke are a smocking stitch. Even the shoulder pads in this are knitted! Mum used to boast that Dad could join his hands around her waist, which measured 18". Unfortunately there are a few moth holes and age stains on it, but I'll never throw it out, too many memories.

The tumbling blocks quilt is one that Keryn made for Mum years ago and it always lives on her bed.

I can remember Mum asking us on one of our birthdays, ( I think about our seventh) what we wanted and we both asked for material of our own. We always had plenty of her dressmaking scraps, but we wanted new stuff for our doll's clothes. So she took us to a large store in town called The Co-Op ( short for Co-operative) and with great difficulty we chose some half yard pieces from all the tantalising rolls of fabric. I can remember a printed orange gingham with a sprig of flowers on it, and a white fabric with a purple rosebud. We bought material that we both liked so that we could swap bits at home, and we still do the same thing now. Keryn sends pieces of her treasures to me and I send mine to her.

Once when Keryn had come home for a visit we went to a quilt shop on the way to the airport when she had to fly home. We had a pair of scissors (this was long before 9/11) and we sat in the waiting area, spread our purchases out and proceeded to cut it all in half to swap. We got some funny looks, but it was better than waiting around feeling maudlin about being separated again. One day we'll live together, but heaven help us if we combine stashes, we'll need a whole 'nother house just for that!

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This is my very first applique quilt, made in about 1990. I'd only ever made one applique block in a friendship exchange but as soon as I learnt how to do it I was hooked. I LOVE applique.

I didn't have any patterns, only photos in magazines, so I drew these designs and away I went. I used over 70 different prints in the flowers, something I'd never do now, and worked out the setting after the blocks were done- not much planning ahead.

Because I didn't plan I had to use two different creams for the background of the blocks. ( it's not white, I just had to lighten the ancient photo so you could see the colours) I distributed the 4 blocks with the faintly different cream around the central square so that it was balanced and continued on my merry way.

This was actually a raffle quilt for a friend who was in a fundraising thing, and I had a strict deadline to follow. I went for a visit to Keryn, and the quilt came with me as hand luggage (wouldn't trust it to the tender mercies of Aust baggage handlers) and we both quilted frantically with a hoop at either end. The quilt is queensized, so we had room to stake out our own little patch on it...

Before it was raffled I entered it in the local show (tiny little town, and the judging committee run by women of the Jurrassic period) who apparently took umbrage at my blatant disregard of the rule that all background fabric MUST be the SAME! Some wanted to disqualify the quilt straight away, but in the end I was relegated to second prize (there were only three entries) and the first prize was won by a set of two hexagon potholders. Hmm, I've never been a fan of The Rules and that's possibly why I don't enter contests. Either that or it's just sour grapes!

The quilt raised nearly $3000 for the Crippled Children's Assoc, and I've never regretted giving it away, I had fun doing it and I don't really need to own the quilts once I finish them. The process is the thing for me, I love all of it, designing, drafting, sewing, quilting, binding. Once it's over I'm looking for the next project and starting something else!

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One of my favourite quilt books is Legacy, about the life of Talula Gilbert Bottoms. Her productivity was amazing and even the ordinairy everyday covers she made for her many children were an inspiration. Although I love applique and complicated designs too, I'm always looking for great scrap patterns that I can make in between the 'good' quilts.

Apparently Talula pieced this design, called Glittering Stars many times and always had pieces cut to work on the diamond sections. I thought this might be a pattern that I could have on the go and cut my scraps up for every few weeks, so I gave it a whirl.

May I say, for the record, that I HATE curved piecing by hand and instead of whipping these little diamonds out by the fistful I ended up having to bribe myself to touch the things. I did it Talula's way of only having an eighth of an inch seam allowance on the curved sections and I really didn't like that either. So this isn't the perfect scrap pattern for me, but I do like the finished result- I just won't be doing any more.

I used Keryn's patterns from her Kaleidescope pack to quilt the stars, and there were lots of different designs for the cream background spaces; I had a lot of fun trying them out. I do like doing things freehand, but sometimes following patterns is just sheer fun, sew on the lines and you're done!

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The blocks that I set together a while ago now have borders. I really like triple borders, they seem to frame the centre nicely.













I'll put this with all the rest of the finished tops, but I do like this a lot so I think it will be high on the list as soon as it gets cool enough to quilt.

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Lucy asked if I could show the star quilt that's hanging in the background of one of my photos. So here it is but it's not finished, I've got this much sewn together in two panels and I have another three rows to sew and join. Typically I made the blocks in quick time and then they sat there for a year until I decided on a setting fabric.

I was going to use blue for the triangles, but Keryn made a set of stars too and set hers with blue, so I didn't want to do the 'twin' thing. So mine's a bit different. (Gonna show yours, Keryn)

Even the long setting seams are done by hand, I like being able to press the seam allowances in different directions, which is why I'm not working on this during the hot weather.

I love sewing 6 point stars by hand, they are so easy and it's hard to stop making more and more. Most patterns are so simple to make by machine, but any pattern based on hexagons is usually more pleasant to sew by hand, so I've got a list of ideas for them too. I must say I don't really like the run of the mill Grandmother's flower garden usually, but I've saved some photos of antique ones that are gorgeous, and they'll become handpiecing projects in time.

Having written that I suddenly remembered another 6 point star top that I handpieced last year, and I'd forgotten all about it! I tend to just finish the tops and stow them away, then on to the next thing. The pink in this is a reproduction double pink, whereas the other one is more of a salmon pink. I based this on an antique quilt which actually had a really deep pink, almost red setting diamond but I couldn't replicate that and chickened out of using just red. I'm not a great risk taker, but I think I'm getting more adventurous.

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I adore red and green applique quilts, and have dozens of them drawn in my ideas book. I can't work on them in the summer months because I do all the applique by hand and it's just too hot and sticky.

Despite it's appearance this is really quite a simple design, and it grew very slowly. I didn't base this on any particular antique quilt, so I just let it dictate each stage as we came to it. I enjoyed doing the swag border, and the little stars; I was originally just going to have another bud there until this idea occurred to me.

I think that's why I prefer to design my own quilts, I'm always surprised by what turns up. I'd hate to be bound to a rigid plan, even though it might be helpful when I get stuck and don't know where to go next.

The quilting was done on my Janome 4000, which has a throatspace of 6". Even though it's not a big quilt it was still annoying not having more room to manouvre. Some of the designs are Keryn's but the feathered scallops in the border were designed just to fit the applique, which was fun. Much easier to just design something new rather than try to fit an existing pattern to it.

I have a number of other applique tops waiting for quilting once it gets cooler; I now have a Janome 6500 so I won't have to struggle quite so hard. I did a quilt for a customer on it that was 108" square , never again. I think it should be illegal to make quilts that big.

On a completely different note, this is my son's dog Jessie.She's a minature fox terrier and a dog of very little brain, unfortuneately. Normally she's a whirlwind of activity, but Matt took this picture of her recently and doesn't she look the most downtrodden, poor little waif?When we saw Ice Age, we all agreed instantly that the funny little creature with the acorn- Scrat- must have been based on Jessie, from the buggy eyes to the quivering nose and the incessant activity, the resemblance is amazing.

I rest my case....

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