Remember this stack of eight point stars?

The ones with blue backgrounds were made into this quiltWhich still left an awful lot of stars to be used.
I was thinking about the pieced borders for the Arrowhead top, and the light bulb blinked- what about the stars that are just sitting there in the drawer?

So off I went with my fabulous idea until I discovered ...this....
This is a HOLE! In my quilt top!
And judging by the frayed edges, it's been in the material for a while, probably before I cut it and sewed it as the alternate squares in this top. How could I not have noticed? GRRRR! So before I could attach my wonderful pieced borders I had to do this......
I contemplated just appliqueing a patch over the hole, but I preferred this solution, even though it meant more work.Sigh.
So here's the top, and I'm really pleased with it on many levels. I didn't plan any of the setting, but I love the way it looks. The material from Keryn was a bit of serendipity, the blocks sitting there waiting to be used were fortuitous, even the colours were right for this quilt. Sometimes I wonder if there isn't some inner process that goes along quite undetected by our consciousness and is planning these "accidents" for us. It just all worked out so well. Except for that hole....

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The blue postage stamp is finished, only took an afternoon.
















The quilting isn't anything special,but at least it's done and I can go on to the next project.



















The backing was made with Bonnie's 10" squares, and I'll be doing that again, it made good use of some wishy-washy blues and it helped when basting to makes sure everything was square. I'm sure I can find heaps more fabric to cut into a 10" square stash.
Remember this top? I left it when I decided it needed pieced borders of some kind. Something has been happening here, but I'll show you that next post.
Mac went to visit friends and now it's apparent that he thinks any bowl of water is meant for him to sit in. He went through great contortions trying to fit into this dish, but in the end had to be content with immersing just his front paws. By that time most of the water was on the floor anyway.

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This little top was made with left-over 4-patch blocks that Keryn sent me, years ago. I quite often end up with her cast-offs, usaully because she mentions that she's going to throw them out and my first reaction is "I'll have them!". I think sometimes she just doesn't tell me what she's going to clear out, and chucks it anyway so that she can save me from myself. Do I want to be saved......?

I must admit that it's all getting a bit beyond me. If I save every scrap that I produce and every skerrick that comes my way from other people I end up spending quite a lot of my sewing time mired in the little bits and not getting the big things done. That's why I chose this set of left-overs to finish, so that I can see something happening with the scraps. It's basted and had the borders outlined with the walking foot, and now I want to do some free motion in the middle. The binding's already made, so I could have this finished pretty soon.

The container of scraps that I emptied all came from Keryn and another friend who donates them to me, and I'm going to try and cut everything up as soon as I get it now.I've got into the habit of making all my scraps into strips and squares as I cut for other projects, so I haven't added to the scrap containers myself for a couple of years. Added plenty to the drawers of strips and squares and triangles, but I can handle that. It's the bags of free fabric I get from everyone else that overwhelm me, ...."Oh, you use scraps don't you, I've got a bag of fabric saved for you!" and I just can't seem to say no.

Don't think that you can get out of sending me stuff Keryn, this isn't a complaint and I still want all the stuff you're clearing out!!!! I'm doing you a favour!

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I finally gave up and went to the optometrist last week.

Verdict- I need glasses. I've known that my eyes needed a little help with fine work for a while and I used those magnifying glasses you get at the chemists. They worked for a while, but just lately they seemed not as effective, so I got a stronger pair.

But what finally tipped me over the edge was the blasted word verification squiggles on comments pages.So many times I've dutifully typed them in and they come back and say try again! What!! I know that was an I! Or perhaps it was an L? Hmmn.....No way is that a J!!! I'm dumber than spam now, so I guess I have to admit I need help.

I said to the optometrist "I don't need my magnifying glasses for reading yet", and he looked at me over the top of HIS specs and said "Well I don't know how you've got away with that!" so my eyes must be worse than I thought. Dammn! I used to be the only one at my patchwork group that didn't need spectacles, and now I've joined the crew of the good ship Failing Eyesight.

Not that there's anything wrong with that....I just wanted to hold out as long as I could.

Oh well, I got to the bottom of one scrap container. Now I know it's not particularly large, but this was piled high with higglety-pigglety bits and pieces. So that's done, and my worktable is conpletely empty and ready for me to choose which project to attack. But I'm going away to visit my boys in Adelaide for the next couple of days, so it won't be anytime soon. Perhaps Sunday I can drag something out. And I'm going to try and not buy ANY fabric in Adelaide, think that's likely?

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On someone's blog (I can't remember now, if you read this tell me and I'll link to you) they asked how everyone stored blocks in progress.

I have a heap of pizza boxes, and also some egg boxes that held 30 eggs and were a nice deep size. The pizza boxes are new, and I think they were about 50 cents each, and didn't I get a suspicious look when I asked for them! Most of the blocks I make will fit in them flat, but I've been thinking about getting a couple of the huge family sized boxes for the larger applique blocks I'm doing.
For the kits I'm cutting now I find these plastic docment cases are really handy. I can fit in the stacks of cut pieces, a few finished blocks and my graph paper cutting chart. This is especially handy if I'm only cutting certain scraps as I acquire them. I can just pull out the case for the Jacobs Ladder I'm cutting from blues and cut until the scraps of the moment are gone.

I only have 4 of these, but I don't think I want to be cutting for any more than 4 kits at a time. That might seem a little excessive.

I'm about half way through the scrap container I'm trying to empty, and some of the pieces are so odd that I keep putting them to one side. They're not ugly, just not things I'd ever use, like chickens and houses and novelty prints. I figure if I group them all together I can perhaps pass them on to someone who does use chickens and dogs bones and butterflies. I'll empty this container one way or another.!

Today I went out to water the lawn and Mac 'helped' me carry the hose. He sat and watched me attach the sprinkler and as I walked back to the tap I was aware of him trotting at my heels. What I didn't know was that he'd picked up the sprinkler and was carrying it back for me. I got to the tap, he sat down behind me, I turned the tap on, and I think you can imagine my surprise! I bet son Matt wishes he had that little scene on video!We had to give Mac a bigger bowl to sit in, he was a bit squashed in his water dish. Do you think he's going to like water when he grows up? You think he will?

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What's a fellow to do when it's so hot but sit in his waterbowl? It cools the undercarriage wonderfully and Mac recommends it to all who suffer from a hot tummy...

I'm all over the place in the sewing room, and I've got to get a handle on the situation. All these projects to be worked on, all of them clamouring "Me First! Me First!" and I just want to walk away and cut out something new.

I shall not!! Or at least not until I've made some progress on some of the others. Because cutting up fabric is so much fun and it usually inspires me to start on the old projects again too.

I've also made a resolution that this week I'm going to empty one of my scrap containers by cutting shapes for kits I've already started. I think Bonnie inspired me with her whole empty cupboard. Wow, that's a lot of material gone and must be so satisfying. My piddly scrap container won't be in the same league, but I can never seem to get to the bottom of even one. Surely if I pick up every single damn bit in the next week and ask myself "What do you want to do with this?" I can cut it for a kit, strip it, or ditch it.

I did bind a quilt yesterday, and I have the top, backing and batting for another one waiting to be assembled. It's not exactly quiltin' weather though, so that might not get done until it stops being sitting-in-my-waterbowl -HOT.

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This is the Alden quilt that Keryn was talking about on her blog. I think I always wanted to make a copy of this because it was one of a pair, a twin if you like.

When my middle son Rob was 11 he became really ill and was diagnosed with type one diabetes, something that changed all our lives. He was taken to the Adelaide Childrens Hospital and spent over a week there being pricked and poked and eventually stabilised. Because it had all been so sudden I had only a few clothes that I'd managed to grab, but absolutely nothing to do. There were a lot of hours just sitting next to Rob, twiddling my thumbs.

Of course I mentioned this while I was talking on the phone to Keryn, and within a few days a hefty parcel arrived at the hospital, containing a kit for the first blocks of the Alden quilt; little baggies of the rosettes already cut out and a treasure of fabrics to fondle and gloat over.

Thinking of everything, she'd included a needle and thread and a template, but I decided it was too big and bought another daintier one. And seeing how big hers turned out, I'm glad I did.

I can't remember now if I got much sewn before we left hospital, but I know that I used to take my bundle of goodies down to the huge cafeteria, park myself next to the free coffee machine and revel in the delight of actually doing a long anticipated project. There's nothing like a new quilt to absorb the attention and the rather frightening future I'd been contemplating didn't seem quite so apalling. Just having something different to think about in the present pushed it far enough away to make it bearable.

Rob, bless him, saw the whole thing as a challenge and handled his condition wonderfully. The diabetes ward at the hospital was also the cystic fibrosis ward, and those childen were so much worse off that Rob decided to make the best of his troubles. He's now 22, did 4 years of Forensic Chemistry at Uni and has a job working in a laboratory for a mining company. I'm really proud of him and what he's achieved, and he's a lovely boy besides.

Like Keryn, this was my sewing for at least two Olympics and I never got sick of it. There were no deadlines and no pressure, because it was worth waiting to find the perfect fabric if I didn't have it in my stash. For years I carried around mental descriptions of what I was looking for..."An orange and red sprig of flowers on a chocolate background....a small mocha coloured geometric, not too dark...." Even now I sometimes think "Oh, that would be great for the Alden quilt!" and then realise that it's long over. I tend to keep buying for quilts that I've already finished, especially if I've been collecting specific fabrics for a long time.

I'm a bad girl, but I haven't quilted this yet.(sue me.) Like Keryn I want to handquilt this, even though she expresses such horror at how long it took her to do it and says a 'nice panto' would be the best thing. I think there's something special about this and the circumstances that brought it about, and I'm quite prepared to take another two Olympics to get it finished.

Besides, I like looking at all the little seams on the back of it too!

And now, some gratuitous puppy porn...
A dawg and his boy...

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The quilt from the last post was based on another one of Talula's. It's called Eastern Star, and Keryn decided to make one just like it. She sent me the template and asked for some scrappy blocks, so I duly made about 8 and sent them off.

I intended to make this quilt too, but in one of my "What if?" moments I decided to turn the block slightly so that the points aligned with North and South, making the stars stand up straight.
(Excuse the horrid image, but I'm too laaazy to go and drag the top out and take a clear picture, - I just blew up a bit of yesterdays photo)

I had to redraft the background pieces, but I love drafting, so that's never a problem, nor do I ever have to lament not having a pattern. As long as I've got an image or a scribble or something on graph paper I know I can make it work.
This is Talula's original quilt, and Keryn's looked very similar if I remember correctly. I still have the templates and one day I might make one of these too.

Mac loves this chair of mine, and when I growled at him this morning for chewing my phone charger he decided to go and sulk in his favourite spot. Hmphh!!

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I've decided to rearrange the furniture in my sewing room in a fit of New Year energy, so there is no sewing going on at the moment.

I'm a great shifter of furniture, I love moving everything around and getting a new look to all my stuff. I usually persuade myself that it's in the interests of efficiency and the new set-up will work better, but I think I just like a change. And for a while the novelty of the different look makes me keep everything nice and tidy, until it all becomes stale again.

I found this little top while I was rummaging and put it in the pile of Things To Be Quilted. It really is quite cute, and part of me wishes I'd made it bigger. All the blocks are pieced by hand, and I got sick of those weird shaped background pieces, so I reminded myself how tedious they were to do.I like the setting fabric too, this will be pretty when it's finished and has some nice fancy design quilted in the plain pink border.

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Sometimes you feel a bit introspective......
( This is a sculpture my eldest son did when he was at the School of Art in Adelaide)

I've been doing a bit of navel contemplating and thinking about what I want to acheive in 2007. It's always a good time to evaluate, but my blog is a year old as well, so I have an added facet to my musings. I suppose that because one of last year's resolutions was to create a blog I can tick that off but I really haven't posted as regularly as I envisaged. Life (and Death) really did get in the way quite a lot of the time, and the gaps in my postings were never due to laziness or boredom. Sometimes when huge things are happening in your personal life even a little paragraph about the latest sewing is too much to handle.

Hopefully this new year won't hold quite as much upheaval and I can be a steady blogger. I've really loved the community I've found and although I knew some people before I seem to have met other delightful friends too that I would never have known otherwise.

I've kept a journal since I was 13, sometimes with a few months lapse, but my life and thoughts have pretty well been chronicled since then. Now the blog is a part of that, and although I don't think I'll ever stop the actual writing with a pen in a book I'm really enjoying the little slice of life, with photos, that I can have here. How could I ever have imagined, when I was 14, and brooding about Lord Byron, Art and a boy called Cookie, that one day I would be able to instantly publish my musings to a worldwide audience, every single day if I wanted. I would have blown my little mind.

So thankyou Blogger, even if your photo loading is a pain at times, I think we forget how incredible the whole thing is, even if it took 45 mins to load every photo.And thankyou blogger readers for continuing to come back even when there's nothing new. Stick with me, I promise to do better this year!

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I can't believe it's a month since I blogged anything. How does life get so crazy at this time of year?

Adding to the craziness is Matt's christmas present, a Staffordshire bull terrier puppy. Mac is 7 weeks old and utterly adorable, but I'm wasting so much time with him I'm not getting anything done. Oh well, they're only little once, and we have to spend time bonding with him, don't we?

All the staffies I've ever known love to lie like this. I suppose the tiles are cool on his tummy, but he looks like a very strange frog, doesn't he?
I have to share my favourite chair now, which isn't too bad when he's still tiny, but in a few months it won't be so comfortable.

I hope everyone has a merry Christmas and I'll be back soon with more regular posts. I'm off to drink Baileys and spend time with my boys.

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Marcie has been inspired to try her own version of my block from this post a while back. I love her blocks and I'm so tempted to start a new set of my own. Back when I made them there were hardly any reproductions available in Australia and I used my 'best' fabrics... Now I look at them and go Ugh! How Boring! But that was all I had to work with. I could do them much better now......

My blocks were all done by hand, and I'd machine sew them if I did them today, but I'd still just cut heaps of fabrics and 'audition' each piece in the block. Like Marcie says you get some lovely surprises that way.

I must NOT start another project! Especially one I've already done! I'm trying to nerve myself to show you the stack of blocks that didn't even make it to the stage of being a proper ufo, with brothers and sisters and an aspiration to be a finished something one day. I quite often grab some scraps and make a block to try out some scribble on graph paper, and a lot of these are non-starters. They just get put in the drawer as reference and I was amazed to see how many there were. I shall have to do a proper 'orphan' quilt with all these one day, but a lot of them are uninspiring. But they'd make a charity quilt I suppose, and they'd at least be out of the drawer and being used.

You can't see it from this photo, but there's over 60 blocks here! That's enough for two orphan quilts. Sometimes I prefer not to know these things, now I'll feel guilty about adding more blocks to The Drawer.

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It seems ages since I posted, don't know why I've been so neglectful. I have been busy organising my fabrics, an activity that can absorb me for days at a time. I love having it in drawers rather than stacking tubs, which were too hard to lift off each other as I have a back problem at the moment. So I felt totally justified in taking time off to categorise and straighten all my supplies and make then easier to manage.

I'd like to say that's ALL my fabric in those 30 drawers, but of course I'd be lying....

In the course of my rummaging I went through a lot of my ufos and set together these blocks as a bit of distraction. I finished them years ago and had been looking for the perfect setting material. Everything I tried turned the blocks to mush and they sat in a pizza box waiting.....waiting...

Then Keryn sent me 5 yards of material that was on special at Spotlight (sort of like Joanne's in America) and the inspiration to try the two together struck me. Perfect!! This is why I don't mind letting projects 'lie fallow' for a while. (OK, years in some instances.) I'd rather wait for the perfect fabric and get it right than finish something with a poor choice, just to get it 'done'.

This will have some sort of pieced border around it next- back to the drawing board- but I'm enthused about getting it this far after being stalled so long.

These blocks are special to me because I pieced a lot of them during one of my middle son's hospital stays. At eleven he was diagnosed with type one diabetes and when he was 16 had to spend a week in a hospital 150 miles away to stabilise his insulin regime. I packed up all my cut pieces, knowing I'd have to have something to keep me busy for that time, and as I sat with him and watched telly I pieced over half of these. It's strange that some of the staff seemed to think I was mad and wasting my time, and yet the people who sat doing nothing at all (except staring at the telly-urgh) were treated as 'normal'.

I prefer my madness thankyou.....

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One of Mum's cacti has this incredible huge red flower, and there are about 5 more on the same plant. Very spectacular, but I've got no idea what it's called. Pudgy hand included for scale....My trip to the quilt shop yielded some fat quarters and 2 metres of a likely material for the setting squares. I shan't show it here until I've decided whether it's the One.

Don't know what this haul will be used for, none of them are really exciting but they go with collections that I'm amassing for certain projects. I'm in a constant state of being 'With Project', so I'm always on the lookout.
Let's just say I think I'm a bit out of control with the square in square units. I've done 27 blocks and yet I've got more of the little units than when I started. And I can't stop cutting more out!! You can partly see a red and cream block that I got side-tracked with, ahem, I might be making a set of them too.....As well as two other ideas I had, but I'm not saying nuthin about them....

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Hedgehog asked what the name of the block was in the border and I'm not really sure. I've seen it called Flyfoot and I like that name so I haven't bothered to research it . I have no idea what the centre block is called at all.
I'm off to an antiques fair today, and a visit to a really nice quilt shop. I hope to get a setting fabric for my square in sqare blocks which are almost all done. Another top well on the way. And I confess I've also been working on a couple of other blocks made from the same units; I'm a wee bitty obsessed at the moment. Obsession can be a Good Thing, can't it?
Can't it?

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On Lucy's blog she reduced 5 UFOs to one by combining them all into a new top. That reminded me I did something similar years ago by combining these two projects. The border used 30 blocks, which surprised me, I actually had to make more to get it done. I like the result, and I might go through my old UFOs and see if I can combine any of them, somehow this top doesn't have the guilt value that the unfinished blocks had on their own.

I loved the look of Lucy's quilt, because there were so many different blocks in there, whereas this looks quite planned. I obviously need to be a bit more 'maverick".

This top was made in the long ago age when I did just about everything by hand, with templates. I loved the centre block, and now I'm tempted to make another top so I can use rotary cutting and machine sewing. That's silly, I don't need more of these blocks, but it would be so much easier....

It was a much more pleasurable process in some ways, but I just don't have the time now. Nevertheless, I loved handpiecing them in front of the telly at night and cutting out every fabric carefully and choosing the colours for each combination . I think I'm going to limit my handwork to applique, because that's something I will never do by machine.

And here's a quilt from my favourite book, Legacy, by Nancilu Burdick, about her grandmother Talula Gilbert Bottoms. This 'Throw-Together' quilt was made by Talula's mother-in-law Elisa Bottoms and is dated 1875 - 1890. I adore this quilt, so full of scraps and the start of quite a few quilts, all combined when another cover was needed and married together out of necessity. I love making my quilts, I love choosing and cutting and buying the reproductions to make traditional designs, but who could ever capture the integrity of an old quilt like this, made from necessity and hardship? Even though I'm Australian I feel that this is part of my quilt heritage too, quilts like this are the reason why I'll always be grounded in the traditional rather than the modern. Just love it.

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The customer quilt is finished, Yay!!!! I had to quilt it really simply because they didn't want me to stitch over all the embroidered messages. That meant a lot of empty space and close quilting in the border would have pulled it in too much. So I just did a sort of wonky vine and left it at that.



As a reward I let myself make lots more of my new blocks, don't they look fun?

Some of the browns are mouthwatering, yum!

I'm having a lot of fun with these blocks, and can hardly wait to get the setting material and turn them into a top. Some quilts are enjoyable from start to finish, and this looks like being one of them.
















I know Keryn will study these photos closely and then mutter "I didn't get any of that brown, OR that one....".


I'll give you the scraps, I promise!

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Happy Birthday me. Whenever I tell people that Keryn and I have different birthdays they all assume that we must have been born around midnight, and about ten minutes apart. But Keryn was born at ten on Tuesday morning and I was born 36 hours later at ten on Wednesday night.
Keryn told the full story yesterday on her blog.

I think it's a wonder my Mum and I survived at all, and marvel at the procedures these days that would make the delay unnecessary.

While we were all recovering from that traumatic experience another woman in the ward gave birth to a baby who unfortunately lived for only a few minutes. The woman was put in a room nearby and her sobbing eventually got to Mum, still shocked from her own experience.

"It’s not fair” she told the nurse, I have two babies and she has none. Give her one of my mine.” Today no-one could conceive of such an action in case the mother became deluded and fixated on the baby, but they were much simpler days. So dear kind Sister Lewis, who had worked so hard to save my life, gave me to the woman to hold, trying to ease her pain. She cuddled me for hours afterwards, and I like to think it was some sort of comfort.

Years later, when I was a mother myself, I suddenly thought What if that woman had been holding me and thinking “Why did YOU live and my baby died?” When I voiced this to Mum she scoffed at such a notion. “If she’d been thinking that then why did she call her first daughter Meredith?” So I had been a great comfort after all.

Mum also used to like telling us that when we came home from hospital (we were both around 5 pounds) Dad took one of us into the nursery to change a nappy. After a while there was a cry of "Help!! I’ve lost the baby!" The nappies were so big and cumbersome for us that they were all cut in half, and he fared much better after that.

I've always loved that story because those were the days when a father usually didn't bother to involve himself with things like changing nappies, in fact it would have been greeted with absolute horror by all of my uncles. But Dad was not going to miss out on the day to day chores of his two new daughters, and participated in the feedings and burpings and nappies with great enthusiasm.

A couple of years ago I was at the checkout behind an elderly lady who I recognised as Sister Lewis, now in her nineties. She was trying to use a card, but had confused her pin number, and got more and more flustered as the girl lost patience with her. “Sorry love” the girl finally snapped, “You only get three tries” and motioned her through. I was incensed that this woman, who had brought hundreds, if not thousands of babies into the world, full of commonsense and knowledge and kindness, was being dismissed as a doddery old fool.

I pointed to the few groceries she’d been trying to buy and said to the girl ”I’ll pay for those!” She grimaced at me as if I were mad and said “You don’t have to do that”.

"I know I don't" I retorted, "But I wouldn't be alive if it wasn't for that woman!" I was hard pressed to get Sister Lewis to accept the gesture, but as I said, it was the least I could do for her.

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It's Keryn's birthday today. For one day she's technically a year older than I am, until I catch up on Sunday. She's told the story of our birth on her blog, and I'll continue it tomorrow.

It was good having separate birthdays because we always got the same presents, and when Keryn opened hers, I knew exactly what I was getting. So that I'd have a surprise Mum gave us another gift on my birthday- excellent stuff!


This is a customer quilt I'm doing, a signature quilt and it's full of nice messages. The recipient will love it, but I'll have to get a move on and have it done by Monday or Tuesday.

It doesn't look possible to feed that big quilt (it's 87" square) through that throat space, but I love my Janome 6500. I've done a quilt that was 108" square on it, and though it wasn't easy it turned out very nicely. Of course I'd love a long arm, but in the meantime I'm quite happy with this set up.

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