Sunday around the house

Lots of things to show today, after a few days of less to show. Here is the batik sampler quilt - I finished stitching the binding down tonight - it's at an odd angle in the photo because I turned it sideways to show the quilt right-side up, even though I took the photo side on for space reasons. It looks good. Might keep this one, as it has no particular purpose at the moment, though you never know - something could very well come up.

I also did some work on the Japanese applique - finished the bridge, added the land at the front and on the right and put up the tree - though I haven't satin-stitched that yet. After that, it's just the bunches of leaves to do, and an optional moon (which I think I will include - I like it).



I also decided to make some fish for my newly painted toilet room - this is a small piece, about 18 inches by 30, I think. Obviously, it's not quilted or anything yet - just pieced together - but I will quilt it fairly soon so I can hang it up. It's attached temporarily to the toilet wall at the moment, just to check the colours and so forth... Oddly enough, this is the third quilt I will have made specifically for a toilet room - but the first for my own.

Wednesday whatever

Took the kids swimming today, so not a lot of sewing was done (though I did start on an applique piece - see below), so I thought it was time for a cross-stitch update. As you can see, I have mainly been working on the cream coloured dress. This is quite slow going as there are about 5 different shades of cream and they are all fairly similar so I have to count even more carefully than normal. I did take this to Scotland with me on holiday, but only stitched on it once or twice. Still, progress has been made and I am down to the last cream colour (white, actually), so it will soon be time to move on to something else in the picture. Thank goodness!

Here's what I did have time to work on today - another in the old block of the month of Japanese images. This one is called The Bridge (I'm guessing you can tell why) and has quite a few more pieces to piece, including a large tree with lots of little leaf clusters, which I'm sure will take ages to do. Next up is to satin stitch the red span of the bridge - at the moment it's only stuck down. That will be fiddly as well and it all looks kind of odd, as the bits of land in the foreground aren't attached yet, but I'm sure it will improve soon.

Mt Fuji

Having remembered to buy the dark brown thread amidst my mad pawing through the sale bin yesterday, I was able to finish the Japanese Block of the Month block today. Woo hoo. Maybe I will take an evening next week to trace out the shapes for the next block. I'd really like to get this done and there are only 4 more blocks to go.

I also started working on something for a Triptych themed piece for the 6-12" mini-quilt swap on Flickr - it's three pieces (obviously) which go together in some fashion, due at the end of February. But it's mostly squares and triangles at the moment and not very interesting, so I haven't photographed it. Maybe later this week (though I don't foresee much sewing time until Saturday, as I am going swimming with friends tomorrow morning and to my little quilt group (for the first time in months) on Thursday. And having coffe with friends on Friday. Such is the life!

Some finishing up...

First off, this thrilling photo of my Exquisite Corpse project. Now, before Arlee panics, I will warn you that this is the ONLY photo you will see of my work on this project - either my piece or other people's pieces - until the entire thing is finished - not even sneak peeks from now on. What is an Exquisite Corpse, I hear you ask? Well, you can check out the blog here, to see the previous rounds which have been done, but in a nutshell, it's like a round robin, except you don't see what the previous person has done. The first person does the head & shoulders, the next the upper torso, etc. Once I do my head, I will cover all but a half inch of my work and the next person will take it from there, do her (or his) section and then cover all but their bottom half inch. We are working in 7 inch squares, and there are 5 people in a group. This round, we are all doing body or body type images, whereas in previous rounds, there has been more variety. I think this will be a really interesting textile/fibre project and I'm pleased to be taking part, even if it means I can't blog it!



So, following on from yesterday, here's what I did today - half a Japanese block of the month - there is a good deal more buildings, etc to fill in at the bottom, but I have absolutely no dark brown thread, not even a dark medium, so I need to pick some up tomorrow before proceeding. Luckily, most of the houses, etc have nice straight lines, so the applique should go quickly once I have the right thread. So then I decided to quickly finish off one of the almost finished projects from my unfinished section - I added a border to this little flying geese quilt, which will now go on the pile of finished tops waiting to be quilted.

I have added a "List of Shame" (tongue in cheek) to my sidebar to help me monitor my progress in moving those things from section to section and off the list entirely - we'll see how that goes!

A picture may be worth 1000 words...

but without at least some of them attached, you might have no idea what the picture is about. I know I said no pictures before, but this is something I've done since - don't get too impressed, it's not sewn yet, just the pieces cut out waiting to be apppliqued down - I'm sure that part will take a bit of time, but I needed something to do while watching telly, and this was a good option.

Edges

Seems to be mostly what I did today - not that I had a huge amount of time for sewing, anyway, but the hour or so I did have, what I mainly did was edge some postcards. I now have six done and at least one more quilted but not edged. Getting there slowly but surely.

This evening watching telly I managed to tie in all the ends of the table runner for my secret santa and to finish the binding and the ends on the one for my friends. So tomorrow I guess I will package up all the various secret santa stuff (in addition to this, I have a "bought" secret santa to swap with, and a smaller group I belong to always does a swap as well, so I have stuff for that to send - also bought stuff, rather than made - we are realistic about our time in that group. Sometimes.) and post it off. Which is fine, as the date for posting is 1 December for the one group and I think the 7th or 8th for the other. Plenty of time to spare!

I also started cutting out bits of fusible vilene for the next month of the Japanese block of the month sampler - this one is Mt Fuji in the mist. It's block five of nine, and was only supposed to be finished in 2005 or so. But hey, I'm working on it, right?

Unexpectedly productive (or, every cloud has a silver lining)

I had expected to get no sewing at all done today - so many errands to run and things to do at school, but Alex's "my tummy hurts" this morning actually turned into real illness (in the form of throwing up on mummy. sigh.) so we spent the day at home. He spent the morning watching telly, then lying on the floor playing with a toy plane and listening to music. He didn't really want company, so in between the washing (he threw up again on the sofa covers), I sewed. And sewed. And then after lunch, when he was a little more with it and wanted to play on the computer, I came downstairs and fused fabric...

The first thing I did was finish my postcards for the autumn splendour swap - these are the last three - one has a red binding/border, I know, but I thought I was going to run out of gold, so I did one with red. As it happened, I didn't run out of gold, but whatever.

Then, I decided to get something old out - I have these Japanese blocks-of-the-month which I am gradually doing (only a year or so behind schedule) and one of them was sort of half done, so I finished it off. At the end, each block will have a fabric around the circle, but for the moment, I've just used paper to give the effect. This is block number 4 (here are the others)- only 5 more to go. I've decided I'm going to designate it as a 40th birthday present for a friend, so it's going to have to be finished by October 2008. Having a deadline, even a distant one, will help me actually work on it. It's not that I don't like it, it just tends to get pushed down the list of stuff to be done because it's not urgent.

Lastly, as I said above, when Alex got to the point where he needed me downstairs (light supervision & help with computer game) I decided to dig out the small fine-tipped soldering iron I purchased at Festival of Quilts and have a go at Fusing Fabric, Margaret Beal style (I bought her book too). Basically, I just played around, but it was fun. I'll definitely do some more with it, though I'm not sure it's a technique I'll use a lot, but I can see using it for small projects, like postcards and things. Some more photos here (this one very blurry because I took it without a flash - the flash makes the nylon organza look really garish...)