Travelling and not much Sewing

Well it's been a whole month! In that time I've been to NZ to visit family and friends. Love those people and that place!

Brick Bay north of Auckland

 I enjoyed the cool wet Autumn weather in Christchurch -yes really!

Then a brief trip further South to visit our our son at University in our hometown of Dunedin

Dunedin has some stunning beaches:

Photo credit- this was taken by our daughter!

Good to have two of the siblings together again. The youngest was on a school trip. A music one to Europe mind you, so almost worth missing NZ for!

My husband, me and our eldest

Looking back inland across the estuary

Colour palette inspiration

Local wildlife

The view from our son's college room across the chapel roof

And as if that wasn't enough, we've just returned from Mt Gambier in SE South Australia for Generations in Jazz a fantastic high school jazz festival. We stayed a bit away in the sleepy riverside town of Nelson. We didn't have much time for exploring after all that music, but what we did left us looking forward to returning at some stage.

Boathouses on the Glenelg River at Nelson

With all the travelling I haven't had much time for sewing at all in the last month.

I took the baby cross quilt (as opposed to a cross baby quilt!) I've been making, to Mt Gambier to finish off. I rushed to complete the quilting on the morning we left so I could bind it during the 5 hour car trip -it didn't take me that long!




 Before we went to NZ I had nearly finished the quilting, when I ran out of the variegated thread I'd been using only two rows from the end. None in stock at any shop... so they ordered it for me and it was waiting when I got back from NZ.

Taken at Nelson Ocean Beach, where the river doesn't quite meet the sea any more!

I'm really happy with how this quilt has turned out. I used Katie's tutorial which made it all really quick and easy and the colour palette worked out well. Hopefully the recipient likes it for her wee boy.

Apart from finishing off this quilt I've managed a few bee blocks and that's it.

This is for Kathy for May's Simply Solids block.

Kathy asked for I'm a Ginger Monkey's Scrap Vomit B Block. I already changed some of my initial colours, but overall I'd say this has been a learning experience! I'm not so keen on the colours and I think it's a value problem in the background/corner squares, (do you think so?); but in the end I decided not to remake it again as when it's part of a larger very mixed colour selection it'll be OK and at least the central diamond is defined.

I've also joined another bee for Do.Good Stitches, which is a charity bee making quilts for needy people. I'm part of the "Cherish" Australian based circle. This month we were asked to make two black and white 4x4 blocks. So I cut those out before I went to NZ but didn't manage to sew them together until I got back last week.

I'm looking forward to a sewing day with Liz this Friday, but overall things aren't very speedy at the moment on the sewing front. Slow bloggers of the world unite!

HST Finish

It's taken a while what with one thing and another, but my HST quilt is finally finished!

I made this quilt with scraps plus the colours I pruned from the 60+ Kona colours I bought for this quilt also blogged about here.

The back is kona Peridot and some left over triangles joined end wise and trimmed. Actually I sort of forgot I'd lose the points so ended up cutting them in half lengthwise and making a couple of stripy strips instead.  But I'm happy with it although it wasn't my original idea. Sometimes mistakes end happily!

After some debate I decided to straight line quilt it in offset triangles.
While I was doing it I worried that it would overwhelm the interplay of the piecing, but it turned out OK.

Bound in 2 1/2 " wide Espresso again but I needed to do a bit of clever cribbing and hide the seam inside as I almost didn't have enough..

Loosely, I did denser lines on the darker rows and more widely spaced lines on the lighter piecing, but of course the pattern of the triangles is irregular so it's not too strict. You can see it better on the back, except where the lowering sun washes it out!

And a couple more gratuitous shots with the trees in the setting sun...

And I need to say that I was hugely inspired by Katie with this and this!

Spring Colours

 I had never seen a lily (I presume it is) like this one before. It was so thick and large it looked like it was moulded from plastic. The bud you can see behind was also most unusual.

These, just growing by a busy, dirty noisy roadside in a business garden, were prolific and so vivid too. The centre of that flower looks like it's designed especially for pollinators to me...!

I managed a bit of sewing a couple of evenings this week and was impressed with my aging machine's capabilities in sewing this leather pouch for a friend's birthday. 

Lined with some lovely orange feathers from Anna Maria Horner's Field Study collection

I made another pouch too, which I might keep under wraps for the time being.

And here are a few more pictures of my finished improvised quilt previously posted here and here.

I like the effect of the scrappy binding and for the quilting I used a thread a few shades darker than the aqua as I wanted to reduce it's clean brightness a little. I had mis-identified the blue I'd used in the centre of some of the squares as Kona Aqua, when actually on closer examination in better light I think it was Dusty Blue- the perils of 1" swatches on a card...

At least I think it's finished, I'm considering adding some dark aqua and blue hand quilting in between some of the wider lines...?

And last but not least, look at the lovely needle case Liz made me to match the pincushion at the end of this post! I suspect she used this pattern?

Sneak Preview

I have finally finished the improvisational piece I started in my pajamas and continued with the last couple of months alongside another couple of projects.

 More and proper photos soon, after it's dry. I had to get a move on to finish and wash it coz I oiled my even feed foot since it wasn't behaving... The problem was fixed but some oil did seep onto the quilt in a couple of spots :-(

A portion of the back, which I might even prefer to the front?

There hasn't been a deadline for this, which is probably why it's taken ages. I always seem to do better with a deadline!

Linking up to  Creative Spaces today.

Eclipse on a Sunny Day

I've been waiting for a sunny day and beachy background to show you this quilt; which I think was the third one I made, finished a few years ago now.  It was a very long process, begun in NZ and stretched across two more moves one across the Tasman and one within Adelaide where we still live. 

It was my first go at curved piecing, which really wasn't as hard as I'd anticipated and the instructions were very clear. I added on a couple more rows of blocks to the pattern to make this a twin bed sized quilt.

 Leftover fabric was good for the scrappy binding

 The quilting was a meander in variegated thread, except within the circles where I used an FMQed spiral to emphasize the circle. Some went a bit wiggly woggly, especially on the larger outside parts of the spiral!

I left the lighter pieced circles unquilted, having stitched in the ditch around them.

This quilt was for my daughter who loved these colours. It's probably not what she'd choose now at almost 17, though she is still drawn to colour, but I think she still likes it and I'll make her another some day.

I didn't take any of the back, which is just a soft white flannelette sheet and the variegated quilting thread used front and back just gives it a little lift. I used wool batting as my daughter feels the cold!

The pattern (called Eclipse) was a free one from Fun Quilts Weeks Ringle and Bill Kerr whom I've enthused about before. And much of the fabric is from a line they did too, though I did supplement it with a couple of others.