My Quilted Journal

I realised today as I was filling our my Dear Jane journal that I have never really 'journaled' about the day to day quilting I get up to. Sure I have blogged and in recent times it's more a 'ta-dah' look what I finished post. After listing up my Work In Progress Quilts the other day and subsequently cleaning and re-organising my craft room for the 500th time, I realised that I have many more than the quilts that are at that Ta-dah moment. More still I have started or purchased with a particular reason in mind and as I age, I tend to forget why the heck I did that. So today with this post I start my "Quilted Journal"

Yesterday after entertaining a little girl all day while hubby worked on his boat (and did some fishing) I asked if I could have today off. I fully intended on spending the free day to sew and quilt to my hearts content! So it was quickly arranged. Miss K was none to happy to realise that I wasn't coming with them to play tinnie (boat) swaps nor was she happy to hear I was off to the shops WITHOUT her. Yet it's now 4:30, my free day is nearly over and she seemed to have enjoyed herself. Me? After a crappy start and getting sidetracked with Facebook, I ended up with a few finished blocks. Though it hasn't quite been the day I envisaged ~ it's still been exactly what I needed.   

I started with a Dear Jane block. It looked easy enough with only 13 pieces to it, a simple nine patch on the diagonal. Simple. Well we all know how catastrophic the last quilt on the diagonal went for me… but this one - no problem. All went well until I sewed on the first triangles outer, it didn't line up. Dang. Cue Unpicking. Re-sew both on, check they are matching and sew on 3rd triangle. It is then I realise that the block is too small. half an inch too small. WTF. Oh dear. Check the measurements I've cut the pieces out correctly. Re-check and decide to unpick the whole thing and start again.

At that point I realised it was nearing 11am, half my day was spent gas-bagging to the quilters on Facebook and making a block that was too small. Damn. Time to go shopping. I headed to Spotlight and bought a few more pieces of fabric for my quilt as well as a tonne of other stuff I really didn't need. Sigh. There goes the budget and the fabric ban for 2012!

Home again where I made myself lunch just in time for the crew to arrive home. After lunch I headed back to the sewing room, determined to make use of this one day of quilting freedom. I re-did the block this time doing just under a 1/4" seam and Ta-dah my block turned out just fine.

  

Inspired and on a roll, I quickly started another I had cut out ready to go… do you like my design boards?

  

The next block came together really quickly. Go figure - it had 40 pieces to it.

  

So that was it for my Dear Jane progress to date - stay tuned, I am half way through a blog post with an update on them all.

As I mentioned I've been trying to re-organise my craft room (again) a post on that will follow as soon as I finish it! Anyhow with a pile of fabric still to wash, piles to be folded, I was feeling very weighted down with the sheer quantity of fabric I actually own. I think I have carried forward a few hoarder issues that both my mum and nan have… So I tentatively mentioned to my quilting group that I was going to op-shop a lot of old fabric that my Nanny gave to me way back in the early days of sewing. I've probably had them sitting around for 7 years myself and lordy only knows how long she had hoarded them for. So in my mass clean up earlier in the week, I pulled down the box of Nanny's fabrics and started sorting them into piles. Keep. Throw. Op shop. The keep pile kept getting bigger and bigger and it appeared that my hoarding tendencies were still intact and bigger than ever. I just couldn't bring myself to throw them nor op shop them. Instead I put them back in a box and decided to sleep on it and see if I could come up with some way to use them rather than storing them in a box. Some of these fabrics were old. Lots of florals and small prints from the 80's - I swear mum had dresses made from some of this stuff and some of the fabrics were god-awful ugly. Yet I couldn't throw them out.

THIS is the reason….

  

My beautiful Nan obviously had an idea to make these into something back in the day. She had pegged together groups of strips. Long and short. So old that the pegs are crumbling and breaking when I touch them. So after thinking it over I decided to find the perfect scrappy project where I could start using these fabrics and adding to them from my stash (if needed) and use it as a great big picnic rug or quilt. An ongoing work in progress. Last night I stumbled across the string quilt. Sewing pieces on the diagonal across a square of interfacing. I'm not cutting these nor trimming them to make perfect straight edges, they are going on as is. Wonky or not. This is going to be one unique quilt and I'm hoping not too ugly! I managed three blocks today



I did warn you there were some ugly fabrics involved, but some of these have grown on me ~ absolutely loving that green!

And that rounds out My Quilted Journal for today. I'm hoping to do some more tomorrow!