A Moment of Madness..... and more

 As I reported in my post on Wednesday we are in lockdown and can only leave the house for 5 essential reasons and not travel more than 2.5km from home. I sympathise with all those who are unable to go to work and for all business's that are shut down and thus costing them financially. I am fortunate that I can work from home, and at my age there is not the financial pressure that this would have been for me 10, or even 5 years ago. 

The weather this week has certainly made staying at home very appealing with the heater going flat out and a warm house. We have managed to keep occupied and in fact, there are so many things on my "to do" list that it's hard to decide what to do first. Many quilts have been finished ready for the quilt show and I am not short of more to load on Max yet. First a summary of a few things I have done in between quilting with Max.

I have stitched another block of my Dear William quilt, so now there are 2 finished out of 9 needed. 

I have spent time in the kitchen and prepared meals for the freezer and my 92 year old neighbour.

Back in April I posted about the Zig zag quilt I was making and asked opinions about a border, or not. I decided it was time to make a decision .......

......and added a 4" border all around, to make the zig zags look like they are floating in the background. The leftover pieced zigs and zags have been joined for the binding. A back has been found and it is in the queue waiting for my quilter now, and I know she is still waiting for it to "talk" to her.

After a bit of a work out my Pfaff started to sound a bit rattly and noisy, so I took it apart to check things out. And look what I found in the workings!! Almost a felt pad!! Perhaps I should do this more often??

Earlier this year I made a Scrappy Trips single bed size quilt to be donated after the exhibition. I had cut enough strips for 2 the same, and needed a quick quilt this week to be given to a friend. So out came the extra strips and because I didn't need to choose the fabrics, it didn't take too long to make this smaller version.

It was not in the quilting queue for long, and has now been bound and ready to be given.

 Raylene brought her knitting to fill in 'quiet' times, although they are few and far between.  Most of the week, her spot in the lounge looked like this!

I have a very large quantity of strings in the drawers and have been looking online at ways to use these up, and have a collection of ideas by the computer. A few months ago I showed this pic to Val who was enthused and has been steadily working away on this using my strings. I will have more photos of this in due course, as I hear she has made the required 72 blocks now. (This is one pic that I did write down the source so it can be acknowledged and will do so in a future post.)

This is another idea I came across and liked that it was a bit different to the other string quilts that I have made. (Sorry but I don't know the original source of this, and would appreciate knowing if you do). When I showed this pic to Raylene, she was very enthusiastic and immediately got busy.

I did a few calculations to work out the sizing of that centre strip set. Because my roll of vilene is 40" wide I usually cut the squares 10" so there is no waste. (I know that it's an odd size to have the blocks finish at 9 1/2", but it works for me). It was decided to make the centre sets so that they would be cut at 4 1/2" and finish about 4". All the shorter scraps in the bin were used to make these.

Then the trimmed unit was placed diagonally on the vilene................

............and mostly black strings of differing widths were stitched either side, and  the triangle areas were filled with more strips.

We wanted a single bed size quilt and looking at the maths and the block size and also wanting them in sets of 4, we decided to add some sashings to every 4 block unit to make up the size instead of making heaps more blocks.

Out came a couple of options to get the effect and we discounted the one above and settled on a black.

24 blocks were needed to get to the size we wanted with borders added. While my fairy started out with great enthusiasm making the blocks, it was starting to wane. It was then that the name of this quilt was born...... A Moment of Madness!!!  We then started auditioning border fabrics and thought that the orange colours were showing up quite well.

It was at this stage that I went to EQ and made a quick mock up of the block to see how things were going to look with the chosen scanned fabrics. I really wanted the quilt to be a bit wider, so added the extra black border...... but still wanted more width. Making the outside border wider made it look top heavy......

......so how about this idea??? Decided that the orange was a bit prominent...........

..and now it looks more in proportion and we changed the orange to be one a bit less vibrant.

A sample was made and we were both happy. We were also in communication with another friend via messenger with this whole process, while she was also trying to make colour and border choices for her quilt. (This is one of the positives of modern technology when we are unable to visit each other's houses during lockdown).

           Ta Daa................ a finish!! Well, almost, a backing has been pieced and it is in the quilting queue. This will be an allover so probably get done very soon, while my binding fairy is still here!! It will have black binding and will be another entry for the quilt show.

In case you didn't know, the fairy loves organisation and doesn't do well in chaos. Unfortunately sewing strings means you are working in chaos doesn't it? (Do you spy a block of chocolate behind the machine?? Apparently it helps with stress??)

She was very happy to get to the finish line and immediately settled into cleaning up her work area and putting things away.

I am not too sure what really happened while trying to clear out the strings drawers. Val has sewn up 72 blocks and Raylene made 24, several other string quilts have been made this year, and the drawers are still full!?? 

Today I spent in the kitchen having another cooking session before attending church services online in Bordertown, Murray Bridge and London. I have been trying to catch up on blog reading and downloading photos for this post and another customer quilt post to come. The weather has been very cold and we have received much rain this week. There will be another newsfromjude competition held at the end of this week. More news on that to come soon. There will also be a 6 year old birthday happening too. Hopefully there will be news of an easing of lockdown restrictions also. 

I will be back very soon.   Stay warm and safe.............

 Blessings, From Jude