A bloganniversary!

 

It was July 31st, 2011 when I made the first post of newsfromjude! Where has that 10 years gone? I can say it has been an amazing decade of my life. I made the decision to blog as a way to advertise my business. I had been machine quilting for customers for 9 years by this time, and had just finished the renovations of The Sanctuary, the house I purchased "across the road' for quilting retreats. Most of the early posts were about customer quilting and retreats held in the house. Later other events in my life were added and thus it  became the story of my life and almost a diary. 

Every year I ordered a printed version of the blog and more recently there were 2 books a year as I added more photos to newsfromjude. This is my collection in the bottom of the bookcase. The first book I had printed was for 18 months and is the thinnest one there. Does that mean I am having too much to say these days? Perhaps I'll blame it on all the photos!?

I have decided that 10 years is an achievement worth celebrating and so we are having a competition. The case below is the prize and will be filled with as much "quilty" goodness that I can fit in there. 

I would love to hear from as many as possible, and because some of you have trouble with leaving messages on the blog, I will accept email entries as well. (International entries welcome as I will post to you too.)

I am asking you to tell me how many published posts there have been on my blog in 10 years, up to and including this post. ????? I will leave this open for one week, closing next Saturday evening, SA time, August 7th...... 

edit - see the next paragraph!!

Well..... I posted this last night and when I checked this morning, the first comment had the exact number of published posts!! Amazing guess I thought! And then another comment also!! What is going on? Well I then went back and had a very thorough look at the blog and what did I find, but alongside the archives is how many posts there were in each month!! So, an errr derrr.... moment. I will send Jo and Di both a case for being so clever, when I was not. But I am now changing the competition, and ask for you to tell me how many comments have been made on this blog instead. Sorry for my stuff up, but thanks for visiting! Nice to hear from you and thankyou to those who leave me a comment.

Blessings, From Jude

More quilting

 I better update you with newsfromjude customer quilting before the file gets too large. I hope you are staying warm if you are in southern australia. This has been a very windy, wet month of July. Makes me very thankful for a warm house and my supply of wood. It is easier to accept not being able to go anywhere when outside is cold and wet. Thankfully our state seems to be under control and my thoughts and prayers go out to those states and countries where it is not.

A string quilt made by Val and myself and been called Mellow Yellow and quilted with a Loopy pattern. It was later bound with a scrappy binding which used up many pieces of leftover bindings that have been sitting in a box for a long time!

This is Vals quilt made for our group's Presidents challenge called Mystery and Mayhem. She has called it Wild Abandon and it was quilted allover with Effervesence.

Helen has been making lots of half square triangle quilts lately and here are another 2, that are made for her grandaughter. This one was quilted with Starlight..........

                                          ........and this one with Stars and Loops.

Beth made this using up lots of little bits and sashed the blocks with blue. I think I have a rather large collection of pieces that could be made up like this, one day! The cornerstone blocks are butterflies and Beth wanted Butterflies and Swirls to be quilted on the top.

This cat quilt was made for a friend who loves cats! It was decided that it would be quilted with a cat pattern that I had.

I used 2 cats for each block and when joined up it looks like cats walking allover the quilt.

This is how the quilt looked on the screen and there are 84 cats quilted on the top as well as the pieced 48 blocks!

Joan used her collection of 30's fabrics to make this sweet little quilt, and it was quilted allover with a pattern called 30's flower.

This is the Farmers Wife quilt, made by Louise. She wanted very dense quilting using wavy lines, and I used the pattern Streaming and loaded the quilt lengthwise so that the lines go up and down and not across the quilt. Louise loved how close the lines are and was very happy.

This striking quilt was made by Ruth with Hexagons that were donated to her. It is quite amusing as Ruth has made it known to our group that her "least" favourite blocks are Hexagons!! The person that donated these did not know that,  and the quilt has been named "Harrased by Hexagons!" This was quilted allover with Deb's Swirls. The colours certainly show up against the black triangles Ruth used to make the top.

Members of our group have been very productive getting quilts finished for the quilt show in October and Helen is no exception. She has called this This Way and That Way and it was quilted allover with Spring Thing.

Mary has been busy during lockdown in Victoria and when the borders were open briefly she brought quite a few tops to be quilted.  The following 3 have been done and the first one is a lovely collection of colours and has been quilted allover with Blooming Feathers.

This is one of my Ready Set Sew kits made by Mary called Spinning Dots and was quilted allover with a circle pattern called Asti.

The photo of this was hard to show the pretty colours as the day was like many lately and very gloomy. This also was quilted allover with a pattern called Flower Spray.

Ruth has also been busy and churns out a lot of quilts that are donated. This vibrant string quilt uses up a variety of fabrics and is quilted edge to edge with a pattern called Spilt Paint.

Also made by Ruth was this Rail Fence quilt using a variety of green jelly roll strips. This was quilted allover with Easy Loops and will keep someone warm when it is donated.

Prue made this Illusions quilt and during the making of this was very tempted to call it Dissillusioned, (sp?) but when it was finished was very happy with it. It has been quilted allover with a pattern called Square Dance.

This I Spy quilt was also made by Prue and features a great variety of I Spy fabrics. It was quilted with a pattern called Loopy Stars.

I think that might do for today. I still have a couple of custom quilting jobs to show another day. It's time to get standing with Max. I have a custom quilt loaded, one for me!! Miss Billie's Miss Piggy quilt is on and hopefully I can get this done in the next couple of days of July. This week, since lockdown finished, I have had deliveries of quite a few more tops.

My offsider, aka the fairy left early this morning for home, so it is rather quiet here this morning. I will have to get used to my own company again. 😔 It was a great couple of weeks and we achieved lots and had a lot of laughs and fun along the way! Thanks Raylene.

I will be back with a post tomorrow to record a very significant date and a competition. See you then.

Blessings, From Jude

And now she is 6!

 Miss Bridie turned 6 today!! Where has those 6 years gone too? It hardly seems anytime at all since all us girls at the Christmas in July retreat at The Sanctuary were waiting for the birth. Once again I have been back through the photo files and found a selection. It's hard to choose. 

In no time at all that cute little baby has turned into this confident little school girl.

It was lovely to chat today and hope you enjoyed getting back to school after a week's lockdown. 

Luv from Margar.

It has been a very wild and wooly day here today, a bit of all seasons, we saw the sun, we heard thunder, a few heavy showers and lots of wind.

I shall be back soon with news of the competition and a few more customer quilts.

Blessings, From Jude

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