Try again

 Well, the quilt top wasn't what was wanted! It is a bit too strong for a baby. 

I did try laying it out differently, in diagonal lines and it looks quite good. I forgot to take a picture though. I may make it bigger, once I have the baby quilt out of the way, and keep it for myself or a family member who might like to take it to the football, if we ever get to go again. We go to the MCC, which regularly has large crowds, not sure that will happen in the near future. Not that the football season will go there this year. Hopefully, by March, we will be able to have some matches here in Victoria. But some of our matches have 80,000 people, which suggests that social distancing will be a problem. Wait and see. 

But for now, back to the drawing board. I got out some of my fabrics that have motifs that might do for a baby and started working on another idea. I found some free baby quilt patterns here. 

Unfortunately, I don't have much suitable fabric left from my quilting days. I found some bright dinosaur fabric and tried that but cut it the wrong size and used up too much of the fabric - aargh! 

I tried it with several different iterations but none work. And it is still rather strong colour-wise. 

So I'll have another go at a much more muted one later. Seeing it is a boy and seeing I have quite a lot of blues, I will go down the boring colour theme. Probably. 

I am really only posting because of the date: 20/08/20. 

Using leftover squares for another baby quilt.

 I made a small quilt for a baby about 18months ago and, because he was born 5 weeks early, got carried away in the rush of things and cut way too much fabric. 

Now I have another baby quilt to make. Easy decision to use those leftover pieces (with still some left!). I have been told that the baby is being born into a Hawthorn supporting family (AFL club) so I only used the yellow squares and cut up some brown fabric I had. 

Because there were some already cut, I didn't have to find the pattern or work out the size, I just copied what I had. They were 5" square (seeing most of my quilting equipment is in imperial measurement, I usually use inches rather than metric). 

I sprayed the fabrics with starch as that makes them sit better for cutting and sewing, especially on the bias. 

I cut them all out and drew a line diagonally across the middle, then sewed them, using the quarter inch foot, on both sides of the line. I cut them along the line afterwards, giving me lovely triangles. Using the board that has sandpaper as one surface ensures that the fabric doesn't move. 

I trimmed the corners off all the squares.

I have laid them out but will leave them till tomorrow and look at it with fresh eyes, to see if there are any glaring areas that I will want to change around. It may look different in daylight too. 

I am writing the process down in a bit more detail this time as I needed to look at my previous post and photos to see exactly what I had done. This being my visual diary, I think I need to put in more information so that I can easily find it in the future. 

So far, so good. 

It has been a good change from working on my blackwork course, I find I move around much more when doing a quilt. The sitting still for the embroidery is much harder on the neck and back. 

Still going

 I noticed the date today and thought: I should have blogged yesterday - 12/8/20. But I have just looked up the world clock and it is still the 12th somewhere in the world. 

We have moved on to working with coloured threads for our blackwork. 

I am feeling ambitious with this as we can use a solid colour or variegated and we have also been asked to do some with deliberate colour changes (as opposed to random variegated). But I will try to get the minimum done before I launch off into trialling lots of permutations. 

As you can see, the different textures of the various threads cause different effects. The pink is a soft Anchor thread, maybe a bit thicker than I would like. 

The grey is DMC Perle 12 and worked the best so far. It has a lovely sheen. 

The purple is Wonderfill Spaghetti yarn, Egyptian cotton. I bought it to use in the bobbin of my sewing machine. It is too thick for the needle at the top. It is an ok thickness for the blackwork but tends to get fuzzy, especially when you have to pull it out, as I frequently do. 

The sitting still is continuing to cause me some back and neck problems but I am being more aware of it now and trying to only do a little bit at a time.

I have even enrolled for an online Zoom dance class for 55+ people. It started with people from all over the east coast but now seems to only have Melbourne people in it at the moment (I wonder why??). It is a way to get moving without using up your hour of outdoor activity. I can still go for a walk later, weather permitting (it has been lovely so far but some rain is forecast and I can't complain, we don't want another drought and/or huge bushfire season). 

Band samplers

 Our next block of work in Blackwork is to do some coloured embroidery, in band samplers. 

I have found it hard to find much about what these are, most of my embroidery books, of which I do not have a lot, do not mention band samplers. 

It doesn't help that when I went onto the computer, I was initially looking up bandwork embroidery in blackwork. Autocorrect and other such things kept giving me handwork! 

Then I found something that mentioned band samplers. Now I have found some information! I probably didn't really have to look it up, we were given some images to inspire us. But I was interested to know what made these 'band samplers' rather than the other samplers we have been doing. 

One article I read says that band samplers were made as a way of recording and passing on designs, before printing became common. Also, young girls were usually the embroiderers and it was a way of educating them as they sometimes had letters and they would have had some discussion about the meanings of the patterns (I assume). 

I am still not certain I really know but I think I just have to work my designs in bands. 

We have done a sample of motifs, of our own design or copied; border and corner patterns; shading ideas using either different thicknesses of thread or density of pattern changing. So I assume I will be ok with border patterns as they will work well in bands. 

I will have to go through my cottons now, see what colours I have. 

I have mostly stranded cottons, in a large variety of colours but we have been advised that stranded cotton is difficult because the needle can separate the strands and make the blackwork not sit properly. So I'll have to go through all my other yarns and see what I have. 

In this strange time of lockdown I can't go to a shop to browse. I have done an online order but had to rely on the images which, as a tactile textile person, isn't as satisfactory. And I have to wait for it to arrive. Still, it could be fun to go through stuff, as long as I don't make too big a mess before having to pack it away again. 

A Sign of the Times

Well, Blogger has a new interface - another new technology to have to adapt to. We are having to deal with so much that I would never have used now that we are not so social.

But that is not what I was going to post about - but it is Covid related:

I went for a walk today, masked of course, and came across two cars all with no-one in them. 

I presume the masks were emergency ones, in case the driver had forgotten to bring one. 

Fortunately, it is beautiful weather at the moment, encouraging us to get out for our daily exercise while adapting to mask wearing. 

Spring is on the way! 

Making face masks

Today we had to start wearing masks anytime we are out of the house. So far, we have been using masks purchased from the pharmacy but they are one or two uses only, so that is going to get expensive. And the temptation will be there to say that they look ok, so why not keep using them?

Having heaps of fabric offcuts, from my previous quilt making, I decided that I really should get to and make some of my own.

My first attempts have been using the pattern provided by DHHS. It is a fairly simple pattern and even takes into account the fact that people may not be able to access some fabrics. So it is based on using what you have.

However, I have also done a little bit of 'research' and found some articles that recommend using synthetic fabrics or cotton/poly, cotton and silk. Here is one. Here is another.

Having some silk that I have collected over the years, I decided to use a piece as the outside layer. (I met someone in the park yesterday who had used silk and it looked good - and she seemed to be breathing ok, always a consideration).
I had some bits of synthetic organza and used that in the middle, not wanting to have three layers of thick fabric. Then I used part of an old doona cover for the inside layer, cotton of course.

Cotton at the top, silk at the bottom.

The second iteration is using a quilting cotton that I got from GJs Discount Fabrics. I bought quite a lot of it because I thought it would be good for sky and cloud images. I didn't use this piece but used something very similar in my Spot the Difference piece.

I had read, in one of the many articles that I have browsed, that batik fabrics are good - I think that might be because it is thinner and may be easier to breathe through. This fabric is very like batik.

I found some silk chiffon (suggested in one of the research articles, apparently it is good for stopping some aerosol particles) that I had used in my eco dyeing days, it is very easy to breathe through. So that is the middle layer.

Once again, I used the left-over fabric from the doona cover for the inside piece.

The advice has been that if you can see through the mask, it isn't thick enough but I can't see through three layers!

There has been a rush on buying elastic but I was able to source some today - they would only sell me 3 metres but the mask needs 40cm so that is ok - so far.

Now I will have to go for a walk and try them out, see how they go. I don't think it will be a very energetic walk, I am expecting them to be less breathable than the bought masks. They should be ok for shopping expeditions and visits to essential appointments, where I won't have to be very energetic.

One thing that I have thought about, we could save the elastic from the single use masks and use it on the homemade masks. So I'll have yet more 'stuff' that I haven't thrown out!

20/7/20

I was reminded of the date today - after I had commented that I had no idea it was Monday. What strange times we are living in.

Anyway, not much to report. I have been working on my blackwork again - was going to write 'beavering' but it is more like 'struggling'. I am doing a sampler for my course and we are up to the shading stage. I have done one bit that is shading according to the threads used, one that is by the pattern (which I repeated because the first one just wasn't right) and am now working on a combination.

I have pulled out the first part several times, to the extent that I am worried that I might be damaging the fabric, so I have pulled out the first iteration and am ploughing on with the pattern and different threads. I am not going to pull it out even when (not if) I find mistakes.

It was necessary to draw the designs on graph paper , partially to get an idea of how to sew the shapes and not have to cary the thread too much across the back. Turns out the drawing and the doing are quite different things!

I have to have a magnifying glass as well as my glasses, that I don't use for anything else, as the fabric is of a smaller weave than I have been using and is hard to see. So I am having a rest now.

We are about to get to the stage where we design a shape and put in shading from dark to light, then work out what pattern to use for the shading. Sounds easy - but now I am not so sure, I have struggled with the sampler, so am less confident. But I have been doing my doodling for ages, might try to use one of those patterns in the near future, maybe try for something a bit more abstract.

Someone sent me a link to some interesting blackwork that is connected to doodling/zentangels, so I hope to be inspired by that. But it won't be any quicker as a process, I expect.