Quilt Progress

It was the last day of a long weekend today. Instead of getting out and about in pursuit of photos, I spent the day at home - kitchen, gardening, writing and putting together the blocks for the quilt I am making for our king sized bed. It's a bit big to get the whole thing in one photo, given that it is held together mainly with pins. Now that I have all the blocks laid out, I will be able to get all the rows joined together, making it a lot easier to handle. I couldn't do that until I had all the edge triangles in place, as if I joined the long strips of rows together, there would be awkward angles left at the ends. There are a couple of borders to go on yet, but those will be just long straight pieces.

The walls of our bedroom are painted a sort of pale, greyed minty green. The paua shell fabric that I am using for the borders has the green in it, also purple, browns and other colours, so I have taken the colours from that fabric.

Emerging

One of the things I have been working on lately. Now that we have our new home and know the wall colours, I have started a quilt for our bed. The colours are based on a fabric which depicts paua shells, beautiful shells with a lining of purples, blues and greens. These pieces are pinned to a flannel backing, so some of the light areas are gaps, not light pieces of the quilt.

Since I last posted about NaPoWriMo, the writing has slipped back.I wrote nothing for about a week. It doesn't look as if I will manage thirty poems this month, but I have written three more in the last couple of days and, in total, way more than I wrote all last year. So I am happy with the results so far. Especially as nearly all the poems I have written are ones I want to work on and keep, rather than being contrived around a prompt for the day, just for the sake of writing something.

A Year of Finishing Things

The blog has been neglected for the last few months. That's because we had housing issues going on, and have spent most weekends looking at houses - seventy in the past year. And now we are all ready to move (well, as ready as we are going to be). Over the year, I have been trying to finish off as many unfinished projects as possible, as part of my decluttering in preparation for a move.

These little quilts have been sitting around way too long. They were a project for an online creativity group that I am part of. At the time I conceived this idea, we were taking turns to set a weekly creativity exercise which we called "Tea and Cookies". So when I saw the teacup block in Quilters Newsletter Magazine, it seemed like a good project to make for the group. I asked each participant (not all sewers) to sign a set of cream coloured triangles, and return them along with a half metre of fabric of their choice. I didn't realise quite how much work was going to be involved. The notes that came with the fabrics tell me that it was started in the year 2000. Thirteen years to completion is better than never finished!

There were twelve people when I sent them out, but the group has shrunk, so there are seven small quilts in the final set. I made each one different to make the project more interesting. The last of these will be mine and is not yet finished. The rest have all been sent to their new owners.

Quilts in the Library

The library where we had our book launch was hosting an exhibition of quilts this month. I was too busy the day of the launch to look, but I went back later.

These quilts are made by the members of the Refugee and Migrant Quilt Group. Each quilt had a card displayed with it telling the name of the maker and something about her. The women are from many countries, predominantly Asia but also Egypt, Jordan and Latvia among others. The group is a place where they can learn not just sewing skills, but English, and in addition make new friends. The quilts range from very simple to more comples - here are a few details from some of the more complex ones: