Well, That Wasn’t Expected

This morning, at breakfast I was reading the comments on my blog post about my hexy quilt.  

One comment suggested that I could make a design wall using flannelette on a rod, suspended over a door using hooks.  Well, my first reaction was, I wish, but I haven’t got a flat surface suitable.  It’s not as though I haven’t thought of every possibility already.

A design wall is something I’ve coveted for some time, but there is no flat surface in my sewing room and all our wardrobes have sliding doors. It is just something that is not possible.

Well, while sitting at the breakfast table, my eyes fell on our large glass display cabinet in the sitting room, just beside my sewing room and the cogs started ticking over.  It wasn’t long and Mick and I had the tape measure out and decided that it could possibly work.  

A trip was then made to Spotlight. We bought a lightweight curtain rod, some flannelette and some plastic over door hooks.

The start.

The curtain rod was 2 metres long, so two widths of fabric would be perfect, with just a seam up the middle and no need for side hems………..except, when I got it home I discovered the fabric was 60 inches wide, not 42.  Blast!  Now there were side hems to sew, as I still wanted a centre seam for lining things up.

After a bit of work it was ready to hang.  

Ta da!  One design curtain.  It only seemed fitting that the last hexy flower that I appliquéd should be the first placed on it.

Then it was time to play.

All done.

This quilt is a biggie, so one row still ended up on the floor.  I love it.

I don’t think I will have a chance to start sewing the blocks together tomorrow, but now that they aren’t on the floor, I doesn’t matter if they stay there for a couple of days.  The best thing is that my sewing room is right next door to this cabinet.

Once the blocks are all together, I can pack everything up.  There is the minor matter that we can’t open the cabinet doors while curtain rod is hanging there.  Mick joked that he can bring a motorcycle into the sitting room and put it on the coffee table to work on, now that I have encroached on the space.  I know that is the last thing he would want to do.  Also, despite what I said in my last post, he would not mind me having the blocks on the floor, as long as he could get around them.

I’m so grateful for the comment that had me thinking again, as now I have a really useful addition to my toolbox.

The Final One and a Revised Goal

Hooray!  On Thursday night I appliquéd the last block for my hexy quilt.

This pile consists of one hundred and eleven one inch hexy flowers and eight two inch hexy flowers.  I started this journey back in May last year.  At that stage I had no plan in mind for them.  It was just some hand stitching to take to my stitching mornings and may tick the Rainbow Scrap Challenge box.  I thought it would a very long term project.  I kind of had in the back of my head that I would appliqué them onto a background before joining them……somehow.

Then, in about August, the quilt “Bigs and Smalls” by Anorina Morris, was published in Homespun Magazine.  The few larger hexy flowers appealed to me. Having seen this quilt, I now had a plan to follow.  I took my blocks to Baradine in September, only to discover that Brenda, one of the other participants, was also making the quilt, but much faster than me.   Now I had the goal to have at least the top made to take for show and tell in April for Scrub Stitchin’.

It has been such a good project to take to my stitching days, take away when we travel, and to meet my 15 minutes goal each day, but to the detriment of other projects.  I now have to think about what hand work to take to my stitching days.  

Having met my self imposed goal to have all the blocks completed in January, I have revised my goal.  Now I want to have the blocks pieced into a quilt top by the end of the month.  I’m itching to get started, but as it is rather large and I don’t have a design wall,  I will leave it until when I can play with them on the “Design Floor” and not annoy anyone (Mick) too much.  

Wish me luck.

Today’s Vege Haul

While much of the country swelters under extreme heatwave conditions, we seem to be having a cool wave today, with temperatures only in the high teens C.  It feels rather autumnal, although we still have about six weeks of hot weather ahead of us.  We have had to hunt out the cardies, which is a bit of a change.  We had temps in the mid 30sC just a couple of days ago, and that is the forecast for next week as well, so we should make the most of this cooler day.

Our vege garden is continuing to produce nicely.  Today I had a little bandicoot around the potatoes in the tyres and found a couple for us to enjoy.  I think they are ready to harvest, but we will leave them a bit longer.  In the mean time, it will be nice to try these little few of our first ever home grown potatoes.  

There was a nice little variety in today’s picking.  As well as our first potatoes, we have our first egg plant, with several more coming along on the plant, and our first cob of corn.  Our corn is a bit of a failure this year.  This cob is rather thin and there aren’t many more coming on.  Oh well, just a small taste will still be nice.  The beans aren’t producing much at the moment, but we don’t mind, as it gives us a bit of a break from freezing them every couple of days.  There are lots of flowers coming on, so there will be plenty more in the near future.

Remember our two zucchinis, one that rocketed away and one that did very little.  Well they were both supposed to be “Black Jack” variety, but the one that had taken off wasn’t.  Initially, it just produced a lot of rather spiky leaves and a few little fruit that mainly shrivelled up.  We seriously considered ripping it out.  Now, all of a sudden, it is producing larger fruit, more like a squash.  I’ll try to pick them while they are fairly small and treat them like zucchinis.

Tonight we have left over chicken and mango curry (yummo), so we won’t be using these veges today.  However, we are looking forward to a meal including lots of fresh veges tomorrow night.

In the meantime, I will make a double batch of Zucchini Slice for the freezer.  A serve is the best thing to take for my lunch on our patchwork days.

The First Two Weeks of Stitching

Now that it is already halfway through the month it is time to see what I have managed on the stitiching front during the first two weeks.

My aim for January was to make some crumb blocks for the Chookshed Challenge and to finish appliquéing the remaining 40 hexy flowers.

In the first week I managed to appliqué a whole two hexy flowers.  Big effort…..not.

One day I decided to have a play with my crumbs.  The result was two red blocks.  Hopefully, I will manage to make some more, but if it doesn’t happen, at least I have something to show for the month.

I did get the twelve inch block completed for our patchwork group’s group quilt.  I’m pleased with how it turned out.  This was achieved during a Zoom sewing session.

In the second week I was somewhat more productive, partly due to the fact that my patchwork group met for the first time in the New Year.

I have made good progress with appliquéing my hexy flowers.  At the end of the second week I had a total of twenty completed.  I have my patchwork group again today, so should be able to get quit a few more stitched.  The goal to get them all done by the end of January is looking very promising.

So far, I have already missed three days of stitching for fifteen minutes.  I’m not worried.  It is what it is.

Despite only minimal machine stitching on the crumb blocks, there is already one empty spool to add to the jar at the end of the month.  That’s a good start.

Bubble, Bubble, Toil and Trouble

It’s that time……

The veges are starting to ripen and we have sufficient tomatoes to make some relish.  This is the condiment that we use the most, and we ran out towards the end of last year.  Tragedy, but it did meant that I supported some little craft shops.  However, I know I am biased, but we really do like ours the best.

The recipe says to peel the tomatoes, but I am lazy, so just chop them finely.  This year our pot contains large tomatoes, tiny tomatoes and yellow tomatoes.  They all work.  Also, the onions are from our garden.  You know they are fresh when they are rather juicy and make you cry lots.  Here are the tomatoes and onions sitting in their brine.  That was supposed to be done the night before, but I forgot.  So, it was done in the morning and sat all day, ready for us to make the relish in the evening.

When it came to adding all the other ingredients, after draining off the brine, I discovered that I didn’t have sufficient malt vinegar, which I usually use.  I really didn’t want to have to go to the shops.  No worries, we used the dregs of some apple cider vinegar, the remaining malt vinegar and then made up the rest with white vinegar.  Once again, it doesn’t matter.  The recipe is rather forgiving.

Ta da!  Our yearly supply of Tomato Relish, all ready to go.

If you would like to try the recipe yourself, here it is.  My cousin’s wife gave it to Mum years ago.  I believe it may be a CWA recipe. It says “will keep for years”, but it never lasts long at our house.  Yummy with scrambled eggs.

For metric conversion, I used 3kg tomatoes, 1kg onions, 750g sugar and 250g sultanas.