The Current Status

If you have been following along with our home audience, then you will recognize that I have removed the center 4-block square that I had before. It wasn't working for me, altho I did reuse some of those blocks in the center.  I also changed out two blocks that had grey for the background.  They were just stopping my eye.  So now I'm really liking this.  Funny thing is, it's not exactly what I was aiming for originally.  It has evolved, and I just went with it.  

I really like how I can see the whole piece when I post it on the blog, or just take a picture of it, really.  When I'm standing in front of it, I can't tell much about it, but when I look at a picture, I can really see the whole thing at once.  

And looking at it this way,  I can see two blocks I'm going to switch.  Hee hee.

Now comes the scary part:  fusing these parts together and filling in the open spaces.  I have a great idea (I think) for the open parts, but I'll post about that later....

Layered Fusing Tutorial

A couple of days ago, blog reader Ursula posed the following question:

Q: Do you fuse all the circles on top of each? Are there about 5-6 layers on each square?

Isn't that great? Ursula is just the one for asking pertinent questions. So, I took some step-by-step pictures yesterday and have this tutorial:


Here is the first circle in my block.



And here is the fabric I want to fuse it to.




This surprising tool is a small sliver of bar soap that is left over after the bar is almost all used up. You know the stage: you can't use it anymore because it just breaks. That piece of soap, dried out, is an excellent marking tool.



It's a little hard to take a picture of something that usually takes two hands, but I use the soap to trace under the top piece so that I know where to cut out the bottom piece. I don't trace right at the edge, tho. The soap line would show. I trace a little in from the edge.




Now I have my circle traced onto my fabric.



And I cut that part out.



Then I can fuse the two together.



But in all but the overlap, it is essentially just one layer.



Then I continue on, building up the layers, removing the backs, until I get something like this:



But the back looks like this:




The reasons for doing it this way are
1: to save fabric. Those cut out pieces are being immediately recycled into the next block or blocks in this quilt. And,
2: to reduce bulk. The fusing becomes a little less reliable when there are so many layers sandwiched together, the quilt is heavier and harder to quilt.

And here is the current status:




BTW, all of these pictures were taken with my new camera. Woohoo!

Another Trip Around the Sun

November 20th is my birthday.  Two years ago, I threw myself a party, which I blogged about, and I invited about 12 ladies.

You see, I wanted to have a tea party, and in Singapore, you can't go out and do that without encountering seafood in some form or another.  I'm not interested in seafood in any form, so I had the party at my condo.  I made finger sandwiches and pastries and a good time was had by all.

Last year, my dahlink friend Janis couldn't let the event go by unnoticed, so she hosted a party at her house (also blogged about).  We had chicken kebabs and hummus and salad nicoise (I avoided the tuna) and everything was delicious and wonderful.  And I wondered, "How did I trick my friends into thinking they had to celebrate my birthday every year?"  

Well, it happened again.  Here I was going along, minding my own business, and a call came on Tuesday saying Thursday we were going to have lunch in honor of my birthday.  "It's become a tradition, " I was told.  How did this happen?  What did I do to deserve these repeated kindnesses?  I'm not sure, especially as I have been mostly absent from our gatherings this year.  But sometimes one has to just accept the kindnesses done to them, and be grateful.

Here we are, from left to right:
Mavis McAllister, Janis Douglas (the instigator, I mean our host), me, Marianne Bos (a fellow quilter, a fellow fuser), and Amy Low.
I was treated to a Mexican feast the like of which will live in my memory for at least a month, maybe two. I had a virgin lime margarita, the best mole poblano I've had in years, and a decaf cappuccino. Everything was absolutely delicious and I felt so blessed and honored.



Everything was so delicious, I forgot to photograph it until I was almost done eating!

I have such wonderful friends.

Afterward, I scrambled to meet the DH and we went downtown so we could pick out a new camera for me, as my old one occasionally thinks it's on another planet.
Here's what we got:




The Canon Powershot A1000 IS, in a lovely shade of metallic lavender. I really thought I was going to buy an IXUS, but they cost so much more, and for mostly the same options. This one is much smaller than the old camera, and only uses 2 AA batteries, so it's much lighter.

Every year, I think I don't want to make a fuss about my birthday. Just let the day slide by with maybe a nice dinner or something. But secretly, I'm afraid that if that were to actually happen, I would be very sad. Luckily, no one seems interested in letting me go there. May I be worthy of their love and generosity.

Further

Here are some further pictures of the current work.
As you can see, I have rearranged the existing blocks once again.  I think I'm more drawn to the Around The World layout.

When does a few green blocks become enough green blocks?  I would never know if it weren't for my pin up wall.



And here you can see that I started filling in the white spaces with the grey scale fabric I have. Not sure if that will stay or not. Love the blue, don't you?

I made some great progress today, but felt compelled to stop when my mp3 player ran through my podcasts.  I need to reload, but I also need to take a break and do some housework.  Fah!  When I feel overwhelmed, the house is clean.  When I feel on a roll, I need to stop.  Figures.

Progress is Slow

I've been beating my head up against the wall on this latest quilt. But that's ok, it turns out. It just means that I am breaking through - or trying to break through to a different level in my art.

So, I took my sister's advice and just starting making motifs in my chosen color scheme, and building the quilt on the pin up wall. Seems like every day I make a few motifs, place them up on the wall, and then I feel overwhelmed and have to go away until the next day. So, yeah. Progress is slow, but I'm gonna keep plugging away.

Here are some photos showing my progress:





This last photo has a lot of white space, I know. I will fill it in later with different little things. That is, if I decide to leave it this way.

In order to feel some sense of accomplishment, I have also been cooking a lot. I made a caramel apple pie the other day. It was delicious!



For the first time, I made the pie crust in my Cuisinart. It was so easy that way, I can't believe I never tried that before. If you haven't done that before, go to Crisco's website; they have a short video and everything. Easy as pie. Sorry, I couldn't resist.

Then I just sprinkled the apples with cinnamon sugar. I didn't want too many flavors since I was using caramel. And the apples were very tart and a little dry.

For the topping, I had about 18 caramels which I melted in a small sauce pan with a little water. Then I stirred the caramel into chopped peanuts and oatmeal. Working quickly, I spread that concoction over the top of the pie. Quickly because once it cools, it ain't going nowhere.

Then I covered the pie with foil and baked it for a half hour at some temperature. I don't remember what it was. I took the pie out and poked at the apples to see how done they were. They were quite soft, but really still dry, even though I put several dabs of butter on them before putting the caramel topping on. So, I got the caramel topping for ice cream out of my fridge and squirted a bunch of that on the pie, covered it and let it cook another 15 minutes. It smelled so good!

Afterward, when I'd had a taste, I decided I wasn't getting enough of that caramel and peanut flavor that I wanted. It tasted a lot like oatmeal. So I think I will do it differently next time. But it still got gobbled up by my family. Yum!

Over Thinking It

You know how, when you look at a word too long, 

for example,

the word AQUEDUCT, 

it begins to look like you've misspelled it?

I had a similar experience recently. 

After the last quilt, I knew I wanted to continue working in this series, but the ideas weren't quite crystallizing in my mind. So, I set down to do some sketching.

I really liked the idea of these eggs or bubbles or whatever, the motif, overlapping. But then what? I continued drawing, but it wasn't coming together. So I tried again.




Nope, that's not it, either.
Naturally, I'm skimming through all my art quilt books to try and get ideas. And I'm being bombarded with ideas for layouts and color schemes and it's kinda confusing me. So I press on.




And now making these sketches is becoming a bit tedious because of all the detail I'm tempted to include. So I leave the detail out and go for a sort of shorthand, and even that is not making me happy. I'm beginning to get a little panicky. I don't feel like making any of these sketches into quilts would be fun or would be worth the effort.

Keep trying, I tell myself.




Now the big doubts are starting to surface. Why did I think I could be an artist? And other mental junk like that. I ignore it. Mostly.

In desperation, I sent all of these sketches to my sister.

Her advice?

It's only fabric. Start playing around and see what you come up with.

Playing around.

Playing.

Around.

Why do I insist on thinking that making great art is going to mean grueling, frustrating work? 

Well...I'll be in my studio. You know what I'm doing. I'm having fun.

The Last Bit

Here is the quilt top finished, but not trimmed or fused to the batting yet. While I enjoyed making the medium and large sections, my favorite bit was the little "bubbles" - as I've come to think of them. I think that idea will continue to feature in the next quilt or quilts.


And here I've fused the quilt to the batting. This is the point of no return. It's not impossible to change things if you've only got fabric fused to fabric, but once it's fused to the batting, it becomes a sticky mess to try and change something and I have never tried.

I was tempted to do an old-fashioned binding on this quilt, but it's been so long that I just didn't feel up to it. So I did my favorite escape hatch finish and then quilted it up.

Fizzy Pink Lemonade

17" x 15.75"

$100

SOLD!

Here are some details. You will notice that you can't see the quilting. Isn't that so great? I'm so pleased. My new machine is the bomb.