Spring at last

I don't know what happened to February.  The winter seems to have gone on and on so I didn't get out to take any photos and this blog did not get updated.  However, I have made progress on the quilt front!  The churn dash top is now all but finished (just the mitred corners of the pieced border to do tomorrow) and I have found someone at the other end of Cornwall who will longarm quilt it for me.  That feels like a great relief.  I really did not want to spend months trying to sandwich it together on my dining table (not really big enough) and then trying to quilt on such a complex pattern.

I have also completed the first bag from the yellow scraps and am making good headway on a second.

The second one has stitching in purple as well as yellow.  I have reduced the number of layers and will sew the bag with a proper lining.

After weeks of wet weather it has finally cleared up.  What a difference to see the sun.  On Monday I was at Tate St Ives for the annual 'Home Day' for staff.  It was held in the cafe on the top floor which has views to die for.  I was lucky enough to get a seat next to the window so I could gaze out on the beach, the bay and the coast looking north, all day!  No photos though.  On Wednesday I paid my first visit of the year to Tregwainton http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/main/w-trengwaintongarden.  Not very many flowers out yet but some nice light on the bark which I will show in another posting.  Yesterday I decided it was time to walk up our nearest valley.  We are lucky in that although we live on the edge of town it is only a few hundred yards to a road that goes up onto the moors and which is an easy walk providing there is not too much traffic.  The signs of spring always appear reasonably early here.

This stretch goes through a small wood and there were plenty of daffodils out.

They are wild but I think they are escaped cultivated ones - the seed having blown from the fields as the whole of this area has been a commercial daffodil growing area for a very long time.

There were also plenty of primroses in the hedgerow as it is quite damp.

The third plant that is a real mark of spring in Cornwall is gorse.  We have two varieties, one which flowers at Easter and the other (which I think is Western gorse) which flowers alongside the heather in August and September.  It is a real mark of Cornwall but some years there have been awful problems with vandals setting fire to the heath, burning all the vegetation and displacing/burning the birds.

Yesterday there was still a bitter wind, though, and the horses were still in their winter overcoats.

At the top of the road there is a typical Penwith dwelling (at least I assume someone lives there). It consists of a caravan and an old shed, possibly a pig byre.  Parked beside this is this wonderful old car.

I am not sure what it is although I think it is the same as the first car that my father and his brothers owned in the late 1930s.  This year it has spent most of the winter parked round the corner from us here.  As it is obviously a vintage something (I suspect a relic of the US forces from WW 2) and was parked right on the corner I got a bit concerned when the snow came in case someone ran into it.  So it was good to find that it had returned to its summer quarters.

This valley and its vegetation inspired a spring Journal quilt a couple of years ago.

I gave this one to my sister-in-law for Christmas as I have reached the point where I feel they should not languish in boxes and folders.  This year I am having a rest from Journal Quilts.  This is supposed to free me up to do some new art quilt work but I have to admit that so far I have just done the Churn Dash top and finished Zelah's quilt which together are the most traditional pieces I have made in years.    Now I can see the way forward and I hope to get started on something more exciting this month.

Using Yellow Offcuts

I have spent a lot of time this week making Churn Dash blocks.  The problem with this pattern, especially using the Cut Loose Quilts method, is that you are left with a lot of small pieces of the fabrics used for the Churn Dash pattern.  In fact, I nearly decided not to use this design for this reason.

Here are the first few blocks laid out.  I have now made nearly forty (I am aiming for at least sixty as I have not finally decided on the size of the quilt and I probably need a few spare ones).  There is now more variety in the backgrounds as I have a wide variety of blue and green fabrics for these.

I thought hard about what to do with the leftover yellow strips.  Then I realised that I could make 'fabric' out of them.  I need something that I can hand stitch, to take on holidays for one thing and for sitting in front of the television.  I used to be a keen hand quilter in the evenings but over the last few years this activity seems to have passed me by.  Here is a piece that I made a couple of years ago.

This was made from very lightweight fabrics; mostly cheesecloth, scrim etc. that I had dyed and pieces of polyester voile.  I mounted them  directly onto wadding and a cotton backing.  It was good and flexible but in places you can see the wadding (top centre of photo).  I stitched it with variegated threads.  It took forever!  I have never done anything with it and told myself at the time that it was a sample.  I loved the rippled effect of the rows of stitching.

My yellow pieces are much heavier than this.  In fact I may have overdone it as the fabric has a calico base, then wadding and then a patterned cotton backing and is of course cotton.  On top of it all is a layer of net.

 However, I am aiming to make bags from them so this means they will be relatively sturdy.
 I am using Fine Mercerised Cotton from Stef Francis.  This is variegated and  I already have a vast collection of different colours. I have decide to change colours from time to time to give more detailand am using some red/pinks in the piece that has red in some of the fabrics.  As the second piece does not have any red in the fabrics I think I shall introduce purple as being the complement of the yellow.

My plan is to donate these bags to the Quilters Guild fund-raiser at the Festival of Quilts.  Every year there is a fund-raiser organised by one of the specialist groups.  Two years ago Contemporary Quilt did Journal Quilts.  This year the theme is 'Put 'Em Ins' which means any kind of container.  I have already unearthed one or two unfinished or unloved things that are suitable and having a goal for this project will be good.  For more details go to www.quiltersguild.org.uk and click on 'Specialist Groups'.

New studio bench - at last!

It must be three years since we had the garage converted into a combined studio/utility room.  It has always been an untidy mess because I could not decide what I wanted in the way of furniture and storage facilities.  The space is not huge and as we have almost no storage space for the things you would normally put in an attic or cellar, there are also a lot of general household bits and pieces that live here.  Finally, I was allowed this studio on the understanding that John could have one corner of it for his DIY.  That's the back left hand corner in this photo and, as you can see, it still needs further tidying up.

The black shelves from B and Q hold general household things although the set on the right are 'mine'!  I already had several large underbed storage containers which had to go under the bench.  They contain all my wadding, large pieces of fabric, the remains of my 'wedding dress shop' remnants box etc.

I keep most of my sewing supplies in my bedroom/dry studio in the house.  This studio is where I do 'wet' work as they say.  The wall shelves are new and will be a great help for smaller bits and pieces.

At the utility room end I have two sinks which is wonderful.  It is so good not having to walk from one room to another with pots of dye, dirty Thermofax screens etc.  The lights are two daylight fluourescent strips.  The ceiling is very low but there is nothing I can do about that.   The wall to the right of the picture is the former garage door and is mainly glass: the door and two windows, so the light situation isn't bad.

The table is our old kitchen table and the yellow thing behind the dryer is my printing board which is MDF covered with an old blanket.  When it is in use I cover it with a drop cloth made from a genuine WWII Utility sheet that belonged to John's grandmother.  When it is suitably covered in leftover marks it will make some good recycled items.  John built the new bench from MDF with metal supports screwed to the wall and bannister rails from B and Q holding up the front.  Many years ago he built us a kitchen on this design (but without bannister rails) so he used the same principles here.  I think he rather enjoyed the whole process once I had decided what I wanted as  he has spent the last couple of days wondering what else he could build!

While he has been doing this, I have started on the wedding present quilt.  That's some of the blocks lying on the table.  It needs a lot.  I have made twenty but I know I will need at least fifty.  I have two unfinished from yesterday so I am going back to this work now.

Zelah's quilt is finished!

I think this is a good start to the New Year.  I have finished Zelah's quilt!

In the end I decided not to do any hand quilting in the plainer blocks so I just hope it holds together given that I did most of the quilting with invisible thread.  I used a Borders Made Easy www.quiltingmadeeasy.com border pattern.  These are designed for machine quilting.  You simply lay the printed piece of paper which has sticky on the edges, on to the fabric and stitch.  Brilliant!  The whole thing only took a couple of hours.

I then pieced the binding in several colours taken from the Fossil Ferns fabric I had used for the border.     This tied everything together.  Now I just need to embroider my initials and the date.  I'm tempted to put 2010 since 99 per cent of it was made then.  Although Zelah could do with the quilt in this terribly cold winter she will have to wait until either her grandparents go to visit her from here or she comes down on holiday.  I am not prepared to post it because, although I have never lost anything yet, you do hear awful stories about quilts getting lost in the post.  Scrap quilts full of fabric with 'stories' behind them cannot really be insured

Christmas trees

Happy New Year everyone!  On the ninth day of Christmas I have been looking at our Christmas tree and its ornaments.  In 2009 we did not dare have a tree because two of our cats were still kittens and this year we thought quite carefully about what they might and might not attack.  Actually it has been fine and only a couple of ornaments have been removed by paws.

First we realised that if we put the tree in the conservatory we could shut the cats out if necessary although we their access to the garden it through it.  So in the end we shut the doors to the sitting room as it got dark (and cold) but haven't pulled the curtains so we can still see it with its lights on.

Then we decided that there should not be any fine dangling bits.  The tree is a bit smaller than those we have had in the past.  This was partly because of the height of the conservatory roof and partly because we only have small cars to bring it home from the garden centre.

Like most people we have accumulated lots of ornaments over the years.  We have close friends who lived for many years in Luxembourg but used to come to Cornwall for Christmas and frequently brought us lovely examples of German and Luxembourgish ornaments.

We have two of these made from  glass with hand-painted wild flowers.  Also a German glass ball from a company that produces them annually.

And some made from nuts and seeds:

Then a long time ago I decided that Christmas tree ornaments are easily transported souvenirs.  We had one Christmas in New Zealand

where the pukeko bird is a frequent symbol.  This is made of paua shell (abalone).  We spent New Year that year in Sydney where I found this in the Opera House souvenir shop.

I learnt that there are Americans who are serious collectors of Christmas ornaments so we have one or two I picked up on stopovers in Los Angeles.  But the biggest Christmas industry I have found was in Salzburg.  Despite it being mid-summer there were shops full of Christmas decorations and Easter eggs.

I bought two wooden ornaments, one with a train on it because I was on a train-based holiday in the Tyrol.

The colour is actually quite yellow but the camera and Photoshop Elements could not deal with it.

One of my sisters lived in Moscow for three years in the nineties.  When I visited her we had a wonderful morning at a huge open-air market on the site of the Olympic village.  There were amazing collections of arts and crafts from all the former Soviet republics and it was extremely difficult deciding what to buy.  In the end I spent most of my money on a huge book but I also got two tiny dolls: Saint Nicholas

and a peasant girl.

I also took a lot of photographs of carpets and quilts which I must scan (this was in the days before digital photography).

This is just a selection of our ornaments.  There are also English ones and some whose origins I have forgotten.  Of course we have to have a cat

Having not had them out of the box last Christmas it has been good seeing them all again.

Christmas Day in Penzance

Happy Christmas everyone.  OK, I know it is now Boxing Day but somehow finding time to upload the photos I took was not the highest priority.

We have spent every Christmas since 1986 except two in Penzance but I think this is far and away the coldest.  In the days when we used to drive down, always with two cats in the car as well as most of the food in the days when Penzance did not have a supermarket, we never got stuck by snow or ice, but I don't think we would have made it this time.  We haven't really had any snow in this second lot, especially when my sister in Shropshire has had it as low as -13 degrees, but it has been very cold indeed.

Christmas Day dawned brilliantly sunny.  We eat Christmas Dinner in the evening and we do not do family Christmases so we always try to get a breath of fresh air.  There have been times in the past when we have taken sandwiches for lunch and gone for a walk on the Coast Path, seeing seals and finding the air almost balmy.  Not 2010.  However, we did go for a walk on Penzance Promenade (the one in the painting The Rain it Raineth by Norman Garstin) where it is fun to watch people in the large hotels eating their Christmas Dinner.

There are always a few people like us although I think yesterday there were not as many as usual.  One dog was having a Christmas Day swim

The tide was right out so the dog and his owner walked/swam some way out.  Not so good for the owner who ended up with his wellie completely full of water.  This part of Penzance is all reclaimed which means that as the tide comes in some interesting patterns appear in the water.

The esplanade (for that's what it is) has been reclaimed more than once from what were originally dunes or Towans as they are called here.  It is difficult to imagine what it must have been like two hundred years ago but winter storms do batter the prom. and dump sand, stones and seaweed over the road quite regularly.

The sight of these rivulets turned my attention to the patterns of lines created by the low angle of the sun.

The Jubilee Pool was looking wonderful although it is not easy to take photographs when you have to poke the camera through the railings.

There were interesting arrangements of lines at the Pool, too.

I took a lot of photos and will use them as the basis of some design work in the Moleskine Notebooks that I got as a present.

The other thing we noticed was strange signs.  It is just that when it is quiet and you really start looking you see things that you would normally walk straight past.

We know John le Carre is a local but we did not know his characters frequented the Jubilee Pool cafe.

A bit difficult to read but the Ritz Bingo hall appears to have moved to France.  At least the sign is suggesting you swim there!

And finally the harbour wall rises to nearly ten feet tall as you approach the wharf where the Scillonian berths. That's the ship that travels to the Isles of Scilly.  The wall plunges vertically at this point.  Would you really want access we asked ourselves?  But obviously walking along it has been a youth sport at some time.

The views across Mounts Bay were glorious.  That is the Lizard in the far distance with Prussia Cove just behind the point on the left.

Then it was home again to concentrate on that important element of Christmas: eating.

The cats knew there was pheasant about and they know the leftovers are still in the fridge.  I made this hanging over ten years ago.  We put it up each year but one or more cats then swings on it until it is right at the end of the baton.  I will have to see if I can find a wonderful photo of Nui doing this when he was young and scan it.

Quilting with cats

A few days ago I decided it was time to tidy up the part of my studio that is in the bedroom.  As a quilter I have learnt never to throw anything away but I am beginning to think that if I have had something for a number of years and not used it, it should be junked.  However, tidying up is easier said than done when you have two two year old Siamese cats.  (The older one isn't bothered - he's seen it all before.)  So this is what happened.

The stand of cane baskets contains various thick threads - just what we love.

Any fabric or UFO is fair game for a toy which will then be dragged around the house.  Pania is particularly fond of wadding, so much so that I have to keep most of it in the studio where she has no access to it or in a closed hat box on top of the wardrobe.  The problem really arises when I have a large quilt that is already assembled as I do at the moment.  I have put the whole thing in a plastic bag that held a duvet which had been to the cleaner.  I then put the bag on top of the wardrobe where it seems to be relatively safe - probably because it is too heavy for them to pick up.  Here is what happens with smaller pieces.

But the top of the wardrobe isn't an impregnable place as Hinemoa has worked out how to climb up the clothes if the door is left open, making her way onto the top shelf and then up onto the top.  From there she can walk across to the bookcase where I keep my stash and an assortment of jars of threads, embellishments etc. just like all quilters.  So when I had finished cleaning the shelves I went off to the shops without checking that I had shut the wardrobe doors.  This was the scene that greeted me on my return.

The things on the floor were in an open container on the top shelf.  She reaches over and hooks out things  (you can just see a piece of gold ribbon hanging down in the top left of the photo).  Once on the floor the two of them select a nice piece or two to serve as Toy of the Day and then proceed to drag it round the house.  I know I should abandon having open containers on the top shelf.  There is a second bookcase on the opposite wall.  As that one is next to my sewing table it is even easier to reach into it and there have been numerous occasions when they have helped themselves to plastic bags containing works in progress and then upended them on the floor during the night.  For the first year I made them sleep in the study but in the hot summer nights (yes, we did have summer once) they spent hours scratching at the door to be let out so I got no sleep. In the end it was easier to give in and let them loose.  Fortunately they did tire (a bit) of all this nocturnal activity especially once it got cold and the alternative was a bed.

And this is where they were when I got back the other day.  Butter wouldn't melt in their mouths.