Our Creative Space

After lots of hard work, the top and back of my reversable Wonky Star throw are done!  I finished the black side last night but haven't taken a picture of this yet.  Doing my first real pieced quilt has been an experience and I have come to a few conclusions:
- No one could ever make a living out of making quilts - well, your average sewer at least.  Not only are supplies relatively expensive but the charge for the labour component would be astromonical. It's not just the sewing but the cutting of fabric, trimming and pressing the blocks (and, in my case, the unpicking and rework) takes an awfully long time.  And there's the basting, quilting and binding to go.
- Cutting fabric perfectly straight, let alone sewing the perfect quarter inch seam is really hard.  In fact, impossible!
- Despite the above this has been a lot of fun and theraputic.

I hope to baste and start quilting on Friday night.  There is going to have to be a lot of quilting done between now and 10 December to meet the deadline.  Sounds like a good excuse to get out the "Downtown Abbey" DVDs.

For more creative spaces, head over here.

Op shop gold

You know it has been a good day when you hit the op shop and see exactly what you have been looking for right in front of you.  Even better when it is only $3.00 for a newish copy.

Haruki Murakami is my find of the year after I was given "A Wild Sheep Chase" for my birthday.  What would you think if you knew that the book you were going to read included a girl with whom sex was am amazing when she uncovered her ears and a man who lived in a sheep costume?  If anyone else other than R & R had given me this book, I don't think I'd have bothered with it.  It took me two attempts to read but once I got going, I couldn't put it down.  My next Murakami, "Kafka on the Shore", was even better.  The strange thing about these books is that the weird stuff that happens during the course of the story seems completely normal.  I'm not even sure how to describe it - "magical realism" a la Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Isabelle Allende initally springs to mind, Murakami is in another category again. 

For the princely sum of $3.00, I'm really looking forward to my next trip into Murakami's strange and compelling world.

Our Creative Space

Wonky star quilt blocks, a photo by AndreaAMM on Flickr.

All the madness of the day job is officially over today. Well, the half yearly madness is at an end. Now I have to get through things that have been put on hold over the last 8 weeks. Sigh.
But the upside is that I get my evenings and weekends back so will now have  more time for projects. This one has a deadline for early December as a birthday gift. I mentioned a few weeks ago to Stos that I would make a gift by this date and his question was "Do you have time?" Quite reasonable, in the circumstances but it has turned into an unintended challenge that has spurred me on to squeeze in some sewing at a time of year that involves lots of late nights and weekend work. 
Two of the blocks are shown above.  This is going to be a Wonky Star throw, inspired by Rachel's Wonky Star blocks for the Melbourne Modern Quilt Guild "Oh Beehave" swap. You can see Rachel's fabulous finished product over here. She had a irregular sized blocks arranged as a reversible quilt in red/cream and cream/red with the quilting around the stars showing through on the lighter side.    My plan is to have 12.5 in blocks, with star blocks interspesed with plain squares, set out alternately on the reverse side so a blank block will have a quilted star pattern from the work on the other side. I'll do the quilting in red so that it show both on the black and white blocks.  I hope to get a lot more done on this over the next few days and I'm dying to see if it looks like my vision.  If so, I'm not sure I will be able to give it away.
For more creative spaces, head over here.