Allegretto

 

You can see where this is going.

This is what the wrong sides of my quilts look like. Neatly pressed, threads trimmed. Every quilt I make looks like this on the back. Every. Single. One. And they lie flat as a pancake too.

I thought you might like to see some of the fabrics up close.

When Megan received her quilt, Waltzing Matilda, her husband was surprised that my points didn't always match. Well, I certainly like my corners to all match nicely like the four that meet in the photo above, but the points like the one in the circle, THOSE I do deliberately. I like those angles and what they do in the quilt. 

I have decided to name the quilt Allegretto. What does allegretto mean? A direction in musical notation indicating that the musical piece should be played rather fast and lively. I think that describes the feeling of this quilt.

Thanks for all your suggestions.

Waltzing Matilda in Australia

 

The Waltzing Matilda quilt has safely reached its new home in Sydney, Australia!

I love to see my quilts in different locations, and there sure aren't any palms in New England in the northeast corner of the US.

Megan said, "the quilt is, of course, absolutely wonderful..." and that it was welcomed with "the thunderous applause it warrants." She says it has been given pride of place on the lounge where it will be used throughout the winter.

For me, this smile says it all. We make, and give, quilts because of the "Sheer Love Units" they generate.

Mission Accomplished!

Waltzing Matilda Flies!

 

The Waltzing Matilda quilt is packed up, ready to fly to the land down under. I even attached a picture of Millie to the box.

Although I originally planned to ship the box via USPS, in the end I decided it was worth the extra money to ship by FedEx. FedEx could guarantee me door-to-door tracking information, as the package would never leave FedEx's possession, even when going through Customs. With the USPS, as soon as the package left the USPS control, I would no longer know where it was until Megan told me she received it.

The other nice thing about FedEx is they gave me a scheduled delivery date: Tuesday March 30. Ten days. Woo hoo!

Hot Damn! I am so excited. I hope Megan is excited too. I hope she likes it.

The Beauty Shots

It was my pal Julie, who first suggested taking beauty shots of all my quilts. I thought they were kinda dumb. Over the years, I have had to admit that Julie was absolutely correct. Beauty shots are almost a requirement. What makes a good beauty shot, however, is all in the eye of the beholder.

Over the fence, near the snow, angled so the sun could emphasize the quilting??

On the granite steps? You can see the clamps I use to hold the quilt in place at the top corners, and the shadow of my phone at the bottom.

I thought this was it,  but I have learned to take a closer look,

I stepped back, to better appreciate the quilt on the granite steps of the old town hall. But the quilt wasn't the center of attention in the photograph so I thought I would hook one corner on the door handle. I have learned to bring big metal clamps with me, so the quilt will more or less stay where I put it. Since I do this all by myself, it's kinda tricky.

This isn't bad, but then I noticed the mullions on the windows stuck out about an inch. I wondered it the clamps would stay...

Indeed they did, but OH! But I had another thought.

When you have a setting like this, you should take advantage of it. But the sun was behind me, and it was shining on the screen of my phone, so I could hardly see what was in the frame. Hmm, this wasn't centered and I cut off the peak of the portico. Can you say re-do?

So I backed up some more. This one was actually taken across the street. I bring a step stool with me so I can get a photo like this with no distortions. And yes, I had to wait until there were no cars coming to take the picture.

Satisfied with these shots, I brought the quilt home and washed it to get it all soft and crinkly. I have found that if you do not do this, the folks you give quilts to will display them, but not use them because they look too perfect to use.

There are some people, though, who think a beauty shot of a quilt isn't a beauty shot unless it has a cat curled up on it. 

Who am I to refuse?

Ready for My Beauty Shot

 Waltzing Matilda is ready for her beauty shot.

This isn't quite it. I like to take beauty shots outside.

Millie has given the quilt her Paw of Approval. Four Paws, actually, a rare honor, but then, this quilt is going to a Very Special Person.

I've been working hard the last few days, sewing my way around the quilt, and doing research about shipping it 10,099.90 miles (16,254.22 km) to Megan in Sydney, Australia. (Got that all sorted, actually.)

(You can click on this picture, then click again to get a bigger and more detailed view.)

The quilt is really gorgeous, and I am kinda jealous. I really really like it. But it's OK. I can make myself another. I'm glad it's going to a home that will love it as much as I do.

I will try to take it out over the next few days when I can take pictures of it outside. (When it goes to Oz it will never see snow again.) Then I will bring it inside and stuff it in the washing machine and then the dryer to make it all soft and crinkly. I'll fold it nicely and wrap it in a plastic bag and then I'll wrap a bit of bubble wrap around it, stuff it in a box, and had it off the the guys in the proverbial bloo (or brown or dark bloo shorts) and they will put it on a truck and eventually a plane and eventually another truck and then in some magical period of time as yet to be determined, it will arrive "home." 

What a lovely thought!

update: Dorothy, I always add a sheet with my address and the address the package is going to inside anything I ship. Thanks for sharing the suggestion for others who may not know.

Round and Round with Matilda

 

Regular readers know that when I am not sure where I am going with an idea, I shift my attention to something else. I learned long ago not to force anything. 

So I decided to take advantage of the sunny day on Sunday to spend time in the studio doing something that didn't require a thought of conscious effort. 

I added the binding to the Waltzing Matilda quilt, which, at some point, will take a very long trip to its new home.

If you want to know how and why I do my binding this way, you can get my binding tutorial, here at my Etsy shop.
 

I've got one long side done. Naturally, Millie has been "snoopervising."

Reality Bites

 It 's easy to think you've got it all figured out. Then Reality Bites.

I really like the ruler at the bottom of my cutting table, but then, the other night, as I was actually doing some cutting, I realized that I had to stop my blade from running over the ruler. If I did, I would almost certainly dull my blade, but also cut through the ruler. Um. Not good. The benefit of the ruler did not outweigh the risk of cutting through it.  Oops. I will have to figure something else out.

The day after I attached my original 24" x 48" mat to my sewing table I noticed this. That brown edge. It's the top of the table, and it looks terrible. I should probably have painted the piece of MDF that sits on the worktable (to reduce the vibration of the sewing machine when it is running), but I didn't have any paint, and I was overeager. I do not like the way this looks. I am going to try to remove the cutting mat. The adhesive on the tape may bring up some of the tabletop with it, so I have two choices. One: do it now before the adhesive really bonds and can never come up, or wait until I get some paint and then, if needed, use the reverse of the MDF. Or 3, I suppose, buy a new piece of MDF and paint that and when it's ready, remove the mat from the MDF and use the new piece. Option 4, of course, is to live with it. Number 4 is looking pretty good right about now.

When I wrote about eQuilter the other night, I kinda figured they'd hear about it eventually, but never in my wildest expectations did I expect to receive an email from Luana Rubin herself thanking me for my "very kind post!" Luana and her husband Paul, own eQuilter. Apparently I should thank Paul for all the technology that makes shopping at eQuilter such a pleasure.

I've been experimenting with those darned long rectangles. I thought I had the size worked out, so I found some fugly fabric and cut them into rectangles, sliced them with curves and sewed them up, trimmed them and then threw them up on the design wall. It looked good, but...

If I wanted a long rectangle version of Waltzing Matilda, and I cut only one curve, then I was going to have to make RIGHT and LEFT blocks. Hmm. I'd have to think about that.

Then I wondered WHAT IF I made the blocks square because two of them together would give me the long rectangle shape I was looking for, and since I would make a curve on only one corner, I could arrange the blocks in any orientation...

This isn't quite what I had in mind, and there certainly isn't anything wrong with this. I will make more blocks (these are from leftover fabrics I've used as backings of quilts) to play with to figure it out.

THIS is the kind of place I told you about. A place were YOUR ORIGINAL IDEA and SOMETHING ELSE collide. I have to decide if I want to try to continue to pursue the long rectangle idea, or shift gears. Many quilters doggedly stick to their original idea even if it isn't working. I'm not convinced my original idea is a failure just yet, and besides, there's nothing wrong with pursuing THIS idea, seeing where it goes and then going BACK to the original idea later. It may be another quilt entirely.

Either way, it's no loss to me.

Matilda, Waltzing

 

I also picked up Waltzing Matilda from JL over the weekend. We had been unable to connect because of the pandemic and the holiday, but I really had to get the heck out of the house, and it was a nice drive out to the seacoast. This quilt had been ready for some time, as you can tell from the creases. 

Here is a better view. It was sunny (but very cold this past weekend (7F), so I didn't take very many outside shots. I love to take pictures of quilts in the snow because we know they will probably never see snow again. 

After taking these pictures I brought the quilt into the house and spread it on my bed. A few hours later the creases had relaxed themselves out.

Choosing the binding for this one was a snap.

Waltzing Matilda

I've decided to name the quilt "Waltzing Matilda."

Several things came together to get me to this name. I was reading a book and a character's name was Matilda. The quilt reminded me of movement, of a dance, and I got an email from my friend Megan in Australia.

Matilda + Dance + Australia = Waltzing Matilda.
 
Waltzing Matilda has been described as the unofficial national anthem of Australia. I'm sure my friend Megan will correct me if I am wrong. It's not about what you think. There's a YouTube video of Johnny Cash singing it, offering a translation as he goes.

I received a wonderful compliment yesterday from Wanda Hansen of Exuberant Color. She thought the fabrics I chose were terrific. There are about 50 - 60 different ones. Anyway, you can click the pictures and click again to get a very good look at all the different fabrics I used.

I started this quilt Tuesday night, after 9:30 PM. I worked on it after dinner till about midnight on Wednesday and Thursday, took Friday afternoon off and worked on it all that afternoon, and after dinner that night, again until midnight. Saturday morning I got up about 9 AM, went straight into the studio and finished making the blocks and designing the layout. I started webbing the top together at 3:00 PM, finished one half, pressed it, had dinner, and then finished sewing the top before I went to bed Saturday evening.

It may not be the fastest quilt I ever put together, but it's damn close. One of the reasons is that I have learned that quilts I don't put a whole lot of thought into turn out really great. They don't suffer from being overworked, overwrought and overthought. It's all about trusting your instincts.

And, I suppose, having a good stash and a pretty good idea of what you want when you start.