Exhibiting Myself

I still have not blogged about the other 3 quilts I had in the Canberra Quilters Exhibition back in August ... so it is about time I did!

The quilt I did blog about was the Bookworms one that I blogged about here.

I also entered this:


Which is actually a re-arranged/added to version of the quilt that I Entered in the Tasda (now called ACTTAA) exhibition a couple years earlier - and blogged about here [note to self - add link]

... later, when I found this saved as a draft and actually posted it: er ... actually I don't think I did blog about that!

so ... I went and found a photo:



hmmm - I didn't realise how much better the new version looks! (although it was only meant to be, and look, temporary ... and the quilt show version was hung a bit better too ... and I have also decided that it is not temporary any more - I plan to leave it as it is and hang it up on a wall somewhere in the house - lol)
btw, it still has the same name as it originally did - "Exhibiting Myself"
(and it wasn't meant to sound rude ... really ... why don't you belive me? - LOL)

For the "Tiny Treasures" (miniature quilts) I entered this:



... which I actually made back in 200something - when it was the "International Year Of Rice" ... the idea for it came to me when i was wondering how on Earth one would make a quilt with that for a theme ... and the idea came to me when my mind was wandering while I was walking around the supermarket, so I just had to make it! The background fabric was a bit that I dyed at the Scquilters "Fringe Retreat" a few years ago, I drew the rice plants after spending some time "googling" pictures of rice plants, and I used stitches that look like rice grains (I think it is called seed stitch?) to quilt the bits of the quilt that didn't have the rice plants or the ripples to hold the layers together.

Yes - I sometimes have fun thinking up interesting names for my quilts/etc - lol

The other quilt I entered was another one I made a couple years ago - it was actually done as a mystery quilt on the mq yahoogroup ... this one was MQ9 which we made one day in the middle of 2003 (sewing instructions posted to the list bit by bit - every hour or 2 - during the day) ... it was probably a month or 10 later before I actually finished the quilt - lol

(probably about March 2005 - because that is when I took a photo of it finished ... it is also when I took photos of the fabric I chose/used for MQ10 - and I vaguely remeber deciding to get MQ9 finished before we started doing MQ10 - lol)

This is it hanging in the quilt show - and as you can probably tell - it is the one I need a better photo of - this one is a bit blurry (which is why I made it a small size)



I did take a few other photos of it (including those I took in March 2004) ... but they are all either just as blurry/etc

... or the quilt is underneath the dog!

[where IS that photo?!!!]

... 2 1/2 months pass by ...

(I must have had other things to do besides hunting around for a photo ... or spent too long getting distracted while looking for it ... so I had saved this blog post and then forgot about it ... I was originally doing it back at the start of OCTOBER ... and Christmas got here before I got around to posting it - LOL)

anyway ... this time it only took me a couple of minutes to actually find the photo I was thinking of!



well ... now I have at least made a start on catching up with one of the heaps of things I intended to post to my blog a lot sooner than this but still have not posted yet ... maybe I will get around to posting a few more things sometime in the near future ... or maybe not ... life is still a bit busy ... and I still have a couple of journal quilts I should have finished a week ago, and one more of them that isn't even started yet! (so of course I came in here and did this tonight, instead of going out to my sewing room and doing that - LOL)

Talking about "tonight" - it no longer is ... is is now well and truly morning (3:30am actually)
so I probably should go to bed and try not to sleep in all day tomorrow - LOL

Fishing around in my Fabric ...

... actually more like digging it out and spreading it around in piles all over the place, digging around in the piles and then stuffing most of it back in the cupboard but not nescessarily neatly and not always where it came from ...

so why was I doing that instead of in here making a bit more effort to at least sort of half keep up with "blogtoberfest"?
(at this rate I will be lucky to do a post a week, let alone the post a day we are supposed to do!)

Strange as it may seem, and sometimes it doesn't appear to be the case, but I also have other things in my life besides blogging ... although what I was doing does relate to what I do in cyberspace - LOL

- I have been choosing fabric for the mystery quilt I am doing on this yahoogroup

There are a lot of us doing it, and we are having a lot of fun - lol

This is actually "MQ11" ... because it is the 11th one we have done on this list! The first one was about 10 years ago (I joined the list the night before we started sewing the first one!) ... then the list kind of went to sleep after we had done 10 of them (and I have actually done all 10 ... well ... only finished some of them, but started them all - just have not finished them all ... yet) ... all was quiet for a few years ... then someone decided to wake the list up ... and I am glad they did!

We actually got instructions for choosing our fabric just over a week ago, and the cutting instructions were put up on Saturday ... so of course I am only just choosing my fabrics now - LOL

actually I started digging around and looking for some suitable fabric a few days ago ... but ... I only found one lot of "maybe" and then life got in the way for a few days ...



trouble with that lot is ... I don't know how well it would work with the fact that the background of the chilli fabric matches the backgrounds of the plain red and black ... (I also realised later, once the cutting instructions were posted, that those 2 chilli fabrics would have been the ones that got cut up into little strips) ... so would be a bit of a waste of a cute design fabric, that has a lot of potential to use it in a design where the matching/blending colours could be used to do that on purpose ... so I might see if I can find time to try and design a quilt just for these fabrics - lol

or maybe some/all of these as well? LOL



so ... the "maybe" became a "yes I will use them, but not for this quilt"

... so back to the stash to see what else I could find ... I did a LOT of digging around in there last night ...

and came up with these ...



(no not the stuff in the plastic bags - that is a sample of some alpacca hair, plus a bit of stray sheeps wool thrown in with it, both of which came from the Murrumbateman Field day, which DH and I went to on Saturday ... and a bag of emu feathers which someone gave to me at a thing I went to at the Dunlop Grasslands, which are "just over there" [andrea points roughly in the direction of the front door] ... it was a nature talk/walk and the launch of an information pamphlet ... and I took lots of photos of flowers/etc LOL)

er ... back to that photo, and the subject I WAS talking about ...

the pile of green/brown fabric on the left is enough for the single bed size version, on the right is ok for the lap quilt size ...

... I thought I had chosen my fabrics ... but I just wasn't so sure about that lot on the left ... the top one matches some of the others but doesn't quite "go" with them ... and the browns go together too well ... I kept grabbing that green one on the far left and trying to find other blue/green/etc fabrics to go with it but just couldn't get the combination we needed ... had to have a light, medium and dark (and another medium/dark for the single bed and double sizes and also a medium/light if we wanted to do the queen size) ... and a couple of the bits of fabric had to be fairly big ... and I don't have a lot of big bits ... and most of what I do have don't go with each other - LOL

I wanted to do a single bed size and maybe a lap size as well ... but I kept finding fabrics that would only do a lap size - like the pile on the right in the photo above, and this one:



btw ... the bottom middle fabric (looks almost white) is actually some fabric that I "dyed" with condy's crystals - to look like sand ... for a quilt I WAS going to make for something a few years ago but didn't get time to make yet ... story of my life that - lol

This pile of fabrics is still a "goer" ... when I went to bed last night I think I had decided to do this and the other lap quilt size (the wildflowers/orange/green/brown/etc) ... but I ended up deciding that I would not use either of those other 2 piles ...
(although I wouldn't mind using the top 3 fabrics from the lap quilt pile - the wildfowers and orange bits and the big bit of dark green - together in something ... one day ... lol)

... this lot was still calling "come and find me"



I kept grabbing the bits of green fabric and these ...



... and a few others ... but this afternoon I realised that I had been trying to choose them all around the 2 on the left in the above photo ... which, once I read the cutting instructions I realised it was totally silly to actually use those 2 where I was going to use them (we needed 2 smaller bright bits of fabric that sort of needed to stand out a bit) because they get cut up into narrow little strips ... so all my kokopelli/animals and cats would end up being sliced in half, or smaller!

so more digging ... what else could I use for those 2 bright bits?
(I even tried using a few other brighter things with one or both of those 2 bits as other fabrics ;)

why am I having so much trouble deciding? ... I guess I always take ages ... then often use/do something weird for my fabric choices ... and (maybe because I DO take so long to decide?) whatever I eventually choose has always worked out looking good ...

... even when I do something totally weird, like I did for MQ2 - and used GOLD LAME as one of my fabrics!



I am glad I did ...

(I really should finish that quilt one day!)

... and strangely enough ... I also have some of that same lame fabric (came from the same garage sale I think) in green and blue ...

so ... yes ... I just HAD to do it ...

- so I had a look what fabrics I could find to go with the lame ... and I found some!



enough for a single bed size quilt in fact! ...

I thought I was going to be short one fabric ... wasn't sure what I could use for the "medium" ... noticed I only needed a fairly small bit ... so had another dig in the pile that was still in the cupboard and found the fishy fabric and measured it ... it was the right width - good ... how long do I need it to be? - 35cm ... how long IS it? ... 36cm! LOL

- it must have been "meant to be"?

... too bad if a quilt with lame fabric on it is not that practical to use for camping/etc or to put on my side of the bed when I am cold and DH isn't (which is the whole reason I wanted to make a single bed size quilt in the first place!) ... I guess it will just have to be the one I take to sleep under on quilting retreats or something - LOL (although I probably will still use it on my side of the bed eventually ... just not while we have a rather large dog who likes sleeping all over the bed ... and sometimes even wrestling with us there as well!)

I wonder if the fishy fabric will stay as the 6 1/2" squares the instructions say to cut it into, of if it will end up getting cut/etc into something smaller? lol

so ... it looks like I AM making a single bed size after all ... and I will probably do the pink/brown/grey/etc lap quilt at the same time, if I can find time to do all the cutting and sewing for both each week ... (not that I need more lap quilts - but what ELSE would I use those 2 weird pink/brown/grey bits of fabric for? ... strangely enough, even though they are not "my" colours I DO like them ... but I don't think I have a lot of other fabric they would go with - lol
I guess I can use the chilli/etc fabric to make something the right size for my half of the bed/camping/whatever ... or finish one of the other MQs that is about the right size ... I have one that is almost finished actually - I got it half quilted (doing it myself - I like to say I did everything not just the peicing) then I put it aside for later because I had something else I wanted to do/start ... and kind of never got back to it ... oops

er ... I should be asleep ... it is now about 2 hours later than the time on this post (the time on the bottom is when I started typing it ... unless I change it to some other time ... which I did not do this time ... LOL) ... which means it is at least 3 hours later than I should still be up, seeing I have to go to work in the morning! ... sigh ...