I finished my first quilt for the year - the Ordinary Times quilt for my old parish church in Canberra - been dragging my heels on getting it done, so pleasaed that I can tick it off the list at last.
The colour for ordinary times is green - representing growth. So I cut squares from as many different greens as I had - which was quite a lot! As always with a scrap quilt, I interpreted 'green' as widely as possible - not quite letting it go into blue -but definitely lots of olives and yellowy greens, shading down into some browny shades too. And lots of soft grey greens representing eucalypts. I wanted a sense of movement, and originally intended using Martha Thompson's Square Dance technique, where you arrange and sew together lots of squares then using a pinwheel template, cut new squares which have four different adjoining fabrics - its a good tessallating pattern, with lots of movement. I even made a small sample just to remind myself how to do it.
But then I hit a snag. First, I went ahead and cut out all the square the WRONG SIZE. Failing to read the instructions properly (now that's never happened before!), I cut the finished size. I did some quick maths and realised that while I could still go ahead with the technique, it was going to be very, very tedious indeed. The quilt is big - 80 x 110 inches - 200cm x 275cm, and the thought of wrestling it on my cutting table cutting out new squares and sewing it all back together a second time made me feel faint.
So, I looked at my pile of squares and thought - hmm, what to do. In the end I settled for stacking four different fabrics and just free hand cutting to get a sort of pinwheel shape and sewing them back together. I did think that I would put some autumn colours in a few to be highlights of swirling leaves, but I soon realised that it made the whole thing look spotty and disjointed - there was no focal point. 
Ordinary times goes for a total of 32 - 33 weeks of the year - although not continuously, but it is still a long time for people to be looking at this thing, so I wanted it to have movement and be interesting, but also to allow for quiet contemplation.
So, I decided it needed a focal point, and to make that a simple cross in the upper right. I did a quick mock up in EQ7 and went from there.
Then I started laying them out on the design wall, I started with the cross shape, using the lightest fabrics, then arranged stuff around them. Once I had that big together, the rest just fell into place.
Here is the finished top, hung from the railing of our deck. It is the only place I had to hang something this big and stand back and get a photo. I loaded it up on my quilting frame and did a leafy type pantograph design, whacked a facing and a hanging sleeve on it and now it has gone to its new home. Hope they like it. But its a gift, not a commission, so I guess I am not going to worry too much - someone will like it! I have always found that when I give quilts, I never look back, wondering whaat happened to them. My pleasure is in designing and making them - what happens to them after that doesn't really worry me too much. Of course, I don't gift quilts to people who I think aren't going to appreciate them - if I thought there was a real chance a quilt I made was going to end up in the dog's basket, or being used to wrap furniture in a removal van, I would give that person something else that I thought they might value more.
Making these letter is a lot of fun - no real rules, just a few simple guidelines and off you go. I realised when I looked at the photo that I made a mistake putting that band of red white and black fabric under the date - it should have just gone straight to the spotty sashing, but by then I had the outer border on and really couldn't be fussed unpicking it all. I am sure Leo won't mind. I am binding it with the same black and white spots, and that will get done this afternoon, while watching some old episodes of Dr Who that I missed the first time around, then it is in the mail to Melbourne. So, that will be two completed quilts so far this year. I'm on a roll!
I have a nearly completed top on my design wall. Lots of white, which isn't normally my thing, but during the fund raising that went on around a number of blogs following the floods in Queensland, I came across this designer who was offering to donate the sales from her patterns to the flood appeal. Well that sounded like a pretty good deal to me, so I bought a couple of her patterns. Kate is obviously part of what I believe is christened the "modern' quilt movement! Lots of white, bright fresh fabrics and free cutting. Her quilts and others in that style certainly do look bright and fresh, and if is attracting a whole new generation to quilting, then it is a damn good thing, I say.
Anyway, I whipped this up - not quite following the pattern (sorry Kate) with some brights that I bought at the end of 2009, while suffering cabin fever in the apartment. Don't know what possessed me, as they aren't really me, but what the heck. This will go to Canberra Quilters Quilts for Others program, once I get it finished.
I just noticed a dark rectangle shape shadowing behind this quilt. Canberra Quilters has an annual challenge, which is always 70cm by 50cm. I am not good at visualing space, so I arranged some leftover strips on my design wall to mark out that area so I could get my head around how big this needed to be. I just plopped the quilt top over it.
The theme for the challenge this year is "HOME". I have been thinking about how to represent that. I could of course use my new found letter-making skills too make a HOME SWEET HOME quilt, with a couple of wonky houses, but that is a) a bit obvious, b) a bit naff, and c) not really me. So, what else?
Homes and the loss of them is very much to the forefront of peoples' minds here. With the floods/cyclone in Qld and fires in Perth, many people are homeless. We have just marked the second anniversary of the terrible fires in Victoria which killed over 170 people and destroyed many homes - almost entire villages. Some of those people are still homeless, too traumatised, emotionallly or financially to think of rebuilding.
In Qld, there are seven people still missing when a fllash flood swept through a small farming community, tearing houses from their foundations and washing away the occupants within. We think of homes as our sanctuary, our safe place. But for some it is anything but. There was an article in the paper this weekend about some adults who had been sentenced to jail for systematically abusing and starving a number of children, supposedly in their care. For these children, 'home' was a hell from which they have now been rescued, but the physical and phsychogical scars will remain with them for life. A few years ago, the state government ran a campaign called 'home is where the heart hurt is', highlighting domestic abuse.
Lots to think about there - I had better get cracking.
