It can be difficult to get work done during school holidays but I do not really need to entertain my kids much these days. Nell and I went to St Andrews to see a magnificent student production of Sweeney Todd because Freya had been the costume designer. She had sourced authentic Victorian outfits and accessories and we were impressed by what a professional job the whole company had done with the show. We did not get home until 1.30 am so did not feel at all guilty about getting up late the next morning!
I managed to complete 2 simple customer quilts (forgot to take photos) and supervised 2 DIY quilts. I was honoured to make a Golden Wedding cushion for a lovely quilter with failing health. She has been a regular customer over my 10 years as a longarm quilter and it was sad to be told that this will probably be her final project.
The DWR is always on my mind and very soon I will have to tackle some serious marking, once I have a clue how I will quilt it. I have made some very rough notes and I think I am probably (well, not definitely) going to give up on the idea of printed Russian women.
It is the time of year to decide whether to have yet another crack at FOQ’s Fine Art Quilt Masters so I decided to try out something that I had filed under “Ideas”. This has taken me down a new rabbit hole The basic quilt top is old table linens but the quilting is something that I have wondered about since seeing an antique Indonesian rug. It was not made with wadding but with strips of rope - a lot of rope! I ordered 5 metres of soft cotton rope online to see how far it would go and was a little surprised to find that some people use it for Bondage! Luckily, my friend, Mo had a big unwanted reel of piping cord, like old-fashioned clothes-line, although thinner than I originally planned.
The question was how would it be put together? It would be a pain to attach it on the longarm as I would have to keep lifting the quilt top to add the next strip. I experimented with trying to sew each strip on with the domestic machine using a zip or piping foot but it was very awkward and kept puckering up underneath.
In the end I decided to use a piece of backing fabric and cotton wadding without the quilt top and sew each strip of rope on with the longarm trying to keep the lines as straight as possible, spaced ½” apart. It took most of 2 days to prepare the piped wadding and used up 500ft of rope!! The backing was not pretty because I stitched right through the rope and it wriggled around a bit. The next part of the process will be to use a new backing, more wadding, then the bumpy wadding, lay the linens on top and hope to feel the channels like Braille and stitch in reasonably straight freehand lines. We will just have to see how that pans out. If it works then I plan to add something extra that is still swirling around in in my head;)
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