Vireya's Blog

I read an article this morning that suggested we aren't living in a timeline, but in a timesoup. "As the hours, days, weeks and months become a blur, it’s no longer clear if time is passing too quickly, or too slowly." That resonates with me!

I have no idea how much time has passed. I am very surprised at how long it is since I wrote a blog post. It was last month and we are now almost two weeks in to this month. 

We had snow on the 4th August:

 

I never wrote a stash report at the end of July, although when I went searching through my blog apparently I didn't do one at the end of June either. How did that happen?

Stash report for the end of July:

Thread:
No spools emptied, none added.
Year to date - no change.

Dress fabric:
None used, none added.
Year to date - up 4.25m.

Quilt fabric:
1.8m used, 0.5m added
Year to date - down 7.64m. 

But I've just realised that I never added into my spreadsheet any fabric used for face masks, so more fabric has been used than I have recorded.

 

There are signs spring is coming, such as more daffodils opening:

 

 Although the liquidambar still hung onto two red autumn leaves:

The tulips that took 3 weeks to travel 60kms back in May/June have started to pop up:

I planted the bulbs in a pot which just fits in my wombat planter. There were 3 tulips up when I took this photo 5 days ago, but by yesterday there were 5 up. I haven't looked at them this morning. 

This plum tree is the first tree in the orchard to have any blossom:

Photo taken on 10th August, when a birthday was celebrated in a very low-key isolated way.

Each day we watch for the new virus case numbers, hoping that the current restrictions will bring the numbers down, and worrying about what will happen if they don't. Doing too much worrying.

Some wildflowers are appearing:

Nodding greenhood orchid above, tall greenhood orchid below:

Nature is following its normal timeline, even if the humans are lost in timesoup.

Each day I make one block of the Laundry Basket Quilts mystery which was run about a month ago. There are 100 blocks in all. Today I finished the second clue, meaning that I have 12% of the blocks made. Here is what each corner of the quilt will look like:


Stash report for the end of April:

Thread:
No spools emptied, none added.
Year to date - no change.

Dress fabric:
None used, 3m added.
Year to date - up 4.25m.

Quilt fabric:
1.4m used, none added
Year to date - down 5.7m.

Last year my pink Japanese windflower didn't flower, but this year it is:
And there are heaps of buds to come:
Hooray! I hope the white one flowers as well. It would be nice to see them both at once.


Back in January Jo did a post about her broken herringbone table runner. I was quite fascinated by how it went together, and wanted to give it a try. Since then I have cut a bunch of rectangles out of fabrics in my scrap basket. Today after making my daily x-plus block, I set about starting to sew those rectangles together:

You might notice these are not all seamed. At the moment they are columns of arrow shapes pointing up; the downward v-shapes are not joined yet. When the columns are long enough they will be sewn together to make a flat surface which will become a donation quilt.

Because all those fabrics are out of my scrap basket, they don't count as stash use. But here's how the stash is going at the end of March:


Thread:
No spools emptied, none added.
Year to date - no change.

Dress fabric:
None used, 1.25m added.
Year to date - up 1.25m.

Quilt fabric:
1.3m used, none added
Year to date - down 4.3m.

My ginkgo tree is maybe showing the first signs of autumn,
or maybe it is just scorched.

My Japanese maple has beautiful red seeds, but the leaves just look burnt:
Maybe it needs a more sheltered position.



February stash report:

I did very little sewing in February. I used up a small amount of fabric making extra bits and pieces for my smaller Frolic., but I added to my stash by buying a metre of this fabric:
I've used some of it in the small Frolic, and some will be a border for that quilt. And some will just be added stash.


Thread:
No spools emptied, none added.
Year to date - no change.

Dress fabric:
None used, none added.
Year to date - no change.

Quilt fabric:
0.5m used, 1m added
Year to date - down 3m.

Here's a touch of gorgeous garden colour for the end of the month:
I'd love to tell you what it is, but the tag is somewhere buried in the mulch. I'll try to find it again some day when it is not 40 degrees outside and the march flies aren't waiting to attack me as soon as I go outside!

I was reminded this morning that I have lots of left-over bits from the Frolic quilt. In fact there are units for nine more blocks. I pulled them out and tried to arrange them so that there was a good distribution of different fabrics:
Just plonking them out on top of all the rulers etc on the cutting table, which wasn't a good idea. Anyway, some time later I had sewn various bits of each pile, but I lost interest in turning on the iron after a while. Here's everything waiting to be pressed before it can proceed:
I'm still considering options for the corners of these blocks, and whether they will get sashing. Or even what they will become! But I've already counted them in my stash use, so I have to do something with them.


Stash report for January:

Thread:
No spools emptied, none added.
Year to date - no change.

Dress fabric:
None used, none added.
Year to date - no change.

Quilt fabric:
3.5m used, none added
Year to date - down 3.5m.

How can I have sewn up 3.5m of fabric, and not emptied any spools of thread? Because this is what I have been using for all my piecing:
A 3,000m spool! That will take quite a while to empty.

The second-last day of the year was our first day of Extreme Fire Danger for the summer. Image from the CFA website:
High temperatures, strong winds and extreme dryness make for a dangerous combination. We went down to Ocean Grove for the day. It is a strange feeling leaving home in the morning, with a bag of essentials, and wondering if your house will be gone by the end of the day. As it was, only one fire occurred anywhere near our home, when a tree was hit by lightning and burst into flames about 5km to the north. The fire was stopped from spreading, fortunately. However, many other parts of the state and the country have burnt and are still burning. The images and video in the news reports are dreadful. And there are months of summer ahead of us.

*******************

In happier news, here's part five of the Frolic mystery quilt:
This was kind of funny because two weeks ago the clue involved making blue and neutral half-square triangles. But because I had swapped the colours around, I made berry and neutral ones that week. Then this week the clue was to make berry and neutral units, so here are my blue and neutral ones!


In my last post, on Boxing Day, I was wondering if I would get the wonky stars quilt finished by the end of the year. I finished quilting it on Sunday, so it just needed binding. I was considering what colour binding to use, when I remembered that a few months ago someone from the quilt guild gave me some scrappy binding she had left over. She thought I might be able to use it on one of the quilts I was quilting for the group, but I was giving those quilts to other people to bind, so I didn't use it. This quilt of scraps will be donated too, so using her scrappy binding seemed ideal. There wasn't enough for the whole quilt, but I knew that amongst my scraps there were several pieces of my own binding off-cuts. I joined them to hers, and here's the binding ready to sew on:
That seemed very appropriate for this quilt which is almost entirely out of my scrap basket. And here it is this afternoon, finished:
The sun was so bright the shadows show you the quilting more than the colours. Here it is inside without the shadows:
So with that, every quilt I started this year was also finished this year (except the on-going Frolic mystery, of course). Hooray! It doesn't mean I have no unfinished quilts. I have a list of those, which I'll do a post about in January, as I intend to make that list shorter by this time next year.

After I'd finished the binding, I even sewed labels on these last three quilts (Sew Many Strips, Butterflies and Sunflowers, and the Wonky Stars):
In the past the guild has printed their labels on purchased bubble-jet printable fabric. They are reasonably expensive, and very hard to sew on by hand. I had the idea last year of getting them printed on normal fabric by Spoonflower. I only had an A4-sized pdf file of multiple labels, not the original artwork, but I managed to create the fabric you can see at the top of the photo. I bought it when Spoonflower had a free postage deal, so 99 labels (which is what fitted on 1 yard of fabric) cost $24.36 at the time. This was less than half the cost of the printable fabric labels, and they are much easier to sew on. The print is a little less clear than I had hoped, but that is probably to do with the method I used to create the file.

*******************

Stash Report for 2019

At the beginning of this year, I started recording the use of, and additions to, my stash of fabric and thread. I said then that "I want to make sure that by the end of the year there is less than there is at the moment." How did that go?

Quilting Fabric:
Purchased: 8.15m
Given: 8.53m - this is a category I hadn't anticipated, so I had to add it to my spreadsheet.
Used: 19.28m
Result: I have 2.6m less fabric in my stash now than I had at the beginning of the year.

Garment Fabric:
Purchased: 6.75m
Used: 11m
Result: 4.25m less fabric

Thread:
Purchased: 1 spool
Emptied: 19 spools
I'm happy to have used up all that thread, but it didn't make a noticeable dent in my thread stash.

What I've learnt from this exercise:
It is much easier to acquire fabric than it is to use it up! Cutting pieces for quilts really doesn't use as much fabric as I had imagined, and buying even one metre of fabric adds considerably to the amount of patchwork needing to be done to use that metre. Looking at all my tubs of fabric, I now know that I have more than I can ever use. I have STABLE - Stash Totally Above and Beyond Life Expectancy.

I will continue keeping track in 2020, and do my best to remove fabric from my stash, either by sewing it up or giving it away.


*******************

Best wishes for 2020 to all my blog readers. Happy new year!

Since Bonnie announced the colours for this year's mystery quilt, Frolic, I've been trying to decide which fabrics to use. My initial colour post was here, and then I played with a few options here. I ummed and ahed for the rest of the month! Eventually a few days ago I made my final decision. And then the first clue came out and I started second-guessing myself.

I made a handful of 4-patches to see how they looked, then just decided to go with it:

My dark blue is Bonnie's berry colour, and for Bonnie's blues I am using berry colours: dark red and lighter purple. My 4-patches each have two corners of dark blue, one of dark red and one of purple.

The rest of my colour scheme is much the same as Bonnie's; chartreuse instead of the grassy green, a bluey-green for aqua, and then the neutrals.

There are no blog link-ups for this mystery, which is a shame. I loved the blog link-ups; visiting all the links and leaving comments on as many as possible. Many of the blogs I read regularly I first found through the mystery link-ups. Reading beyond the mystery-related posts allowed me to find people with common interests and interesting lives. Will Instagram do the same? I don't know.



Stash report for November:


Thread:
No spools emptied, none added.
Year to date - down 13 spools.

Dress fabric:
None used, none added.
Year to date - down 2.25m.

Quilt fabric:
1.6m used, 1m added
Year to date - up 0.9m.

Not much progress on reducing my stash this month. Mostly my sewing activity has been quilting, which does use up thread, but not fabric.
The only fabric used was for binding my temperature quilt and Bloom. Which would have been fine except that I purchased a couple of pieces of fabric I found in an op shop, so my fabric stash went up rather than down. (However I now know that 2/3 of what I bought will be just right for this year's mystery quilt, so that won't stay in my stash for long.)


Stash report for October

Thread:
Two spools emptied, none added.
Year to date - down 13 spools.

Dress fabric:
None used, none added.
Year to date - down 2.25m.

Quilt fabric:
0.6m used, 1.5m added
Year to date - up 1.5m.

I can't believe October is here already. Our quilt show is the first weekend in November, and I don't have anything ready.

Bloom is taking me way longer to quilt than I expected. Being sick for a week didn't help. I still have to baste my temperature quilt, then quilt it. Then bind everything of course. Plus I will be away for a week later this month. How can I get things done?

Today one of my nieces sent me a message that she wants to make a quilt for her parents for Christmas, so would I be able to teach her? I had to reply that I really don't have time for that in the next few weeks.


Stash report for September

Thread:
One (1,000m!) spool emptied, none added.
Year to date - down 11 spools.

Dress fabric:
None used, 2m added.
Year to date - down 2.25m.

Quilt fabric:
none used, none added
Year to date - up 0.5m.

A beautiful morning for the first day of spring.

Apricot blossom:

Grape hyacinths:

Spring stars:

Regular hyacinth:

Daffodils:


Warm enough for the bees to fly. Here's one in the almond blossom:


The top temperatures for the last week show that spring actually arrived on Friday (colours are the colours used in my temperature quilt a couple of years ago):

1/09/2019     16.5    green
31/08/2019   15.4    green
30/08/2019   16.2    green
29/08/2019     8.8    blue
28/08/2019     9.1    blue
27/08/2019    12.8    aqua/teal
26/08/2019    11.1    aqua/teal

But that doesn't show that this afternoon as I was going to visit my father for Fathers Day the temperature plummeted back to 8, heavy rain fell, and we were back to winter.


Stash at the end of August:

Thread:
 No spools emptied, none added.
Year to date - down 10 spools.

Dress fabric:
2 metres used, 1 added.
Year to date - down 4.25m.

Quilt fabric:
Used 3.2m, none added
Year to date - up 0.5m.

Every time I have finished quilting one of the charity quilts I've been working on, I've looked at what was still remaining, and it always seems as if there are about 3 more tops to quilt. After taking the one I finished on Tuesday to the person who is going to add the binding, I decided to count exactly what is still to do, rather than guessing there was "about three more".

I found that in fact I have four more completed tops to quilt, plus there were a random set of left-over blocks, quarter blocks, and re-assembled blocks. I worked out that if I made one more block I would have enough pieces to assemble all those left-over blocks into one more top. So yesterday I made the block, and today I put together this quilt top:
 And now I have a total of five more tops to quilt!


Stash at the end of July:

Thread:
Two spools emptied, none added.
Year to date - down 10 spools.

Dress fabric:
None used, none added.
Year to date - down 3.25m.

Quilt fabric:
Used 3.45m, added 5.1m. (Spotlight clearance sales are a trap.)
Year to date - up 3.7m.

The last couple of days I have done a bit of mindless piecing:
This is three blocks in progress, webbed.I've made 16 blocks.

There are probably lots of ways to put them together, but here's what four blocks look like:
Blocks fully assembled now, but not pressed yet.

The inspiration was the pattern called "Sew Many Strips" from American Patchwork and Quilting. I first saw it at Sewing out of my Comfort Zone in May. I'm not intending to make the full quilt, just a small one as a donation quilt. The 16 blocks I have made might not be quite big enough though. They will either need a border, or I will make more blocks to make a 5 x 5 grid.


Stash at the end of June:

Thread:
One spool emptied, none added.
Year to date - down 8 spools.

Dress fabric:
None used, added 2m.
Year to date - down 3.25m.

Quilt fabric:
Used 1.2m, added 1.3m.
Year to date - up 2m.

Bloom block 17:

Bloom block 18:
Only 2 blocks to go! I will link this post to Cheryll's Bloomers Party when she publishes it in the morning. Here's the BLooMeRS PaRTy.

Here's a few things blooming around the garden at the end of May. First the tree dahlia:
Unfortunately it has been so cold this week that the bees aren't getting any benefit from all these flowers. The tree dahlia was always buzzing with bees when it flowered in the city. But here it flowers much later, and it is just too cold for the bees to be flying.

A couple of broms:



Since it is the end of May, here is my progress on reducing my stash so far this year:

Thread:
One spool emptied, none added.
Year to date - down 7 spools.

Dress fabric:
Used 3m, none added.
Year to date - down 5.25m.

Quilt fabric:
Used 0.32m, none added.
Year to date - up 1.98m.
It takes a long time to use up quilt fabric when you are just making little bits and pieces.

The position of the walls and the door of the outdoor living area mean stepping through dirt or mud to get to the front of the house. So an extra bit of concrete was called for. This morning before I went out:
 This afternoon when I got home:
Next job will be to create a garden bed around the new concrete, with a stepping stone to get to the tap.



End of month stash figures for April:

Thread:
One spool emptied
One spool purchased
Year to date - down 6 spools

Dress fabric:
Nothing used, nothing added
Year to date - down 2.25m

Quilt fabric:
Used 0.6m, nothing added
Year to date - up 2.3m

Cheryll had an extra Bloom link-up yesterday, but I had nothing to show as I had done nothing since the last one. Well I've done lots of things, just not any Bloom blocks.

So today I made a start on blocks 9 and 10. Now I have all the pieces prepared, and have sewn down the green parts of block 10:
Both will be finished before the next link-up.

Also not blooming:
The tree dahlia. Will it manage to flower before the frosts arrive? No sign of buds yet, and we had an overnight low of 1 degree last week. I know last year I had the same worry when the flowers started opening in May, and they did get to flower for a while. Hopefully they will manage it again this year.

A few things which are flowering:
Sedum "cherry tart" in a hanging basket.


Tiny flowers on my spider plant (Chlorophytum comosum) which has grown a bit since I got it.


And speaking of growth - when I planted the concrete pots at the front door six months ago,  I said I hoped the little plants would fill the pots, but this is beyond what I imagined:

I put one echeveria in this pot. It has grown massively, and multiplied prolifically. It has been flowering for several months, and still has new buds forming. Spinebills visit the flowers, which is lovely to see but hard to photograph.


Stash reduction progress for March:

Thread:
One spool emptied
Four spools came in and then went out again
Year to date: 6 spools emptied.

Dress fabric:
Nothing used, added 1.75m
Year to date: Down 2.25m

Quilt fabric:
Used 2.5m, nothing added
Year to date: Up 2.9m