Life after the move!

Well here we are in our new home for at least the next six months. Yet again we have chosen a spot where the removal lorry had trouble getting in and this time, the men gave up and parked it down the lane and used a smaller van as a shuttle. Sadly this additional loading and unloading led to a few breakages, but we can live with that.

Here are a few pictures of our (soon to be elegant, not) home

 Is there anybody in?

Our well tended lawn!

Elegant lounge!

Dave's office!

Spare bedroom!

My work room!

The ultimate kitchen!

And when we had finished unloading and had unpacked until we couldn't face another box, this is the last word in elegant garden features!

I have made a list of all the things I must do in the next two weeks before I go to The Festival of Quilts, but for now the sun is still shining, we are busy meeting up with old friends and family. It's almost as if we were on holiday!

But I must get my CQ journal quilts done and apparently the Jet Stream is going to oblige and provide us with some rain on Monday. So the sewing table is up and all the fabric and yarn mountains are neatly, well nearly, stashed so no reason not to start right away! Well, perhaps tomorrow!

O M G!!!

The big question is, do two people need all this STUFF? Well obviously otherwise we wouldn't bother to keep it!

Looking out of the kitchen window on Tuesday I could just see this huge lorry inching round the bend, coming to rest in front of our drive way blocking the lane to other cars! Two lovely Cornish lads spent the whole day loading our stuff onto the lorry while we raced around making sure that everything was packed up.

Here's our stuff on the lorry, which as you can see could have taken more! 

and here is our elegant lounge as it was on Tuesday evening, just one more night before we depart!

Just the deckchairs, a bed,  a tv and a kettle, so it was a bit like being newly weds in our first home!!

So now we are here, even if we are, as yet homeless and living on the mercy of our nearest and dearest!

Now for the quilting interest. I was born in a village which is in a workaday part of Cornwall, but which has always had a place in my heart even though I haven't lived there for many years. But, they have a very active quilt group, Gate Quilters, and this weekend my DS and I went to their exhibition. What an eye opener!

I had always thought of them as rather traditional making bed quilts and cushions with a few bags thrown in. Well, not a bit of it. Yes there were some traditional quilts, but  an awful lot of  more contemporary work. A real feast for the eyes.

The exhibition was hung in the church and just going in, brought back so many childhood memories. I met up with an old school friend and chatted with some of the group members before leaving. 

Now it's stopped raining and only a few more days to go before we can move into our new home! Fingers crossed!

Fame at Last!

Sometime ago I made a small quilt for the CQ group on the theme of "what it means to me to be British". Each little quilt had to measure 20cm by 20cm and the idea was that 60 would be sewn together and the final quilt exhibited as part of the "Celebrating Diversity" exhibition by the European Quilt Association currently on show at the Quilt Museum in York.

My little quilt was chosen and the actual quilt was featured in an article in Popular Patchwork Magazine and unknown to me, until yesterday, my quilt square was shown on the cover!!!! What an honour and will I cope with the fame! So there we are, my DH and me, spade and fork at the ready, dressed for the occasion on our allotment.

This was the first time I had entered anything I've made in any sort of competition and so now I feel a bit more confident about entering other competitions. However, that will have to wait because we are almost at our moving date and are surrounded by boxes.

We have the removal van booked, and after a bit of a struggle, we have got somewhere to move to even though it's a rental property. We will be living in a lovely part of Cornwall, very close to the coast path and in a very lively village. Above all, I will be much closer to my dear sister and although I'll be leaving many good friends behind here, I'm hoping that I will soon make lots of new ones.

So probably no blogging for a while, but normal service will be resumed as soon as possible!

Displacement activity

I should be packing but instead I am playing with my sewing machine.

Sometime ago I signed up for a class on Craftsy. They were offering a free online class called "Block of the Month" so I signed up, but haven't made all the blocks as they are not really to my taste. Still, I realised that my inability to sew two pieces of fabric together so they lie flat was beginning to irritate. So I signed up for Magical Jelly Roll Quilts with Kimberly Einmo. There is so much in this class that I don't think I will ever finish it, but it's really inspired me to do some more traditional work, although the quilts have a modern bias.

Here are my efforts so far. One rather creased Flying Geese Crossing quilt waiting for a good press before it's quilted

 And one Lonestar panel that was fun to do, but isn't actually square and the middle isn't in the middle! Still not bad for a first attempt!

What I want to know is, why is it when you are so careful to measure and cut accurately, sew the seam to exactly the right width, press carefully, the damn things are never square, the points don't meet and they don't turn out to be the right size? Bit like life really and perhaps my expectations are just too high and does it matter?

So now I've had a practice and got bits of thread and fabric all over the floor of my room, I ought to go downstairs and start putting things in boxes. Well perhaps tomorrow! If I try again, perhaps this time I'll get it spot on or not, but it's fun anyway!

Lucky

It's been a bit hectic. Waiting for exchange of contracts and then trying to find somewhere to rent from 400 miles away. We were beginning to think it wasn't going to happen. Then suddenly the sun came out, contracts were exchanged and we've found a house to live in all in the space of three days. Phew!

We viewed a couple of places that were simply awful and thought we'd try a different agent. He was just telling us that they didn't have anything to rent on their books, when his colleague interrupted and said that a house had become available but hadn't been advertised as the current tenants had only just given in their notice. Would we be interested? You bet. Just one look was all it took and we're sold! If only it was for sale. Never mind, we will have six months living in a simply beautiful place near the Helford river and the lovely gardens at Glendurgan and Trebah. Our nearest village will be Mawnan Smith which seems to be very lively and has a very nice pub! So that's sorted!

But the luck doesn't stop there! A well deserved day off yesterday in St Ives and the sign said Island Car Park FULL! However, we persevered and guess what... four empty spaces! So here's St Ives in the sunshine!

Lots of tourists in the streets, people on the beach and in the sea! We had a crab sandwich in The Sloop in and soaked it all up! Heaven!

Now all we have to do is get back home, get all our stuff in the removal van and get back down here asap.

Definitions and distractions

We heard from our buyers yesterday and they are not pulling out and so we will shortly be on our way to our new home, or at least somewhere to sleep while we look for one! This has led to the realisation that we will only have a short time to get all our stuff packed and this week we have been rationalising and decluttering, but not necessarily in that order. My DD and her partner came and helped us clear the attic and apart from two sheds and some cupboards we are almost clear of rubbish.
 
In the process of emptying various cupboards, I have found  a bag of crochet squares that I had meant to join together into a throw, but hadn't; a half knitted waistcoat that may or may not have been savaged by moths: various quilt tops at different stages of construction: a bag of hexagons cut from scraps let over from dresses I made back in the 1960s: a big basket of all sorts of scraps of fabric: three half made jackets: four handbags each containing a lipstick and an old tissue: six pairs of glasses and three odd socks!

What a haul! Please don't ask me to say how much of it I've managed to throw away!

This process of clearing out stuff so we know what we have to pack is not my favourite activity and I am very easily distracted, so as light relief, I decided to make a bag to hold my laptop! We will be taking it with us when we go to Cornwall so that we can house hunt from the comfort of the sofa and we have bought a dongle, successfully installed it, and are more or less set. Obviously, I must have a laptop bag and it must be hand made and preferably quilted. I measured carefully and spent a merry day constructing it with a zipped pocket etc, only to find that I had made it just 1/2 inch too narrow and to get the laptop into the bag takes a lot of wriggling around and then I can't get it back out again!

What next! As if I don't have enough other stuff to do, I decided to revisit my goodbye to the grid quilt that I had carefully packed away. I had tried several times to get the top sewn together, but as I found that my cutting had not been accurate enough, it just wouldn't lie flat.  I decided to revisit the design from scratch so I printed off the black and white design and used some felt tips to colour it in.

It's a bit rough and ready, but I scanned it and used a posterizing program called Posterazor to enlarge it to actual size. Now it's printed out and waiting for me to put it together so I can cut the pieces and start putting it together again!  I have simplifed the piecing by using a single colour as a background, shown grey in the drawing. My actual background will be white and the coloured blocks will not be in the colours shown, but I will be using a complementary colour scheme to create maximum impact!

Inspiration to get going on it again came from reading Hazel's blog post about a new book she had bought called Quilting Modern and a new group called The Modern Quilt Guild. This seems to be an American version of the Contemporary Quilt Group of the QGBI, but without the artistic angst. Although I belong to the CQ group, I don't really feel as if I belong there. I'm not a dedicated textile artist and don't want to be. My interest in quilting arose from a love of sewing pieces of fabric together and at heart, that is really what I want to do. I just love working with textiles and apart from quilting, I need to find time for spinning, weaving and embroidery too. That is not to say that I want to always follow a pattern and not to design my own work, but I need to free myself from the tyranny of the " Art Quilt" and just make the things I want to make the way I want to make them.

There really doesn't seem to be a distinction between a Contemporary Quilt and an Art Quilt but yet many CQ members would disagree. Trying to maintain such an artificial distinction is, to my mind,  a complete waste of time and takes a great deal of energy that is better employed in doing a bit of sewing!

Anyway for now, I have so much to do, that this is not of any real significance.  Knowing that our stuff is safely stowed in the removal van, and we have somewhere to put it at the other end, now that is top priority. Oh and I must make a laptop bag that fits!

Journal Quilts

I finished the first four journal quilts and got them posted on time by the skin of my teeth!  My original idea was to make them a series of studies inspired by strata in rocks, but that idea went by the board and in the end they were just cobbled together in  my usual haphazard way!

This is January's effort which looks much more pink than it is in real life. The idea came from an on line class called Stupendous Stitching which I enjoyed very much, but I did not use the same techniques in the other three quilts as after taking this class, I took another class in free motion quilting that just took over!

Here is February's effort based on a wonky log cabin with lots of free motion quilting.

I had hoped to use my own hand dyed fabris, but sadly the reds were rather wishy washy pinks, so these fabrics came from a pack of fat quarters I had in my stash which proves that I am willing to declutter!

March and April were both done in  a bit of a rush but in the end I was quite pleased with the results.

For this little quilt, I used raw edge applique and couched the pieces to the backing with some red braid.

This quilt used curved piecing and narrow pieced inserts with appliqued trapunto flowers. My first attempt at echo quilting which sort of worked.

The next four must all be yellow and I haven't even started thinking about them yet. They may have to wait until we have moved into our new home, when we eventually find one!

In the meantime, I'm off to do some more sorting out and packing so I will leave you with a photo of someone special who I'm going to miss a lot but who has promised to teach me how to use Skype