Skin of the Teeth OPAM Finish

Phew! Kiwi Jubilee is finished and joins Neptune for two completed quilts in June. Can I get a woohoo?!

This will most likely be a Christmas gift for someone. While I do love the colors and the French Braid (and my machine quilting),  I can't keep every quilt I make. This is my first Batik though, so parting shall be such sweet sorrow. (sigh!)

As I obviously work so much better under pressure, how about I whip out a table quilt now for hte 4th of July. Let's see.....3 evenings after work and all day Saturday...shouldn't be a problem, but I need to use the Accuquilt to cut strips and make it a strip quilt of some type. (I knew I should have ordered more dies, then I wouldn't be so limited in my choices. C'est la vie.).

Look at the fabric on the left. At first I was horrified when it arrived and found that a perfectly good red and blue batik had been hideously deformed by the screenprinting of a bazillion metallic gold stars across it's Indonesian goodness.

And then I made the genius discovery that I could flip it over and pretend that the wrong side was really the right side. No more confetti of stars!

The Great Bleach Debacle of Oh-Ten has finally ended. I waved the white (but not bleached) flag before I had a chance for a go at round two (which was daubing bleach on mottled blue fabric to create clouds). A trip to the LQS this afternoon yielded a Fat Eigth of:

which will do nicely. Next Saturday all of this should be well on it's way to being my first 'art'-like quilt, a landscape from the Skinny Quilts and Table Runners book, for which I have signed up for a class (though I am putting my own spin on some of the 'materials' on the list in order to not be a cookie cutter quilter.

The Saturday following, I am taking another 'art'-like class. A little combo piecing/applique wall hanging. Nothing really fancy, but it's time to put on the 'Suz Zwizzle - Art Quilter' hat and see how it fits.

I'm off to the Accuquilt die-cut mines for the rest of the evening. Daughter's table quilt will have to wait....can you believe it's the only UFO I've got? (Well, that's if you don't count sashiko, applique, Strolling the Block...).  Hopefully I'll have something to show you tomorrow.

Have some fun tomorrow! Long weekend coming up.

Failure to Bleach

The folded fabics on top are unbleached, the ones below spent a good 6 hours in bleach. Either this is some indestructible fabric, or I've got a dud bottle of bleach. I'm running out of time to find a fabulous sky fabric for this little art quilt. I've got one more trick up my sleeve...I bought a light blue 'faux batik' FQ and I'm going to try sponging on some straight bleach, or maybe some really watery acrylic paint. Otherwise, it's back to the quilt shops to see if I've missed something.

Well, I'm off to work. Have a lovely Tuesday...chin up, there's a long weekend coming!

Life's Little Mysteries

Kiwi Jubilee -- work in progress

It's been one of those days. I'm sitting here, not sewing, but pondering the whole International Date Line concept. I've always been one to think 'Gosh, if I could just fly to California, I'd gain 3 extra hours in a day and I could finish up some things' (of course, I'm not taking into account the fact that I've really lost 2 hours, because it's a 5-hour flight). Then I went to Hawaii and now I'm all about 'Gosh, if I could just fly to Honolulu, I'd have an extra 6 hours to get things done'. Today, I'm thinking big....'If only I could pop over to American Samoa, I'd have the whole afternoon for a do-over'. But wait, what if something went wrong and we wound up in Tonga...then I'd have lost an entire day....it would be TOMORROW afternoon already! (Can you tell, I'm procrastinating about finishing something?)

I spent all day yesterday working freemotion on Kiwi Jubilee. I tried out a couple of new things....chalking a pattern, and tracing a pattern on exam table paper and stitching through it. It was interesting. It did take twice as long to do designs on 10 blocks because it actually took about 4 times longer to tear the paper off than it did to stitch.

Tweezers are our friends.

So, we're left with a 6" border...to quilt, or not to quilt, that is the question (and now we understand why we are playing Internet search games like "what time is it in ________".)

Since I never left the studio yesterday, rather than succumb to cabin fever today, I braved the 98 degree outside temp (which does not include the heat factor) and headed to my LQS where I signed up for 8 classes in July and August and wait-listed myself for another 2. It's going to be a busy July/August.

In preparation for the first class, I started to look for some fabrics (it's an art quilt) in my stash, and not happy with any of my cheesy cloudy sky prints, leftover from an applique project from long ago, I decided to 'speriment and bleach them.

15 minutes in a half/half mix of bleach and water and nothing. Dumped all but a small amount of water and covered the fabs with bleach. It's been 2 hours. Nada! Seriously, if I had been wearing a black t-shirt, and just splashed a drop of that bleach on me, I'd have had a big ole' white spot in a nanosecond. What's up with that? I think I'll let them soak overnight and if they survive I'll just pull them out and lay them outside in tomorrow's sun and see what happens. (Promise me you won't call Fabric Welfare and report me for excessive cruelty).

I'm off to dinner now, and hopefully will manage to turn on the Bernina tonight and accomplish something. Tomorrow's an office day, and I hate to go back to work feeling I didn't get enough leisure activity in on a weekend.

Keep cool!