Bloggers Quilt Festival

It's Bloggers Quilt Festival time again, hi to everyone who is visiting for the first time and thank you for taking the time to come and visit.

This is the second Raw Edge Circle Quilt from a tutorial by Allison at Cluck Cluck Sew, that I've made. It's such a simple but effective design and was finished earlier this year. This quilt came about as I was trying to think of a design to make as a house warming present for very good friends of mine. With a little bit of sleuth work I found out that the colour scheme for the house was going to be neutrals and browns and that there was going to be a burnt orange glass splashback in the kitchen.
Fortunately I spied this colour scheme below from Design Seeds which helped with the inspiration for the colours to use.

My original colour palette included more browns, but it just didn't work well. In fact it looked pretty awful.

I added some oranges, it didn't look much better.

Eventually I decided to remove most of the browns and add a lot more dark and burnt oranges.

I'm so glad I persevered with playing with the colour choices as it really made a difference. The idea was to use the oranges and creams for the circles and the greys and browns as the background for each block.

I used over forty different fabrics. None of them scraps!

I quilted the circles with a simple spiral, and a meandering pattern for the background. The quilting wasn't dense as I wanted a soft finish that would drape well.

I'm so very happy with this one and I hope you like it too.

I found a fabulous flannel that worked beautifully for the backing. I ordered it online and when it arrived it was one of those miraculous moments - a perfect match. How often does that happen when you order something from a computer screen and just hope that it will work!

"Grey Skies and Sunshine" in it's new home, and a perfect match for the kitchen wall  the kitchen cabinets and the sofa.

Bloggers Quilt Festival for me, is a wonderful way to find new and interesting blogs and find some beautiful quilts that I may have missed otherwise. If you leave a comment I'll definitely pop on over to have a look at your festival quilt too.
Thank you so much to Amy for hosting the festival and also to the sponsors that make it all the more exciting.

Intermission

I need to take a little time out. I'm just not in a head space where I can juggle everything any more. Trying to get the house ready to sell has been a huge drain on me emotionally, and it's still nowhere near ready. It's been hard to concentrate on anything pleasant like sewing or blogging. I just want to run away.
I'll be back soon, I promise.

Translation Tuesday Occupations

Oops, had this pretty much ready to go for Tuesday, but because we had a public holiday here on Monday, I forgot it was Tuesday and totally forgot to post it, so sorry it's late. At least it's still Tuesday in most of the world.

This week, as an aid to anyone who is thinking of moving to Oz, you might need to know what your profession is called here, or maybe you might be thinking of starting a new career, here are a few Aussie professions for you.

Journo = Journalist
Garbo = Garbage Collector
Gyno = Gynaecologist
Ambo = Ambulance Officer
Pollie = Politician
Fiery = Fireman
Cop = Policeman
Milko = Milkman
Muso = Musician
Truckie = Truckdriver
Postie = Postman
Brickie = Bricklayer

Once you are working in your ideal occupation you may occasionally feel like chucking a sickie. That's when you take a sick day off work even if you are perfectly healthy. If you chuck a sickie and somebody dobs (informs) on you, you could get the sack (fired).

If you are on Workers Compensation because you really have been injured at work, as opposed to taking a sickie, it's Compo.

If you don't work at all you could be called a bludger, that would be someone who is idle or lazy.

If you work really hard and don't earn very much, but soldier on stoically, you would be called a battler, or to be more precise an Aussie battler.

I'm sure I've missed a few so if you know of any more feel free to add to them in the comments.

A warning, not all Aussies use these terms, I probably wouldn't say half of them, so it's probably best not to practice them on every Aussie you meet.

WIP Wednesday

Last week I totally amazed myself and quite a few other people too!  I made the jelly roll race quilt top as the backing for a quilt top that I had made almost two years ago.

I finished the quilt in a day.  Yay!  It had been bothering me that the quilt top had been sitting there for so long, so it was good to finally finish it.


and the back

I quilted through the middle of the chocolate squares on the front horizontally and vertically.
Front

Back - and sometimes the quilting crossed through the chocolate squares on the back!

Pure for the binding.

It's not very big but it's the perfect size as a small lap quilt while sitting in a chair or wheel chair. I have someone in mind for this quilt, but I'm going to wait and see how the next quilt pans out before I make a decision.

Part of the pile of squares from last week has been made into HST's and trimmed to size. It's time consuming trimming them down, but at least I know they are all perfect 3 inch squares now. I much prefer making them a little bit bigger, and knowing I can trim them down, rather than hoping that my piecing is perfect and then finding it isn't and I have to make more because I wasn't accurate enough.  This is coming from a LOT of experience in my not so accurate piecing. The  #@!* snowballs especially, come to mind.  I'm slowly piecing the rows but I'm not 100% sure how it's going to turn out, as I think I may have stuffed up the value. I wasn't looking at the colour value when I started, more concentrating on the use of colour.  I'm reserving my judgement until I have more of it sewn together. I'm hoping that the fabrics and colours will produce a subtle pattern on the quilt top which will be great for a masculine quilt. Rather than a dogs breakfast of random grey and aqua blocks with a few HST's thrown in for good measure. Fingers crossed. I'm using a wonderful pattern from a fabulous person but I'm not going to say who or what yet, as I don't want to give her "credit" for a really crappy quilt top that is all my fault. If, however it turns out as beautifully as the original by ________ I will be shouting about it from the rooftops.

I'm going to need another burst of colour in my sewing soon, all these neutrals are pretty but you can't beat lots and lots of vibrant colour.  That reminds me, most of my hand sewing and quilting projects have lots of colour,  and I forgot to show the finished circle from a couple of weeks ago. It's not as colourful as some of the other BOM blocks but I really really love this one. I swapped out a couple of the fabrics from Amitie and slipped in my own. I'm really starting to enjoy the process of making the templates and then hand sewing these blocks.

I also forgot to show the Grey Skies and Sunshine quilt in it's new home.

I was relieved to see, the greys, taupes and browns worked perfectly in T's new home. Look at the fabulous coloured glass on the kitchen wall in the background.

Finally, a tiny bit of hand quilting has started on this.



Worked On This Week
Pure Quilt
Modern Chevrons
Charm Pack Mini Quilt


Sitting On The Sidelines
Material Obsession BOM
Amitie BOM
Starflowers
Paper Piecing For The Terrified

Ignoring/Possibly Given Up
McFlurry
Mystery Quilt

Statistics
Finished - 1 and it wash't even a WIP it had been a UFO
Worked On - 2
Waiting Patiently For Me To Show Interest -  still 7
New - 1

Pop on over to Lee's blog, Freshly Pieced to see all the lovely talented people who are working on WIP's this week.

Translation Tuesday- At the beach

Even though it's autumn (fall) here in Queensland it's still warm enough to swim in the ocean, as it is most of the year.

At the beach I like to wear thongs, I can hear that collective intake of breath as you imagine my ample backside in a thong, or even trying to fit into multiple thongs, no it's not because I'm that big that I need to wear more than one thong,  not a thong but a pair of thongs................
on my feet.
These are known as flip flops in the rest of the world.  This particular word can cause a lot of problems and misunderstandings for Aussies overseas, or for overseas visitors here.

Thongs. Image from here

You should wear your sunnies at the beach to protect your eyes from the sun, you can also hide behind them while checking out the "scenery".

You are sure to find at least one or two Aussie males at the beach wearing budgie smugglers or Speedos (regardless of whether they are Speedo brand), both names are used for the item of clothing in the next two photos.

A famous Aussie politician wearing budgie smugglers. Image from here

 image from here

or togs, this term pretty much covers any kind of clothing that you would use to swim in,

or boardies (boardshorts). 

Image from here

There are a few other names that Aussies have thought up for swimwear, we do have a long summer here - swimmers, bathers, cossie/cozzie (short for costume) and others which I won't go in to here, because they are not for delicate ears/eyes.

Back to the budgie smugglers as I think they need an explanation.  I'm not sure who on earth would have thought about this and came up with the name. Budgie is short for Budgerigar, a native Australian bird that is very common as a household pet. North Americans will probably know it as a parakeet.

Imager from wikipedia

Someone decided that swim wear like in the photos above, supposedly looks like  a budgerigar has been stuffed down their swimming costume and that's how they became known as budgie smugglers. Another Australian word that I'm sure you will be able to drop casually into any conversation!!!!!!