Intentions for this Winter

Autumn is just about over. It's refreshingly cold, rain has fallen every night for a week, and some days as well.  I always revive a bit once summer really ends.
I've been feeling miserable, tired and incompetent the last few months. It's not just been the summer heat. I've let the research project take over all my time, got too tired and have been diagnosed with, among other things, an allergy to sunlight - not really surprising for a woman who is not fond of summer!  So I have done my yearly winter review and decided to  slow the research project down a bit, and pick up the blog again.
I began this blog to keep in touch with family in Melbourne and Cairns. I soon discovered it was a very satisfying way to keep in touch with me. So as well as sewing again, pottering about the house, writing stories and visiting friends, I am going to put up at least one post a week. I don't know why I  stopped doing such things!
Tomorrow and Saturday I'm catching up with good friends over the best coffee in Ballarat. On Sunday Yin and I will drive to Kyneton and visit friends in their new house and garden.

This is the quilt, put aside for over a year that  I am going to finish by the end of April.

In June I am flying up to Cairns to spend some time with my eldest son. The tickets are booked.

Winter quilt

June, and it's really winter now.

 After walking through the park on a dark and frosty morning, I'm thinking of sewing a dark winter quilt with icy glints.
(click on these photos - they will look better)

This image I took of the park made me think of a woven textile, a tapestry.  I got excited and found some fabrics to make a quilt of the same  mood.

with some frosty glitter.

Maybe oak leaf quilting

A quilt with lots of reds and browns and greys and shadowy blues.

I have five quilts just about finished, three more cut and partly pieced, two that are tempting piles of material - what is one more in the queue?

Winter energy

I hibernate through the hot months and start wanting to make things as the weather gets cooler.

 I found some interesting materials over summer, washed and sorted them and now, of course, I have to include them in various quilts.

Last night I got out the unfinished quilts (all of them) and began to get organised.

Lolly quilt

I took these pictures at night, with the new quilt-to-be over the bed, after a spot of hand-quilting, because I just couldn't leave it be even at 11pm.
My quilts are put together with luck and guesswork. Materials turn up, are scissor cut, hand sewn and quilted - and not made up too precisely. I measure by eye, fold material into squares and triangles, adjust as I sew. So they can be worked while I'm scrunched up in bed, on a rug in the park, sitting on the back step.

All these materials, save for one small piece, are second-hand, some very old - seventy years at least for a couple of old curtain remnants. No synthetics. Cotton, linen, wool and silk.

When I put the quilt together I had in mind a bag of lollies from a milkbar, so it has a much more pastel array of colour  than I usually choose.

The first two blocks were so formal and neat that I had to make  balancing blocks of bigger, more random shapes.So far I like it.

The friend I'm making it for has chosen a backing and border of red spotted with white, and that's all I have to do now, the border and the back.

Sewing mountains and rivers without end

I wanted to make a small quilt for myself and have been sewing away in bursts  for a month or so.

Once the top was stitched together I found old, soft Indian cotton for the backing and tacked it on without ironing it. Using it just as it came fresh from a drying wind on the clothes line. It will be very soft and a bit rumpled when it is quilted .

I love sewing quilts. Each quilt evokes poems I love as I work on it, and those particular poems remain sewn into the quilt for me.

Leaves gathered from  the streets form the patterns for quilting.

and I am almost ready to quilt. 

I still have to find one last piece. this was a fairly tightly contained pattern so I have let the cranes fly in over the mountains at the top and I am looking for something to dwell in the river below. maybe a carp, maybe a dragon.
Once again, the pics are bigger than the frame of the blog. If you click on this you will see the whole quilt reasonably clearly.

Almost ready to quilt - just need to get that last little bit!

A sewing seizure

I was sorting out some material on Wednesday evening.  Then I began to play, cutting bits up and stitching other bits together.

It all began to work well .

 More selecting.

 Some rejections.

A lot more stitching. I've been sewing away for two days now.

  Paddy lurks under the table, popping out now and again to see if I am ready to go for a walk.

quilt patterns from the floods

grass basket for grace

I finally caught up with grace of windthread , who has a new site. She mentioned making things with grass so this is to share with her.

I made this by the Merri Creek one afternoon, using local grass gathered as we wove. It's nowhere as well made as the baskets our teacher created, but I loved the magic of making something from 'stuff just growing around'.

The afternoon was a gift to volunteers who worked on revegetating the creek, or at the CERES centre. Our teacher was one of the local people who have been making such things for thousands of years.

Grey and gray

After years of playing with the brightest colours I could find,  I'm turning to white, quiet greys and shadowy colours. Cloudy, rainy day colours. This evening a harvest of recycled old shirts, cut up and washed, is drying inside.

Stone

Water

Clouds

White wool blankie

Lovely white wool, soft springy garter stitch, a luxurious pile of pure white woollen pieces. I've been knitting these off and on for a couple of years. You can always find white wool (and navy blue wool) in any Op shop.

This evening I began to sew together all the knitted squares. I'm going to have the light, white, wool blankie I've always wanted for coolish summer nights.

Then this niggling thought - what if I edged it all round with that long strip of red and white cotton gingham I found recently?

It wouldn't be pure white any longer.

Mmmm.

Dreaming quilt

My friend with the galahs has a rich and marvellous garden , full of food even at the tail end of winter.

 Chillis of different kinds

A tree full of juicy mandarins

And harvest stores.

We ate some of the pumpkins and I wish I had taken a photo of her pantry. There were shelves and shelves of jams and pickles and relishes and chutneys and sauces and many kinds of dried beans.

But I particularly want to share this quilt.

This quilt is a remaking of an older, worn out quilt and is covered with soft cottons from loved clothes or Op shop finds.

I loved its warmth, its softness and gentle colours. A quilt to dream under.

And I did.

Quilts should be made to dream in.