An Apology

I have a confession and an apology to make. And a story to tell. I misled you but it was for the best of intentions and now that Margaret has received my Four Seasons Spring Swap quilt I will tell you the full story.

The Four Seasons Swap is run by Margaret and she organises the lists of people, assigning someone to make a quilt for every participant and a person for everyone to make a quilt for. It is not a direct swap so the person who will receive the quilt I make is not the person who will be making a quilt for me. It is run this way so that we can blog about the quilts we are making and the recipient will not know if it is the quilt they are to receive or not. And a lot of the fun in the swap is reading all the blogs and wondering if that lovely quilt is the one you will receive - or maybe this one or that other one! So because Margaret is the Swap Mama, she obviously knew who would be making her a quilt but she promised me she wouldn't look at my blog so I could tease you all with the quilt I was making. BUT the very first blog entry I made on the Spring Quilt, she was the very first person to comment. So I engaged in a little misdirection. Well a lot actually. I carried on making this quilt for Margaret but I blogged about something different entirely.

I had designed the vase of flower quilt in EQ6 and decided against making it but when I put the design on the blog as one of my red herrings it garnered a fairly enthusiastic response so I started making it and pretended that it was the quilt I was making for my swapee. I apologise for misleading you all. However, I get to keep this quilt AND the one that someone will be sending me!

Show Pictures

Here are the pictures of the show - or if you prefer, here is the link to the picasa album.

I won!

Allow me a little skite? It was the first day of our club's quilt show today - and I won first place in two of the challenges. I won the Celebrating 20 Challenge with this quilt and the Limited Edition Challenge with this quilt. I was also awarded a Judges Merit for one of the delphiniums quilts. The Judge awarded 1 Judge's Choice and 5 Judge's Merits.

AND I sold two quilts - these ones here and here. Quite a successful day!

Terry is going to take pictures of all 223 quilts in the show tomorrow and I'll put them up on Flikr and make a slide show for you very soon.

I'm off now to get ready for our 20th Birthday Dinner this evening.

Quick Quilt

Tomorrow is the Quilt Show! But before I can go and see who has won the challenges, I have some visitors coming to see the SwiftQuilter in action. And I had no quilt to load up to show them so I made a quickie top today. And as I have only washed my red, orange and yellow fabric, I had to make a red orange and yellow quilt. I think it looks like a boy's quilt, don't you? I wonder which little boy I can give it to when its finished. It took a couple of hours from pulling the fabric to finishing the border (well, I had to iron all the fabric I used) but I'm very happy to report that I only had a very mild allergic reaction to my sewing room today. Using washed fabric and having most of the (unwashed) fabric now shut away in bins and the cupboard AND my filter working away in the corner has made the sewing room a much more pleasant place to be. Of course, its all tidy and dusted at the moment because of the visitors coming so that will help too.

And look what I've got in my laundry - 24 boxes of dye catchers! My daughter Sarah found a bulk source of them for me and they arrived in the mail yesterday. So I'm working my way through washing all the fabric, pile by pile. I'm about 1/5 of the way through now. The cute wee squash sitting on top were in my organic fruit & vege box a couple of weeks ago. I love getting the box each week and seeing what surprises I have!

Spring Mini Finished

Here it is - and I'm pretty pleased with the quilting. Judy Potts did a demonstration on free motion quilting at quilt club this Saturday and she had some samples to show us. I saw this pretty background stippling flower which I thought would be perfect. Then I found a lovely continuous leaf pattern in a library book and adapted it a bit for the border by doing an echo around each leaf - all in one continuous line. I've suggested that the vase is sitting on a table by quilting wood grain on the lower part of the background.

I'm going to hang this on my wall for a bit and then I'll be packing up the Four Seasons Spring Swap to send to my swappee. And when it has reached its home I have a story and a secret to tell you!

Man, those dye catchers are great!

I've had a lot of comment from people who also suffer from the chemicals in new fabric. Lisa suggested a room air filter, Nancy suggested a fan and also said you have to wash fabric with hot water and detergent, not just soak it. Nellie and Catherine said why iron it? Fold it and wait until you need it before ironing it because you need to iron before you cut it anyway. So I've bought an air purifier for the sewing room which I am also using in the office for seed counting days. That should help lessen that allergy reaction too. And I've started washing all my fabric. I did a big batch of RED fabric this morning and used two dye catchers. Here they are after the wash. (For the people who don't know about dye catchers, these started out white!) There is no colour run on the fabric at all. I've got a load of purple fabric in now with another two dye catchers.

BUT I've only got 3 more left after that. Does anyone know where I can get more in New Zealand? I've only ever seen them in Countdown twice and that was once on the shelf and then again later in the remainder bin. I guess they didn't sell very well. I bought all i could at that point but I haven't seen them since and I've nearly used up all I have. This is what the box looks like - have you seen any around?