Thursday, October 12, 2006

lights and tigers and leopards, oh my!

Well, where to start today?
Stephen's Godfather, Chris, drove up from Berwick this morning [ 2 hr drive ] arriving at 8 am... and the reason for the early arrival?... well, the fact that the expected temp was going to be 35 degrees C [ 94 F ] and he wanted to get up into the ceiling to install downlights in the sewing room before the in-roof temperature climbed well over 40 [100]
One might have thought that he would just postpone it until another day, but the other reason for today's visit was that he had done me a huge favour and picked up the Wedding Quilt from #1 son and daughter-in-law that I needed for the quilt show that we were hanging today. I'm incredibly lucky that Chris and his lovely wife, Maz, come up here on a very regular basis... and in fact, are hoping to find just the right property so that they can make it permanent in a couple of years. Chris came up solo this time: because of health issues, extreme heat knocks the stuffing out of Maz, so she elected to stay home in front of the A/C. Sensible woman.
Anyhoo, while he got to work, I pottered around, made cuppas and held tape measures, and so on, then we had an early lunch of felafel and salad wraps and I left him to it while I went to the church to help hang the show.
When I left to pick up David at 3, the show was completely hung and looking pretty goooood...and guess what?
You can't?
When I got back home with Dave, Chris had not only installed 6 downlights [ in what, in a normal household would be the living room but in mine is the studio ] he had somehow got the card reader talking to the puter... so we can have photos again. Yahoo....Yippee...Hooray

So here are some of the long promised in-progress shots of the Challenge quilt... including closeup of the main fabric culled from half of a pair of thrift shop shorts. At this stage the rest was a pile of pieced blocks.
The wonky green right side border in the second photo was replaced later with the same fabric as the left border but a different width ... this was just the audition stage. You can see the final choice in the last photo.
Another thing you might want to look closer at is the area in between the two pieces of 'theme' fabric. In photo #2 that olive green bit is intrusive. In photo #3 you can see the leopard print piece I replaced it with... a much smoother transition from those orangy yellow leaves on the left to the greenish ones on the right.
I'll post more tomorrow... this is enough for one sitting :]


and just in case you're interested in such things, it actually reached 36.9 [ so close to the 100 mark in farenheit it hardly matters ] which, given that summer is still 7 weeks away is a bit of a worry. This was the hottest October day since 1914.

5 comments:

Sheepish Annie said...

Hey, we have a Berwick here, too. New England pirated a lot of names way back when! ;) Love the quilting. What impressive work!

catsmum said...

Actually I think our Berwick and yours were BOTH the legacy of being colonised primarily by Poms. There are lots of others too.

Nadie said...

good to see the cameras working, did Chris say what the problem was? Quilts looking good, glad to see the tiger and leopard are getting along with each other.

Nicole & Phil said...

Wow, this is a lovely looking quilt! What a great way to use up a fabric that cannot possible be cut up inot smaller pieces. I never buy stuff like that because I never quite know what to do with it!
Please tell me....what is continental knitting???
Cheers
Nicole, Berlin, Germany

catsmum said...

well as I understand it, that's the way they knit in most of Europe. We use the english method so the yarn is controlled by the right hand and the continental method uses the left.
It's supposed to be much faster once you get the hang of it so maybe you should ask around while you're there.