Inchie Challenge

Today was the December gathering of Designing Women. We met at Alcira's house for lots of socialising and a brief meeting, followed by lunch. The food was yummy and we all had a great time.

There was some wonderful Show and Tell, including some of the inchies that were swapped at the Retreat in September.

Helen made hers into a cuff - an idea that had everyone wanting to copy.


Delys mounted hers on the six sides of a cube. There were only 13, so she made others, using the fabric paper from Pam's workshop for some of them.


Loraine used hers to decorate a needlecase.


And I did the obvious and boring thing and put them into a frame.

More work on the assembly

There were four of us this morning, so Pam and Iris devoted themselves to the orange panel while Juliet and I focussed on getting the blue ones finished. All panels will be assembled in two parts to allow for some tweaking of length when they are all ready to be hung.

There were three units to be joined together to make a row which would then be joined with the last completed row. The units were fiddly since they had to match up with their partners on the other panel. Two units successfully joined. Then we realised that the middle unit was going to be too short to allow for future tweaking, so another piece had to be inserted. This was not easy.


Each "pojagi" style seam has 3 rows of stitching so there was quite a bit of unpicking to be done before another piece could be added and all the lines of stitching replaced. However it was done. Picture above is from an early sample.

One more unit to be attached. A seam was carefully matched and I stitched together the two pieces. The seam allowance was trimmed to .5cm. Then we realised that the final piece had been reversed and the bits had been sewn wrong side to right side instead of both wrong sides together. More unpicking and fiddly sewing, but it was finished before I had to leave for an appointment.

Juliet had finished attaching the bottom hem pieces and said she would get the last seam done before she packed up. I hope she did - I don't want to see those blue panels again till the very end!

This was the last assembly session till after Christmas. The big launch is in March. I think there will be a few full-on days before then.

Melville Textile Project

I trotted off this morning expecting to see huge progress having been made in the two days I couldn't go last week. Unfortunately the blue panels are still proving hard to finish.

However Juliet and Iris decided to make a start on the orange panels and by the end of the afternoon we had made visible progress with about a third of one orange panel assembled.

No photos again. Sorry.

We were able to leave everything set up because the hall wasn't being used this evening. That's a huge bonus because it takes so long to set up and then take down.

Again no fibre

but we went to the retirement function for my sister. Dorothy now has 4 days work left before she joins the ranks of the self funded retirees. I hope she enjoys it as much as we do.

Birthdays, food and things other than fibre

Wednesday was busy. Computer Club in the morning with a demonstration of some ideas for Christmas items to make quickly using the 4D software. My Show and Tell was pictures of the quilts I have in the Australia Wide exhibition.

Then I went to the fortnightly meeting of our friendship group. Only four of us there. I think that as we all get older we have more and more things to take up our time. Our last meeting for the year is on the 12th of December and hopefully everyone will be able to attend.

It was Helen's birthday and I had invited her for dinner, so I had to make an effort. I thawed some of the prawns we bought a couple of weeks ago and I marinated them in a mixture of soy, lemon zest, palm sugar and fresh chopped coriander. I made a sauce to accompany them with lemon juice and sweet chilli sauce. A potato salad and a green salad completed the main course. Dessert was strawberries marinated in Cointreau with a little caster sugar. We cooked the prawns on the barbecue and ate outside though it was quite chilly. It is not quite summer evenings yet, even if the days are hot.

Today was Kevin's birthday. He got his presents from Helen and I at breakfast, then she went off to school. I had an appointment with the optometrist which involved pupil dilating drops, so Kevin had to act as my chauffeur.

We haven't done much the rest of the day. I did wash some towels - does that count as fibre?

Textile Project

We worked very hard today, but we didn't manage to finish either panel. Doesn't help when you discover a LONG seam has been stitched in the wrong direction and requires unpicking and restitching. Pam did that task. What a trooper! Both Juliet and Iris seem quite happy with progress and are sure that the two panels will be finished by Thursday afternoon. I hope so.

I can't go again this week, but I am keeping my fingers crossed for them.

Melville Community Textile Art Project

Assembly of the panels is proving to be a very time and thought consuming process. This is Iris contemplating today's progress.


We did, however, make some progress and it looks as though tomorrow we will have definitely one, and possibly two, panels done. Only eight more to go!


Each of the inset pieces has some sort of story. Juliet spent a lot of time on Norm today, and I will try to get a picture tomorrow. This is a piece done by members of the Embroiderers' Guild. The pojagi-style seams look great but they are really slow going. I only managed to finish two blocks today - nine seams in total.


Tomorrow is the last day I can go this week.

Image transfer again

I think the demonstration I gave today to the Innovative Stitches group at the Embroiderers' Guild was a success. I repeated the talk I gave to the Contemporary Quilt Group in August, and there was a lot of interest, but I added some other methods of image transfer that I have been playing with since then. There are a couple of them on yesterday's blog. The printed vliesofix caught people's imagination so I hope to see some great results from that.

One of the transfers I tried yesterday was using a solvent (a citrus based cleaner) to transfer a laser printed image. It was only partially successful - I think because there is not enough carbon in the laser toner. This was the original

and here is a scan of the result.



I think a search for an old/secondhand toner based photocopier is in the immediate future.

My demonstration was followed by one from Hannah Katarski who has just had an exhibition at Heathcote. I have never met Hannah before - Perth is a small textile community but you don't necessarily know everyone, though you get to know names. Hannah has been playing with gel medium transfers from inkjet transparencies for a while and her results were much more appealing than mine. An interesting twist - she also uses water to transfer ink from transparencies. Great effects. I will definitely be playing with this technique.

Image transfer to fabric

I have spent a large part of the day playing with image transfers. These are some samples for the demonstration I am giving tomorrow.


This is an image inkjet printed on a transparency, then transferred to fabric with gel medium. As usual I was a bit heavy handed and the image is smeared.


I took this photo of giant lily pads in the Pamplemousse Gardens in Mauritius in 2005. Today I printed it out on Vleisofix and ironed it onto fabric. This is the first time I have tried this - I usually just paint the Vliesofix. I think the results are quite interesting and I will be trying this again.


This morning I went to Bestway with my Orchidea machine. It took David less than a minute to fix it. What had happened was that I was winding a bobbin with invisible thread. I thought I was going slowly enough, but it overheated the bobbin and it jammed onto the winding drive. I left it to cool and then pulled it off, but pulled out the shaft and the locking mechanism which was still inside the bobbin. The machine thought I was still winding a bobbin and wouldn't stitch. I got the mechanism out, but was too scared to try and push the shaft back. Not so David. A bit of a whack, push the locking bit on and it was fixed! No charge either. Thank you so much. Oh, and I didn't give blood. I woke up this morning with ANOTHER cold. Hope this one is milder than the last one.

This and That

Today's photo is of the flowers on the bauhinia trees in our back garden. They are almost all finished now. This is a fill-in because I didn't do much today.

I helped to assemble some of the Melville Textile Art project. It is really slow going: 4 hours to get three sections together (approximately 20% of one panel - and there are 10 of them!!) Should have taken a photo - I DID have my camera, but of course failed to use it. I managed to mess up my machine too, so off to Bestway tomorrow after I give blood.

Then I went to a funeral. Enough of today.