Patchwork Discovery during Spring Cleaning

You know it’s Spring when you hear the first dulcet tones of the ice cream van driving up the road. 

Last year, every-time we heard the twinkling twanging sound of the ‘Teddy Bear’s Picnic’, the toddler had hysterics! So maybe we are more sensitive to the van’s arrival as we try to obscure the sound with tuneless singing and dancing! Today we were all quick to notice it’s arrival, more so perhaps because the toddler’s reaction was to calmly declare that the ice cream man had come.

That was the total level of interest, apart from waving it goodbye as it drove away down the street. (Thankfully, he hasn’t realized that we can buy ice cream from the van – only I’m too tight!)

My sister was even sly-er than me with her excuses… She convinced her children that when the ice cream van drives around playing his music, it’s because he’s letting everyone know that he has sold out of ice cream so don’t bother asking for any. Pester-free existence!

All signs point to the fact that Spring is well on the way.

The washing is drying on the line more days than not,

Flowers are popping their heads through the leaves,

and the ice cream man has arrived.

So, today I felt inspired…

…to have a little Spring clean of my sewing stuff. This involves getting things out, going “Oh gosh I forgot I had that” and then putting it back for another day.

However, one crumpled bag stuffed at the bottom of my main sewing bag caught my attention.

It was full of bags of blue fabric, most cut into triangles of different sizes as well as a couple of sewn blocks. The design is the ‘Monkey Wrench’ or ‘Snail Trail’. A fairly common block – click HERE to learn more about this block.

Unusually for me, everything appears highly organised and apparently under control. Bags are even letter and color coded, my goodness! The problem, in this case, is my hand-written instructions.

I often sew things slightly different to the tutorials on the Internet/books/ etc. Instead I work out my own method and directions and sizes. This is the base process I use for all of the videos I share on the Internet. 

The total effort of my instructions!

However, in this instance, I must have decided that this would be a private project so I made instructions for my eyes only. 

I guess it made sense when I was doing it but they are not so helpful now. Hence, I have a bit of a cryptic challenge on my hands. This has got me so puzzled that instead of putting this project back in the bag, I’m going to try and finish sewing it. I’ll let you know how I get on. Wish me luck!

I’m now off to persuade my husband that I can’t do the ironing this week on account of it not being Tuesday… Surely, when it comes to ironing, any excuse has got to be worth a try!!!

Bye for now

Alison

Town Alleyways and City Streets

Today I did something I haven’t done for a long time. I went around town on my own.  Anyone with small people will understand how fantastic and freeing this is.  No one pulling you in the opposite direction just when you get to where you want to be, no one wanting a wee when you are standing in a queue waiting to buy that special something,  no-one  moaning when you go into a fabric shop,  etc etc

It was a lovely sunny and peaceful morning as I ambled around town.  I think I walked miles.

Our town is not a big shopping centre, but it is an old historic town that has evolved over hundreds of years. The layout is strongly molded by the huge loop in the river and the hill that sits within the loop. It’s detailed layout was determined by the desire to protect the town from all invaders : be it the Welsh to the East or the English to the West.

From Google Maps

Getting from place to place can be particularly difficult if you are not used to the town.  We all know that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. So being rational, you aim up one of the narrow streets, only to find it twists and turns and you end up back near where you started or on the river bank – always the river bank.

There are many ways to get from A to B if you know how, but the unwary visitor could get lost for days… amongst the haunted alleyways of Ye Olde Shrewsbury Towne. 

From Google Maps

Modern towns are built on open land. Built not for historic strategy but to provide housing, work areas, modern and clinical shopping areas, etc, for a rapidly growing population.

These layouts consist of straight lines all in a grid.  Easy to navigate, easy to follow and, to me at least, totally lacking in character and atmosphere. 

The patchwork quilt block ‘City Streets’ is a more modern quilt block based upon this second type of town.  Lots of straight lines to reflect the modern town layout, rather than looking like a drunken spider let loose with a pot of paint like the roads in my home town.

I have searched to try and find who first designed this block, but have only found conflicting answers. If you know please let me know so credit can be given where credit is due. 

Meanwhile, here is a link to the tutorial of this, my newest video.  I hope you enjoy it.  It is wonderfully simple to sew and yet very gorgeous. With some small changes a huge variety of results can be achieved, as shown at the end of the video.

I’m now off to hide my newest stash of fabric before husband notices it…

Bye for now

Alison

ps. In case you are following the symmetry issue (click here for a re-cap) this block has two lines of symmetry!

pps. Note to self : don’t write that you are hiding things from husband in a blog that you know he always reads!!!

(Real) Symmetry in Patchwork!

My eldest son is a bit of a perfectionist. If something isn’t right then it is definitely wrong. There is no grey area of ‘nearly’. Right or Wrong. I’m guessing he gets this trait from me. Take yesterday’s blog for example… not even close to right!

So, yesterday I wrote a blog about symmetry in patchwork. It was fairly good and rather amusing, with a pretty picture of a house reflected in a river in my home town. Apart from that, it was pretty much all wrong!

Now, I pride myself on being a mathematician so making such a hash of things like symmetry is a bit of a ‘hiccup’. Husband says I have a brain the size of Jupiter. Well, Jupiter must be a pretty strange planet as yesterday, both Jupiter and my brain were incredibly small. 

Anyways, I digress. Here follows an ACCURATE discussion of lines in symmetry and how they apply in patchwork.

A line of Symmetry is…

Imagine drawing a line through the middle of anything. If you then place a mirror along that line, the image you see reflected should match exactly the image of the real thing. To describe this easier, take the capital letter A. If you draw a line directly through it you can see that both sides of the line mirror each other. For a rectangle, you have two separate lines of symmetry – either vertical or horizontal. A circle has hundreds. In nature, the most perfect symmetry is in a butterfly. 

Some people think that humans are symmetrical also. Well, we at least have similar sides. For a laugh I took a photo of my face and made two new photos. The first is a reflected left half and the second the right. These scare me, neither mind the children!!!

In patchwork

The block at the top of this page has two lines of symmetry as shown, as does the ‘Garden Path’ block shown here. The pattern sewn is a mirror image both top to bottom and left to right.

Yesterday I said that the Pinwheel block was also like this. No it is not. Just to clarify why not, I have drawn a pinwheel block below and also drawn what would be formed by lines of symmetry. The second image is, well, a bit dull. So, if a pinwheel isn’t mirrored it must be something else, and this something else is a block with four 90 degree rotations. Which is also a very very common feature in patchwork blocks.

But that is something to discuss another day.

For now I’m off to dwell within the symmetry of cheese on toast (I ate all the chocolate yesterday!) 

Bye for now

Alison

 

Beginning a Hobby

Last night I went to my son’s stamp club Christmas meeting. He is the youngest member by about 50 years. Yep. They are all elderly and mostly men. The thing that always fascinates me about the meetings is the amount of information hidden inside of each person’s head – all about the most trivial of things regarding all things philatelic (that’s stamp collecting to you and me!)

For me a stamp is something we stick on our post; it sometimes has a pretty picture on it and can be from any country. But there is so much more to it than that. For example, one member can talk for hours about the size of perforation (that’s the wiggly bit on the side of the stamp) whilst someone else can put up a display of 100 plus stamps, that to me all look the same, but are actually all different by print machine, text size, date made and even minute differences in ink colour.

There is so much more to stamp collecting if you are fascinated and keen to do and learn more. These men are all obsessed, one way or another, with the minutia of stamps. And they are all willing to help each other out with stamp swaps and answering questions – although these can on occasion get a little bit heated!

The evening got me thinking about patchwork and quilting. In some ways, are hobby is similar to stamp collecting. We, too, have different areas of interest within the art. For example, some of us love sewing paper piece blocks, some prefer the quilting stage, some spend hours to get the perfect seams and points, some will get excited by perhaps one block pattern but sew it in a thousand different variations, etc. But wherever the hobby takes us, we all start from the same place. We all use similar skills and follow similar methods. But as we progress we get excited by different parts of the hobby – ohhh the fabrics and the colours.

I LOVE the design of the quilt and the trial and error in turning a block layout picture or photograph into an actual sewable quilt block. It really excites me. Weird? Definitely. But the trained draftsman / engineer in me will never be fully silent!

This addictive hobby of ours is vast, too big for one life time. And for a beginner it can all be a bit overwhelming.

Ben and I are beginners at stamp collecting. The men at the stamp club often explain to us about just having fun to start with. To not focus on anything in particular but just do what appeals until we find our ‘thing’ and to know that we can change our ‘thing’ as we go along. It’s a hobby. It’s not meant to be a chore but meant to be fun or relaxing. The same thing goes for patchwork.

My advice is this…

Enjoy learning. Enjoy sewing. Enjoy looking at others work. Enjoy chatting to those who are further ahead than you. Explore and most importantly have fun.

ps. Ever heard of a Postage Stamp quilt where the pieces of fabric you sew are only one and a half inch square. Now that’s a lifetime labour of love.

pps. If you have a block that you want to sew but can’t find a tutorial, check out my design service. Click HERE!