D246: It looks sooo pretyyyy

I actually made a decision and chose a sequence!  Here it is all sewn up, unpressed and bulky seams yet to be clipped.

I plan to do a white border, possibly thicker on the ends and narrower on the sides, and use quilting to create texture there.  It crossed my mind to continue the QST style with only white fabric too, which might look kinda cool.

Anyway, decision are afoot, but I am terribly delighted with this so far. Yiiiiii!

D242-4: MILESTONE!!

It's been a while since I've completed a part of something this big.  I may have mentioned earlier that the last quilt I began - a single bed quilt made from locally printed Australian themes - has only the top portion done.  It's on pause and even though I organised the pieces the night I went into labour, maybe I'll finished it on Bub's 5th birthday, or something.  It was a while ago and its packed away so neatly and quietly I wonder if I'll ever worry about it again.

ANYWAY. 

Completed chevron strips. Rainbow order with a dark teal / dark blue top & tail.

I've finished the colour strips for this baby quilt.  

Rainbow order with red/orange top & tail

I'm pretty sure I want to do a rainbow sequence with the two dark colours as top and tail, but it tried out some other arrangements just in case.

A mixed order.  I quite like the grey, teal, yellow, pink sequence.

Mixed order that seems to have become dark to light

I'm pretty confident too that I want to do a grey backing, maybe a grey pattern but something that will be complimented by a zigzag quilt pattern. I think, though, that I'll border this with some of the white fabric first.  I have a few coloured stripe fabrics that might do well as binding.  It's all a bit wait and see but oh so fun to plan!

D239&40: Banana Bread

The pink, yellow and green strips were sewn together yesterday and the top and bottom strips for orange and purple happened today.  We had a cool change come through today and it's apparently going to be quite cool tomorrow.   Pressing stuff tomorrow night will be much nicer than the pressing last night. O_o`

While tonight's dinner cooked*, though, I prepared a banana bread.  I've never made banana bread before - who has two or three bananas that last that long?!  Well, when you have a heat wave or two... you can arrange it.

Banana Bread

I chose a recipe from Plenty of Lesely. I found it on Pinterest (and pinned it!) and am reblogging it here with the weights so that if you've got your mixing bowl on scales you can just keep hitting zero.  It's dead simple.

Best Banana Bread

• 1 3/4 cup Flour - 260g
• 2/3 cup Sugar - 165g
• 1 cup Mashed bananas (around three)
• 1/3 cup Margarine - 75g
• 2 Eggs
• 2 Teaspoons Baking powder - 5g
• 1/4 Teaspoon bicarb soda - uuuh... 0.625g.  Maybe just go with a good pinch.

The instructions say "Grease your loaf dish or spray with pan. Bake for 1 hour 275 degrees. Let sit for half an hour before cutting."

So that's 275°F/135°C.  I used a fork and started by mashing the bananas (only two for us), and adding the very soft butter, then eggs, sugar and flour/powders.  I think Lesley put it all in the mixmaster with a kneading attachment and just mixed till combined.  I also lined my pan with grease proof paper, which works a treat too.

Even though I'm pretty sure my two bananas would've filled a cup, I wish I'd had three.

*Settle down. It was rice in the cooker and reheated curry.

D236-8: Zip zip zip!

I've been production lining these strips of colour/white QSTs.  I left timing it too late, but I had a hunch, and was right, that it takes me about half an hour to sew up one colour.

I order the squares using the guide I've taped to the extension table and zip zip zip them as quickly as I can, with careful pinning.  Then I put the strips aside until an evening when it suits me to press them. Tonight I had six strips, making three colours.

Oh my goodness the pressing.  I don't know how long it takes coz I do it in front of the telly and stop and start, but it's fiddly.  And here's what I learned from that...

Tip of the day: Quilting work needs an iron with as simple a surface as possible.  The star shape for the steam in my iron is fine for shirts, but annoying as all get out for pressing lots of little seams.  It collects and crookedly creases them all. Grrr.  

D233&4: Dark teal and grey

I've made the dark teal strip by sewing it in blocks of four, and then sewing them side by side.

It took a long time, but it was more accurate than my first strip.

I wanted to try again with the previous way, which was making a top strip and then a bottom strip and joining them in the middle.  It's a much quicker way to piece and I can order the HSTs before I start.  

My machine needs a service and it's main glitch is feeding the to layer faster than the bottom.  So pinning, to counter this problem, and some slight stretching, to ensure the squareness, seems the order of the day.  This third strip, with a faster, more efficient method and careful matching has made a strip with a good accuracy rate.

Onward to yellow!

D231: Here we go

First colour strip:

Two strips sewn up...

...then sewn together.

Some points are near-perfect in their matching.  Others, not so much.

The next step is to sew it up block by block and see if it's a more consistent system.

D229: Humans can't do random

From what I understand, it's really hard for humans to do random things, even moreso to organise things randomly. We're just inclined to create patterns and repetition, make links and meaning. And it's hard to clear your head and just...blaaah.

With these colours, I want the appearance of random. But I'm pretty sure if I actually tried to do it randomly (i.e. without planning) I'd end up with an imbalance or pattern in there somewhere. So this is me planning random.

Each pattern has been labeled A, B, C or D and I made a sequence that mixed them up fairly evenly.

A B C D  A D C B  D C B A  C D A B  A D B C  A C B D  B C D A  C A D B

My four-patch chevron 'phrase'.

It's a four-patch phrase: The chevron pattern uses four colours make one 'point' as a set. (I'm calling mine upwards points.)

And then I realised something. Colours will reveal patterns much better than letters! So I drew out what I had and realised it was horribly clustered. I redrew it twice more, using the sequence above in various ways. Then twice more using colours.

It was relatively easy to get a balanced pattern for a short 16-piece strip, but with a longer set it was hard. I instinctively want to have 'one of each' in each point to balance the patterns along the strip, and even wanted an equal number of each pattern in the top and bottom rows. (Yeah, I soooo wanted random.)

However there are only so many ways I can mix up with phrase without creating repetition across the points. I even thought of repeating the short phrase, but that's not random enough for me. The best I can do is evenly space the pattern clusters.

The bottom line of all that is I stumbled back at the starting gate*: creating 'randomness' and evenness is pretty much impossible when you've got four things in a four-part phrase. The real solution for me is to have more patterns. But we're beyond that point. Decisions must be made.

So tip of the day, folks: when planning a 'randomly-coloured' geometric quilt pattern, begin with noting the number of units in your pattern (your tile). The number of colours you want to work with should be a different number.

We have a winner!

My solution for this was to make a eight 4-square units. Each colour appears in each position twice. I shuffled them around until I was happy with the balance. And there is, in the end, a pattern. Can you spot it?

I've already sorted out the patterns in their row/colourway order to see if there's any clumping of plain colours, stripes or spots across the As, Bs, Cs and Ds. So hopefully it will balance vertically as well as horizontally.

Hopefully, when it's all sewn up, it will look like a serendipitous, carefree mess of oh-gee-I-just-threw-it-all-together-a-ha-ha.

*Hub and I agree: there must be a language somewhere that has a word for accidental self-sabotage.

D228: Slice, squash, sort

All the colours, cut into HSTs, pressed and sorted into colourway order each colourway's A, B, C & D patterns.  On a crappy old towel.

D227: Happy New Year's Day

After a shoddy and wet start to the day, it turned out pretty well.  Bub and Hub got out in the rain and I had a few moments to myself to stitch some squares together.  I even got a brownie cake done and hopefully I'll cut these puppies into half-triangle squares before the night is done.  It was very rewarding after so many days of not getting into any project work :D

D215: MORE!

Little squares have been sewn, pressed, cut and pressed...

And I need more! More patterns of more colours!

D213: Chipping away amongst it all

So I made that cake last night so there was something for my folk when they visited for lunch. Too rich! Too rich! they said.  Oh well, more for us!

According to this, I'll be making quarter-square triangles (QST), not half-square triangles (HST).

I've been double checking my method for making up the QSTs.

I am planning to make up my QSTs by sewing two squares together, right sides facing, then cutting the sandwich into four triangles (squares when unfolded at the seam) by slicing corner to corner twice.  I'm hoping that what I've got will be sufficient for a cot quilt, otherwise I'll be wishing I'd discovered this HSTx8 tutorial before I began cutting:

There is also this tutorial for HSTs. I watched it with the sound off and it still made great sense, it's that good.

I also really like this tutorial, which also works without sound. Isn't video grand?



Four per square is not bad and it has meant I've clipped small portions off my scraps rather than using whole pieces.  There are some fabrics that wouldn't give me an 8" square, so all is well.  My only concern is not warping the pieces when making it up, but that's something to be careful of regardless of your grain direction.