Maldon

 This is why I went to Maldon:

 Maldon Combined Quilters have their show this weekend. The show is small, but quite nice. A few quilters had quilted their own quilts, which I always like to see.

Trees are starting to change for autumn:

Looking at the size of the gutters, do you think they must get some heavy rain at times?

Maldon Post Office looks like many other buildings around the country:

 But a plaque on the wall tells of a famous former resident:

Her novel The Getting of Wisdom was one of my favourites among the books I had to read for school.

Unlike the post office, this building is not like anything I've seen elsewhere:

The building is from the 1800's. But is the 3D brickwork original, or has it been added when the building was renovated? The same 3D effect appears on the parapet above the verandah, which would seem to imply it is original. But it is so wild!  

I just don't know.

Forty-Four

The dominant colour of week 44 of my temperature-based year quilt is seen in this Californian poppy (Eschscholzia californica):

This treasure flower :

And this bee in a red hot poker (Kniphofia):

And here it is in rosette form:

Yellow! Although you may notice another day of aqua/teal. Winter is coming:

30/03/2018    20.6    yellow
29/03/2018    22.1    yellow
28/03/2018    28.6    orange
27/03/2018    18.2    green
26/03/2018    14.6    aqua/teal
25/03/2018    21.1    yellow
24/03/2018    23.4    yellow

Check out other people's weather weeks at Sarah's link-up here.

Holes in Things

The labels I had for sewing onto the little quilts I finished the other day were printed on some very tough fabric. I managed to put a hole near the top of my middle finger:

Not an easy photo to take!

I wasn't even aware that I use my middle finger when hand-sewing. But there you go, I push the needle with this finger. And after I got the needle stuck in the hole several times, I had to stop hand-sewing. Maybe it is time for a thimble!

I've never worn a thimble, although I know I have a couple somewhere. But of course I couldn't find them.

Yesterday after a trip to the dentist where he informed me I have a two teeth with holes that need filling (actually a couple of fillings that need to be removed and replaced), I went shopping for a thimble but couldn't find one that fitted me.

Today I was in a different part of town, and found this one:

It's not ideal, as the metal cap is on the fingertip. But as you might see in the photo above, I'm not using the tip of my finger to push the needle. At least I can do some sewing for now, and when I go to AQC next week I will look for a better option. Any recommendations for brands or styles of thimble?

As if holes in my teeth and my finger were not enough, this also happened today:

Fortunately it could be repaired and I didn't need to buy a new tyre.

This is the fourth punctured tyre I've had since I started this blog!
2009
2015
2015 again
Am I just unlucky?

Shed Progress

It is a month since the framework of the new shed went up. Today I arrived home to find some progress:

I was a bit freaked out by that man standing on the roof, so I ducked inside and left them to it.

Before and After

I recently purchased a couple of these panels for quilting practice:

One panel becomes two little "Quilts of Love" to donate:

Here's the two striped border areas:

The top one I quilted with a ruler a grid of straight lines. I got a bit more adventurous in the lower one. The central curve was done with a curvy ruler, but the rest was free-hand.

The rest of the quilting is hard to see in photos of the fronts, so here is the back of each little quilt:

The Return Of...

Isn't this a pretty spot to sit?

It is a little garden area out the front of Inheritance Patchwork in the small town of Birregurra. It was the last stop before heading home after day trip with some quilting friends.

First stop for the day was the Colac Quilters biennial exhibition. This year it is at the Colac Showgrounds, in a huge tin shed that got pretty warm on this lovely sunny day. The huge space meant that there was plenty of room to view the quilts. A collection of staged picnic scenes with quilts and vintage vehicles are scattered around the exhibition.

VW Kombi:

Very vintage!

This car is a Singer, and was surrounded by Singer machines.

But as far as I can tell the only connection between the two companies is that they were both called Singer.

As for the actual quilts, there were lots to look at, in styles from traditional to modern. A disappointment for me was that almost every quilt was professionally quilted. In fact it seemed that the only quilts in the exhibition that were quilted by the maker were those made by Wendy Gleeson, who is a professional long-arm quilter with a business in Colac.

It was a great day out, but back to the important feature of any Friday. This week's temperatures!

And here we see what the title of this post refers to; the return of AQUA! Aqua was the main colour I used all through winter. We've had no aqua days since the first week of summer (and even then they seemed unseasonable). And here we are with the first hint of the return of the cold weather, an aqua day in March:

23/03/2018    26.9    orange
22/03/2018    27.2    orange
21/03/2018    21.0    yellow
20/03/2018    14.7    aqua/teal
19/03/2018    22.9    yellow
18/03/2018    22.0    yellow
17/03/2018    28.4    orange

The fabric I used for Tuesday looks quite blue against all that yellow and orange. It really is aqua though.

So that is week 43 of my year quilt.  One of the women on the trip with me today is thinking she would like to make one too. She was trying to persuade me to make another one when this one is finished, so we can work on them together. We'll see...

If you would like to check out what is happening with people who are making hexie temperature quilts right now, have a look at Sarah's weekly Weather Report.

Hen or Rooster?

A member of the extended family obtained this young chook a couple of months ago. They've been waiting for it to start laying eggs, but instead it has started crowing:

It is not unknown for hens to occasionally crow, but as the family live in a suburban area, a crowing bird is not going to be good for neighbourhood harmony.

So yesterday she/he came to stay with us for a while. We are keeping him/her separate from our chooks, although in sight of them so it doesn't feel too alone. The owners do not know what breed the bird might be. It is only a few months old, but this chook is already much bigger than any of our hens. That could be because it is a meat breed rather than an egg-laying breed, or it could just be that it is a rooster.

What do you think?

Forty-Two

42! The answer to life, the universe and everything. And only 10(ish) weeks to come for the year quilt. This year has flown by.

I thought this week would be predominantly yellow, so I took a few photos of yellow things around the garden.

Rose Friesia:

A cucumber flower:

Golden edges on the ginkgo leaves:

Liquidambar leaves also starting to turn:

But today the temperature just reached into the orange zone:

16/03/2018    25.2    orange
15/03/2018    19.2    green
14/03/2018    22.6    yellow
13/03/2018    21.2    yellow
12/03/2018    19.2    green
11/03/2018    24.4    yellow
10/03/2018    33.9    red

So my week 42 temperature rosette isn't quite as yellow as I expected:

Linked to Sarah's weekly Weather Report.

Zinnias

Last year I bought a packet of zinnia "Queen Lime Red" seeds. They were not cheap. There were supposed to be 25 seeds in the packet, although I think it was a few short. Anyway, I started them in the greenhouse in spring, and although they didn't all germinate, I ended up with 5 plants to put into the garden. They went into the ground on 7th January, and started flowing towards the end of January.

Here's how they look today:

I'm hoping some of these flowers will set seeds before the cooler weather sets in.

You might notice that the plant on the left above has no "lime" petals. Apart from that, these three plants have the sort of flowers I was expecting.

The other two, not quite!

This one has lots of flowers, but the plant is quite spindly and has few leaves. The flowers are more of a single form:

And this one is closer to orange:

It is also a rather spindly plant, and has only had the two flowers you can see in the photo.

So any seeds I do manage to get from the plants I like, may have been fertilised by either of the last two and thus may produce flowers not at all like Queen Lime Red. It is a bit frustrating because I was hoping to gather plenty of seeds this year, and have more plants next year, rather than paying an exorbitant amount for a small number of seeds as I did this time.

More Charity Blocks

Today seemed like a good day for some mindless sewing. Using some donated fabric, I started work on four:

and finished with six:

more Quartered Squares blocks for the guild's upcoming "Quilts of Love" sewing bee day.

Lunch and Dinner

If you make a full size batch of dough you might have to make more pizzas than you intended, and then you have to eat pizza for both lunch and dinner.

First of a few.

The oven was hot. The dough was made. And apparently making them and putting them in the freezer wasn't an option! They were yummy, anyway.

Dry

The weather bureau is predicting that we won't get any decent rain for another 6 weeks, which is a bit depressing as everything is so dry. It is hard to keep the garden going, but the danger from fires is increasing as everything dries out. The fire last Wednesday was apparently started by someone using an angle-grinder. Who knows what started this one?

Fire on Mt Buninyong, which was out of control for over an hour.

The mountain is about 12kms from here, and can't be seen from our place. But I went up the hill to the next-door neighbours' house to see what they could see:

Smoke on the mountain.

No-one would be using an angle-grinder on a walking track through a forest on a Sunday afternoon. Maybe a cigarette butt?


No fires here today:

After a week of firing to dry it out, the pizza oven today got its final coats of paint.

Two Hours, Two Minutes

In a couple of hours at a sit and sew today I got this quilt basted:

Carolina Chain, designed by Bonnie Hunter. It has been a top since late August last year, but a few other projects took my attention since then. I tried to get it basted at a previous sit and sew but there wasn't room that day. So it is good to have it done - now I just have to decide how to quilt it!

In contrast to 2 hours I spent doing that, here's something that only took 2 minutes.
Into the pizza oven at 5:17:

In the oven at 5:18:

Finished at 5:19:

First pizza from the pizza oven! We now of course need some proper pizza oven tools, for getting pizzas into and out of the oven.

Reddening

A hint of autumn as some leaves on my Japanese maple begin to turn red:

But there is lots of red elsewhere in the garden.

Rose "Mr Lincoln" looking a bit heat-scorched:

Lovely red geranium:

(That's from the cutting you gave me, Jenni.)

Paintbrush lily, Haemanthus coccineus:

Propeller plant, Crassula falcata:

Red valerian, Centranthus ruber:

with bonus butterfly.

Homegrown tomatoes:

And finally, this week's temperature rosette:

The first time in four weeks that we have had two red days in a week. Here's the top temperature (C) for each day of week 41:

9/03/2018    31.1    red
8/03/2018    30.2    red
7/03/2018    29.1    orange
6/03/2018    22.5    yellow
5/03/2018    17.2    green
4/03/2018    20.5    yellow
3/03/2018    29.7    orange

Lined to Sarah's weekly Weather Report.