More Building Progress

It is a while since I showed the progress on the outdoor living construction project.

Since the last post, the builders have added the steel cladding. Now the frames for the insect screening are being made in-house. Once they are complete the builders will come back to add the doors.

Test Block

If you have been around any quilty blogs or social media in the last week, you may have seen this announcement from Angels in Gumboots, a quilt shop in New Zealand:

It is a request for heart blocks to be made into quilts for people affected by what happened in Christchurch. If you can't read this, or want more details, they have a dedicated facebook page here:
https://www.facebook.com/healingheartsforchristchurch/

The full postal address is:
101 Cambridge Avenue,
Ashhurst 4810,
Manawatu-Wanganui,
New Zealand

Today I made a test block using the pattern they provided (although heart blocks can be made any way you like as long as they are the right size):

That worked out OK, so I have prepared a little pile of blocks which I should be able to chain-piece together quite quickly.

Wind Farm Tour

The company building our local wind farm arranged a bus tour of the work so far, plus the opportunity to get close to one of the turbines. They had free food and real coffee, and face-painting for kids. They chartered a 55-seat bus for the tour. How many people do you think wanted to attend?

I rang up to book seats the day I heard about it, and the person I spoke to was surprised that at that stage they had over 100 bookings, so would have to run the bus twice. So we made it onto the second bus load,

and after us the bus made a third trip. And beyond that there were people who missed out all together, and will have to wait until the opportunity is repeated some time.

Since I showed the first turbine assembled back in January, a few more have been erected:

Mount Buninyong in the distance. Of the eventual total of 38, 13 turbines are up so far, with one more like this:

Unfortunately we didn't get to see a blade being lifted, as it was too windy today! Wind farms have to be in windy places to generate power, but they need still days for the construction cranes to work.


Highlight of the tour was getting out of the bus and standing under one of the completed turbines.

It is tall! The tip of the top blade is 160 metres from ground level.

It was a very interesting tour, with the chance to ask questions as well as see the work up close. The turbines are all on private land, so these events are the only chance to get up close to them.

Flowers Like Me

Belladonna lilies, Amaryllis belladonna, white

 and pink

and paintbrush lily, Haemanthus coccineus, 

hide away in summer. They hide underground, I hide inside. Then in autumn we all start appearing in the garden again.

How do these plants know that summer is over? It can't be day-length or water that triggers them to start growing. The bulbs are underground, and we haven't had any rain. Is it temperature?

Maybe This Time?

Last month I showed a newly germinated seed which I said was a baby banksia:

As these seedlings have grown, I've been puzzled as they do not look like the banksia tree the cone came from. Eucalypts can have very different juvenile leaves to their adult ones, but do banksias?

Today I discovered that these seedlings are not banksias at all! They are actually californian poppies. D'oh! This seed-raising soil mix included compost, which obviously also included some poppy seeds.

This is what caused me to investigate more carefully:

A seedling like the original seedlings on the left, something new appearing on the right. And in another tube, one of those same new things after it has popped off the seed covering:

I would like to say that these are banksias. But I am going to wait until their next leaves appear, just in case it turns out they are actually pumpkins!

Bloom Seven and Eight

Another Boom instalment! Again I have made two blocks this fortnight.

I've refined my technique for these curved shapes:

In her introductory video Lori Holt said she doesn't do any trimming of her seam allowances on these shapes. I ignored that advice for the points; I've been trimming away a lot of fabric from the points right from the start (as seen in the green shapes on the left of this picture). Until now I have left the curves intact, but I wasn't happy with how the curves looked without any clipping. A bit bumpy, a bit lumpy. So this week I dug out my pinking shears, which I have not used in quite some time, and pinked all the curved areas. I was much happier with the results I achieved with this technique.

Here's block seven

and block eight

before they had their sashing added.

And here they are, with their sashing, completing the second row of the quilt:

Last time a couple of people commented on the sashing. I should have mentioned that this was not my own original idea. I googled for sashing ideas, and found a few at Alida Tweloq Designs. Alida published a few interesting sashing ideas (which she called "Smashing Sashing") for a quilt-along she was running in 2017, and this is one of them: Gemstones Sashing. I've used her idea, but rather than doing all the sashing in the same fabrics or in random colours as she suggests, mine will create a rainbow effect across the quilt.

Linked to Cheryll's Bloomers Party #5. Check out the progress!

Unexpected Item

In a hardware store?

Mitre 10 in Maryborough.