Tree Skirt

On Tuesday I put up my Christmas tree, and asked if anyone knew of a pattern for a tree skirt that was smaller than the ones I'd seen.

A few people sent me ideas, so thank you to all of you! I also found a pattern that while large, could be easily made smaller. Here's the page:
Piece N Quilt Christmas Tree Skirt
It's basically strips sewn like a giant log-cabin block, so you can stop whenever it's the size you want.

On Wednesday night I attended the Ballaarat Quilters' Christmas dinner, and my Kris Kringle gift was 3 FQs from Emma Jansen's fabric range Terra Australis. Just last week in Geelong I bought myself a few FQs from the same range. It occurred to me that these fabrics plus white would work for the tree skirt. So this afternoon, I ran this up:

I can see now I should have looked for a flat surface to spread it out. It is straight in real life! The pink spotty fabric is not part of the range, but I threw it in because it matches the pink lizards, and adds a bit of variety. In real life the colours are a bit brighter than in the photos.

In this close-up, you can see some of the fabrics:

My Kris Kringle FQs were the green dots, the "spinning top" gum leaves, and the green and aqua fabric of the outer border.

And here is the top in place under the tree:

I don't expect it will get quilted and finished before this Christmas, but I've got a year to get that done before the next one!

Overachiever

A house near my unit is competing in the Christmas Lights competition run by the local paper. The owner has spent the last few weeks putting up the lights, and now it is done. The house is lit up like the proverbial Christmas tree!

Photos don't do it justice. It is so bright it lights up the road outside.

And there are lights all down the driveway, inside the windows, and up on the roof. I'll have to check out some of the other contestants to see it is the most amazing light show in the competition, but I've never seen anyone go to quite this much effort before.

Pretty Things

Crimson rosella at the birdbath:

Slightly better shot than last time.

At first the rosellas would take one quick gulp of water before taking off, but they seem to be getting more confident. I'm sure the one in the top photo was looking right at me, but it took several drinks before flying off.

Also today I put up my Christmas tree:

It looks like it needs some presents around it, doesn't it? Or maybe it needs a tree skirt if I can find a pattern for one small enough. Anyone seen a pattern that isn't huge? I only need something about 50cms (20") across.

Mystery Step Two

When Bonnie released the second mystery clue on Friday night, it gave me some thinking to do. If you saw my post last week, you may remember I changed the size of the first pieces to make them easier to cut in metric measurements. But in making the first part easier, I had unknowingly made the second part much harder! That's the danger of playing round with a mystery.

On Saturday I met up with some quilting friends, and ran my maths past one to see if she came to the same figure as I did. She confirmed that to fit with my first pieces, this week's would have to finish at 10.666667 cms (and be cut at 12.1666666 etc). Well that wasn't going to happen!

One option was to go back to using inch-equivalents (ie 2.5cm for an inch) and cut down last week's pieces to suit. But this would mean cutting at quarter centimetre measurements, which is what I was trying to avoid in the first place. The second option was to use a different measurement which would be easy to cut for both last week and this week, and re-make last week's pieces. Re-making is not such a big deal, as I am only making a quarter of the specified numbers at this stage. But larger pieces might result in a chunkier-looking quilt, which might not be good. After lots of thinking I decided on the second option, using 3cm per inch. This will make my pieces 20% larger than Bonnie's. I think I can live with that.

Much easier to line up my strip with the 12cm mark than the non-existent ten-and-two-thirds line!

This is my metric equivalent of the Companion Angle ruler Bonnie uses. It's the first time I've used it to make a shape like this. Unless you have red-green colour-blindness, you will notice that I am using green where Bonnie has red.

Feeding the bits through the machine:



Once they were all done, I remade the half-square triangles from last week:



and cut the extra squares in brown (my constant) and grey (for Bonnie's black). Now I'm ready for the next clue!

When this week's link-up goes live, I will add the link to this post so that you can easily go and check out everyone else's progress.


Here's the link-up.  Although I can't add my link to it for some reason. I've tried about 10 times, but it never loads. I'll try again tomorrow some time.

Added later: Hooray! It worked this morning. I'm number 70 this week. Something must have been deleted, I'm 69 now.

Currawong Babies

A few weeks ago I noticed a messy-looking bunch of sticks high in a tree above my clothesline in Ballarat. At the time I couldn't be sure which bird had built it. But now I know whose nest it is, because today there were two fluffy baby currawongs in the tree,



(although I only got a picture of one of them),

and a third one on the ground:



I think they are grey currawongs, Strepera versicolor, because the adult seemed to have touches of white on the end of the primary wing feathers. But if anyone knows for sure, I'd be happy to be enlightened!

Not Again

I had a lovely day out with some members of Ballaarat Quilters today, in a town about 20km north-west of Ballarat.  But when I set off home, I heard a noise the car shouldn't be making.

 Yeah, that's not quite right...

I walked back to the hall where we had the meeting, and rang the RACV roadside assistance number from there. Just as well I did that, because one question they asked me was the name of the road and the nearest intersection to the location of the car. I had no idea, so I passed the phone to someone who was familiar with the area.

Then, armed with a bottle of water, I went back to wait with the car for "up to 60 minutes".

It was way too hot to sit in the car. I would have cooked. So I took a rug from the car, spread it under a tree across the road, and sat down to wait. It was actually quite peaceful, as very few cars come down this road. Two kind strangers stopped to ask if I was OK. One offered to call the RACV (no thanks, already done) and the other offered me a beer (no thanks, I have water)!

After a while the Ballarat RACV branch rang to say someone was just leaving, and would be with me in 20 mins or so. It was nice to know they were on their way. He actually arrived only about 45 minutes after I placed the call

and he had the tyre off and the spare on in just a couple of minutes.

And here's the culprit:

A chunk of gravel! The bit pointing down is the bit that was very firmly lodged into the tyre. You can see the hole it made.

This is the same tyre that was repaired in October after a screw went through it.  It's a nearly new tyre. But when I was searching through my old blog posts to find that one, I also found one I'd forgotten from when a previous set of tyres were new in 2009.

Piglet

While visiting blogs which linked up for the Bonnie Hunter mystery this week, I came across Gayle's blog Mangofeet.  One of her recent posts featured a cute piglet block, and before I could even ask where the pattern came from, she posted a link to a tutorial at Sally T's blog The Objects of Design.

So look what happened today:

I just had to make a piglet for myself. Although it probably needs some litter-mates for company...

And then today on Sally T's blog I found she also has instructions for a bunny block, and an owl, and a fish, and more. And they are all very cute!