Observing Magpies

Watching me eat my breakfast this morning:

Two of "our" magpie babies sitting on the shade sail. All six of the family (parents, one adult helper and three babies) are out the front of our house most mornings and at various other times during the day. It is now over two months since the babies left the nest; their flight is improving with just a bit of a flutter as they land, and they are quite capable of feeding themselves now.  Here's one searching for food:

It managed to find something and swallow it just after I took the photo. However the babies still ask adults for food, and the adults will still give them some.

Feral Animals

Until a few months ago we had not had rabbits here. There were rabbits around, but they hadn't found our garden. Unfortunately that has changed, and after the initial sighting in spring, there are now often rabbits in the garden. They have obviously done what rabbits do, because in the last week or so there have been tiny rabbits in all corners of the garden.

There are foxes around. I don't know if they are catching any rabbits, but quite a few of our neighbours have lost chickens to foxes over the last couple of months.

When I came in to the loungeroom this morning I glanced out the window and was stunned to see what appeared to be giant rabbits:

Hares!

I've only ever seen a hare a couple of times before in my life. I've never seen one anywhere near here. But we now have two of them, and judging by the way they were behaving we are going to be overrun with little hares as well as rabbits in a couple of months.

Smoky

After the beautiful clean air we had last night, today we are back to very smoky air that is uncomfortable to breathe. It must be dreadful closer to the fires.

Fortunately I didn't have to be outside, and I had plenty of indoor things to do. After I had finished the last of the pressing and trimming of the extra mystery units I made yesterday, I resumed quilting my Celtic Solstice:

I've got as much of the quilt as possible on the table to my left, but it is still not easy going. There is so much rearranging of the bulk to do after each small bit of quilting, that progress is very slow. But I'll keep plodding along; each little bit done gets me that much closer to finishing.

Frolic The Seventh

The seventh installment of the current Quiltville mystery, Frolic, has kept me busy this weekend.

Some of my pinwheels. Once I had finished clue 7, I went back to make extra units for some of the previous clues. That's because after thinking about the possible layout I realised that the units I had made weren't enough to make a square quilt. Making the extra bits now means I won't have so much to do once the reveal happens. I am really looking forward to the reveal - there's going to be some interesting piecing to come with all the un-sewn pieces we have cut so far.

This afternoon while walking the dogs in the lovely fresh rain-washed air, we saw three kangaroos bouncing through the bush (too fast for a photo), and an echidna digging for ants:

It's things like that that make this such a good place to live, even with the fire danger at this time of year.

Re-Starting

It is too hot to be out in the garden and march fly season has begun so today was a good day to spend inside tackling one of my unfinished projects:

This is the Quiltville mystery Celtic Solstice, from six years ago. It is a monster of a thing, almost burying the machine. I was interested to see that although I thread-basted it, there are pins around the outer edge. A couple of times recently when I've been basting quilts I have run out of pins and wondered what happened to them all. Now I know where about 100 of them have been hiding!

By searching back through my blog I found that I began the quilting in March 2017. I quilted just the 4-patches with this orange-peel design:

At the time I said, "Once that's done I'll work out what to do with the rest of it." But what really happened was that once that was done I put it aside and didn't touch it again until yesterday. I picked something (relatively) easy to do first, and stitched in the ditch down each side of the narrow neutral border, then quilted ribbon candy along it. Next I will quilt the blue and orange border, but not immediately as the next Frolic mystery clue will come out late tonight.

My Unfinished Projects

I have a document that has been running since January 2010 - ten years! - where I list all the quilts I start and what stage they are up to and cross them off when they are finished. So I always know just how many unfinished projects exist. Here are the nine projects which are currently un-crossed-off.


Batiks - started in September 2011. I don't know if I have a photo of this top assembled:

This photo is from October 2011. I stitched the blocks together then put them in a box and haven't looked at them since... I don't even remember how big this ended up.

Sunflowers - started in October 2011

In May 2017 I appliqued the pieced section to the background, but I don't love it so put it away and haven't looked at it again.

Easy Street - Bonnie Hunter mystery started in November 2012.

Has been a complete top since July 2016. I have the batting, and have made a back, and have even spoken to someone with a long-arm machine about basting it. But maybe I will quilt it on her machine rather than just basting it?

Another huge quilt - Celtic Solstice, the Bonnie Hunter mystery which started in November 2013

Pictured as just a top, but it has been basted and I have started quilting it.

Wild and Goosey - started in September 2014

Has been a top since November 2016

Kosmos - started making parts in July 2015, without much idea where it was going

Stitched together what I had so far and put them in a hoop in November 2017, which is where they have stayed ever since. But they aren't "finished".

Allietare - the Bonnie Hunter mystery started in November 2015

Mine is the one on the left. It has been a top since January 2016, but nothing has happened since.

Rajah Revisted - started in February 2018

Has been at this stage since April 2019, and I haven't touched it since then. There are a lot more rounds to make and add.

Lastly, Frolic, the current Bonnie Hunter mystery. I'm up to date with the clues so far.

Some of my sets of units including the surprise 6th clue released just before midnight on new years eve.

By the end of 2020 I want to see a few of these crossed off the list.

Good-Bye 2019

The second-last day of the year was our first day of Extreme Fire Danger for the summer. Image from the CFA website:

High temperatures, strong winds and extreme dryness make for a dangerous combination. We went down to Ocean Grove for the day. It is a strange feeling leaving home in the morning, with a bag of essentials, and wondering if your house will be gone by the end of the day. As it was, only one fire occurred anywhere near our home, when a tree was hit by lightning and burst into flames about 5km to the north. The fire was stopped from spreading, fortunately. However, many other parts of the state and the country have burnt and are still burning. The images and video in the news reports are dreadful. And there are months of summer ahead of us.

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In happier news, here's part five of the Frolic mystery quilt:

This was kind of funny because two weeks ago the clue involved making blue and neutral half-square triangles. But because I had swapped the colours around, I made berry and neutral ones that week. Then this week the clue was to make berry and neutral units, so here are my blue and neutral ones!


In my last post, on Boxing Day, I was wondering if I would get the wonky stars quilt finished by the end of the year. I finished quilting it on Sunday, so it just needed binding. I was considering what colour binding to use, when I remembered that a few months ago someone from the quilt guild gave me some scrappy binding she had left over. She thought I might be able to use it on one of the quilts I was quilting for the group, but I was giving those quilts to other people to bind, so I didn't use it. This quilt of scraps will be donated too, so using her scrappy binding seemed ideal. There wasn't enough for the whole quilt, but I knew that amongst my scraps there were several pieces of my own binding off-cuts. I joined them to hers, and here's the binding ready to sew on:

That seemed very appropriate for this quilt which is almost entirely out of my scrap basket. And here it is this afternoon, finished:

The sun was so bright the shadows show you the quilting more than the colours. Here it is inside without the shadows:

So with that, every quilt I started this year was also finished this year (except the on-going Frolic mystery, of course). Hooray! It doesn't mean I have no unfinished quilts. I have a list of those, which I'll do a post about in January, as I intend to make that list shorter by this time next year.

After I'd finished the binding, I even sewed labels on these last three quilts (Sew Many Strips, Butterflies and Sunflowers, and the Wonky Stars):

In the past the guild has printed their labels on purchased bubble-jet printable fabric. They are reasonably expensive, and very hard to sew on by hand. I had the idea last year of getting them printed on normal fabric by Spoonflower. I only had an A4-sized pdf file of multiple labels, not the original artwork, but I managed to create the fabric you can see at the top of the photo. I bought it when Spoonflower had a free postage deal, so 99 labels (which is what fitted on 1 yard of fabric) cost $24.36 at the time. This was less than half the cost of the printable fabric labels, and they are much easier to sew on. The print is a little less clear than I had hoped, but that is probably to do with the method I used to create the file.

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Stash Report for 2019

At the beginning of this year, I started recording the use of, and additions to, my stash of fabric and thread. I said then that "I want to make sure that by the end of the year there is less than there is at the moment." How did that go?

Quilting Fabric:
Purchased: 8.15m
Given: 8.53m - this is a category I hadn't anticipated, so I had to add it to my spreadsheet.
Used: 19.28m
Result: I have 2.6m less fabric in my stash now than I had at the beginning of the year.

Garment Fabric:
Purchased: 6.75m
Used: 11m
Result: 4.25m less fabric

Thread:
Purchased: 1 spool
Emptied: 19 spools
I'm happy to have used up all that thread, but it didn't make a noticeable dent in my thread stash.

What I've learnt from this exercise:
It is much easier to acquire fabric than it is to use it up! Cutting pieces for quilts really doesn't use as much fabric as I had imagined, and buying even one metre of fabric adds considerably to the amount of patchwork needing to be done to use that metre. Looking at all my tubs of fabric, I now know that I have more than I can ever use. I have STABLE - Stash Totally Above and Beyond Life Expectancy.

I will continue keeping track in 2020, and do my best to remove fabric from my stash, either by sewing it up or giving it away.


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Best wishes for 2020 to all my blog readers. Happy new year!