Rhonda Bracey: At Random

I spent part of today at a quilting workshop in town learning how to do Japanese Meshwork. Earlier in the week I spent a few hours making the bias strips I used in my ‘tumbling blocks’ piece. A word about these bias strips—they aren’t made from the bias of the fabric. They’re cut on the straight grain, then put through some type of bias tape maker to create the double-fold strips.

Japanese Meshwork has no sewing in it, until you need to add borders etc. It’s all about weaving the fabric. And it takes some time to get the technique right. However, within a few hours all five of us at the workshop had a handle on it, though whether I could repeat the technique at a later date remains to be seen!

Here are some of our efforts:

My Christmas Tumbling Blocks - Japanese Meshwork piece (9 in square)

Bobbie's Cafe Blocks (9 in square)

Jane's stars and diamonds (6 x 12 in)

Flora's lattice - in progress (6 x 12 in)

Using the bodkin to weave the strips

See also: Japanese Meshwork: Finished

You can get a free 6-month subscription to the electronic version of Down Under Quilts, the Australian quilting magazine.

Just go to The Quilt Mouse (http://www.thequiltmouse.com.au) then scroll to the bottom of home page and click the link. You only have to enter an email address and you’ll get access to past issues and a free sub for the next 6 months.

BTW, this is my friend Bobbie’s website. It’s been revamped recently—her son set it up for her using Joomla, and her daughter did the graphics. It was their Christmas present to her last year, but was longer in the making than they’d all expected. But it’s up now, and you can even see one of the quilts I’ve made with Bobbie’s blocks in the Photo Gallery.

Funny how things happen… As regular readers of this blog know, I’ve been considering purchasing a new sewing machine since we moved here 18 months ago and I started quilting again.

I staved off that purchase by trading my 33 year-old Bernina in on my Mum’s slightly newer 25 year-old Bernina, at her suggestion. But as my skills have developed and my needs have grown, I realised that I needed a machine that was better able to do things such as free motion embroidery and the like.

I’ve done some investigation and had decided on the Husqvarna Sapphire 870. I was all ready to put in my order when my friend Bobbie offered to loan me her Sapphire 830 for a while. It was 12 months old but virtually brand new as she’d hardly used it while they were building their house, but she was thinking of upgrading to the latest Pfaff, which has just been released. However, she had to find out from the Pfaff people whether a particular part she’d bought for the Husqvarna would work on the Pfaff. She offered me a good price on her 830, should I decide to buy it *if* she decided to purchase the Pfaff.

Anyhow, long story short… Last week, Di from the fabric store asks if I’m still interested in the 870, Bobbie finds out that the new Pfaff will work with the part, and my Mum calls to say my old machine has died! So, Mum picks up her old machine, I decide to purchase the Sapphire 870 at Di’s ‘good deal’ price, and Bobbie decides not to get the new Pfaff, so I return hers to her. Phew!

I think the sewing machine fairies were at work last week making sure that this all happened the way it was meant to happen! Mum keeps her machine, Bobbie keeps hers, and my old now-dead machine gets replaced with a Husqvarna Sapphire 870! Meantime, my old machine is going to an ex-electrician at my folks’ retirement village who will see if he can fix it and then Mum will donate it to charity or one of the people in the retirement village.

BTW, my Mum has taken up basic sewing again. My niece (her granddaughter) visited an orphanage in Africa a couple of months ago and one way that she can help is to get people to make cloth nappies (diapers) and bibs for the babies out of old towels. So Mum’s doing a lot of that.

Sun and Earth convergence quilt

I finished quilting and binding the “Cosmic Curves” convergence quilt the other day. So it’s done.

Sun - free motion embroidered in metallic gold thread

I used a lot of gold metallic thread and did free motion embroidery for the sun and around every little circle (waterhole) on the Aboriginal-style fabric.

Gold metallic embroidery

And I used the same gold metallic thread for the ‘animal tracks’ in the frame, as well as to outline all the ochre lines in the border. You can’t see it in the photos, but I used a maroon thread to outline all the purple lines in the border.

Contours on the earth

I tried to make the earth more ‘earthy’ by adding ‘contour lines’ in a matching thread.

More photos…

I’ve always fudged joining the ends of the bindings on my quilts, but decided it was time to learn how to do it properly so you can’t see where the join is. There’s a great video on how to do this on YouTube (see below). I’ve used it a few times now, and my bindings are now perfect!

Update: There are printable PDF instructions of the same technique here: http://www.heatherbaileydesign.com/HB_QuiltBinding.pdf