Sew Hong Kong ...

What a way to wake up in the morning and look over this:

It's Hong Kong Harbour. We are all sitting in our bed looking at the view will Pickles checks out her loot from the Night Markets last night and I am finally getting a chance to blog .

This is going to be a quick post, Pickles is starting to look at the pillows like they are food so that means that we are going to have to go looking for breakfast in a moment.

What I really want to say is:

Yes Cinderella, you can sew on the plane. I was told this by the ladies at the Cottage Quiltworks and they were "sew" right. But be smart, don't take scissors. But do get your hands on this:

Sewline's needle threader has a great thread cutter on the side and a small compartment for holding a couple of needles and pins. I made sure that I had two number 9 needles and a dozen clover applique pins, all very small and all stuck into a small piece of wool felt and then put in the chamber under the threader. I also had a sandwhich bag filled with thread and my thread heaven, plus the squares I was working on.

I sewed from Sydney to Hong Kong. And watched some movies at the same time.

At the Hong Kong disneyland Hotel.

And too and from Macao.

we have a couple of days left here and then back we go home. But it's been great being able to work on my new piece "Bon Nuit". I'll write more when I can.

I said I would ...

Post and here I am. Posting. I am just buggered by the way. I want to know why it feels like I need 50 holidays to get ready for the holiday we are going on. I am washing everything that isn't nailed down and I have been cleaning the house (yucky, yucky, yucky).

I have been doing some stuff and I have been really enjoying getting my "mojo" back. so I have a bunch of stuff brewing in my brain and its in the process of spilling out and turning into things. I just love that. So I started to put together a travel bag for the holiday.

I went to the Cottage Quiltworks and I always come away from there spending way too much. I bought an amazing pair of really wee scissors and an amazing needle threader. I also bought some really beautiful Yuwa spotty fabric. French Blue Indigo, where have you been all my life?

I just love this colour, so much so that I am building a whole quilt around it and that quilt will be entered into a competition in March 2012, but more about that later. I am taking the laptop on Holiday in the vain hope that I can blog there too.

I'll post more pics of the bag when I get back home.

SO its been two weeks but

I have been busy, and I have heaps of pics to prove it. I'll upload them tomorrow and when I got a chance I will post them here. I'm getting us all ready to go on vacation and I feel like I need 50 of them just to get over getting ready for this one. Aye Curumba.

There are pics coming and I am not going to go a year without posting again, so this is my wee filler.

Watch this space, no really, watch this space!

Being grabbed by the bits by my "muse" ...

Whoever or whatever that is. But I feel like I am in the grip of "something" and everything is coming in a flood. I think this has been a very weird "watershed" moment. Weird. I feel like I am in a daze. I have to tell you that it wasn't just my quilting that was going to get the elbow, I was getting ready to heave my writing as well. I have been plugging away and plugging away. Sometimes however, it can get very weary and it sucks getting rejection after rejection. After rejection after rejection. And more rejection and then another rejection and a bit more rejection for good measure. But ... I had something happen that has seen me writing again with passion. It was a whirlwind 5 days I spent buried in this new project until it got sent off Midnight Wednesday. Ever since then it's been as if someone has set my head on fire and my creative juices should be bottled right now. Reckon they might be worth something with the amount of things swirling around in my brains at this present moment.

So here is what is on the menu as we speak.

A new laptop cover and a new block bag (for my workshops I am teaching)

A new quilt made from two packs of charm squares

A new quilt for teenagers made it mainly homespun but with a little bit of zhushing to make it fab. I think this will be my very first quilt a long for here

Plus a new fabric range. Oh, oh, oh a new fabric range to design. My brain is just humming and it all feels so bloody marvellous.

Like I just woke up from a very long sleep and now I am ready to get going. Lovley.

The charm square quilt will hopefully be going to Katoomba for their quilt show in March along with another quilt I have talked about here (but it needs to be finished as well), but I might spare a post for that all by itself.

And here is a wee spot of evidence:

I nearly died! ...

I just saw the date of my last post and nearly had a stroke. Was it really that long? Yup, that would be right. To be honest, it wasn't long after I wrote the last post that I was thinking about giving up quilting and sewing for ever. I had a really bad experience in a local quilt shop and it was enough to make me never want to touch my sewing ever again. Ever.

But like that was going to happen. I love to sew, I just love it and not doing it is like cutting off my arms. Or depriving me of music. Or good books, or hanging out with friends or spending heaps of time with Pickles.

Funnily enough I have had some quilting things begin to grow and perculate in my brain over the past couple of months and slowly and steadily I have found myself getting back into my quilting groove. I just thought by chance I should check on my poor little blog, languishing in the doldrums and then it all happened all of a sudden I am back writing.

There are some things I have to do over the next two weeks. I have another block carrier to make and another laptop bag, both for samples for classes I am scheduled to teach. So I thought I would pop them here. I decided to make them in a different colourway then I usually do (tones of green!), and some of the notions will be different because I am making them for a store and have to use things they have.

I'll put the details and pictures here, as well as design notes for the new quilts. Yes, that is "quilts" plural. I have about three that I am going to make up for other classes and I want to wax lyrical about the Slice Fabrique. And then there is the Bonnet Project, I am really looking forward to that and a bunch of other stuff all hanging around in the wings.

I am back this time. Big deep breath.

Dark Night of the Quilting Soul ...

That's where I have been. It's been busy and I have had a lot on my plate, but I also maxed myself out in a quilting way. I never thought that was possible but it managed to co-incide with me finishing the first draft of my novel. A wee spot of burn out I think but ... I am back in the saddle yee-haw! Well, woo hoo anyway.

I am sewing and quilting and starting to get stuff ready to make for the next two months and it's going to be full on. With any luck I might be able to sneak some stuff in for me, and make some more headway with my show quilt for next February.

It's this project that I have been taking with me everywhere, my show quilt. I'll post some more pics in a later post. But for now ... I'm channeling Alice. It's weird but I am being surrounded by Alice in Wonderland. Its making my mind brew and bubble and fizz. As I get more concrete ideas, I'll get them down and pop them here. I've just tried to load a bunch of pictures and blogger is making me miserable. So for now, it's down to Gwen.

This just burns my biscuits ...

It really makes me mad. I was a textile designer a million years ago, pre pickles. I honestly have to say that the fashion industry world wide is a den of thieves. It survives on stealing and dishonesty. I know, I experienced it first hand. I could bore you all with a billion stories about stuff I was asked to knock off and my own work that was stolen. I am preparing a couple of ranges for my own pleasure and I might send them out. I did with a wee mini range a little while back. I was reluctant to post pics here in the blog, because I had visions of it appearing somewhere else without my knowledge.

So imagine my surprise and anger today when I was reading one of my favourite blogs.

I love Tula Pink's fabrics. Her range Plume was a particular favourite of mine. So imagine my surprise to see this lovely lovely range had been completely knocked off by one of the biggest chain stores in the US and UK. Walmart has blatantly stolen the intellectual property of Tula, and sold it in their stores. What every you do, if you see these knock offs in your local Walmart ... please please leave them be. Tula Pink hasn't got a red cent from this, as her work was pirated. Here are the pictures of the offending articles. Its really easy to tell the difference in quality but also how close the knock offs are.

As a textile designer, I was asked to "copy" work all the time. There have been murmurs that Walmart may not have known but they would have bought from a middleman or woman. That's true but a lot of the time, really big clients tell their vendours what they want and provide "samples" to show them. So, I have posted a complaint on the Below is a copy of the letter I posted to the Walmarts Ethics site. I raised an issue with the CEO, the HQ is in Arkansas.

Yup, I'm ticked.

Dear Walmart.

While it is great that your company has a special site for behaving in an ethical way and addressing ethics issues, its not great that it is all for show and not a premise practiced by the company. It appears that your company endorses and encourages theft on a particularly grade scale with a great deal of arrogance about consequences. Why would any consumer want to shop, or support a company such as yours if this is the case?

I am speaking directly the theft of intellectual property owned by TULA PINK tm. Her designs are well loved amongst the quilting and sewing community across the planet. Earlier this year she along with the well known Moda fabric company, released a ranged entitled "Plume". It was a lovely range featuring lots of feathers and birds. Yet today, we all found out that Walmart has just released a direct knock off of her range. Its an exact copy.

This is utterly outrageous and the CEO of this company needs to answer me on why stealing is encouraged, and released into stores across the US.

I refer your office to the following website:

http://tulapink.com/2010/09/19/outraged/

There, you will be able to see the knocks off and the originals side by side.

the following website:

http://www.unitednotions.com/un_main.nsf/mf_new_test

Is the moda site where right down the Bottom of the page, you will see listed under "January", pdfs of the "plume" range that can be downloaded and viewed in entirety and apparently, to be made available to walmart to steal at will.

I will be blogging about this on my blog (revolutionarycake.blogspot.com), and there will be others who follow suit. I will be reprinting this letter there, and passing this letter on to MS Pink. It's only fair for her to know that there are others out there who are outraged by this blatant piece of corporate piracy.

Its appaling to think that Walmart has made a call on what it feels it has the right to do. Which ever way you look at it, theft is theft. And your company makes a lot of money from it. Shame on you.

Jo Ellem

Well, I had a go ...

here is my first attempt at free motion quilting. I have to say that I like it, free motion quilting that is, my attempts leave a lot to be desired however. But I can see how a little bit of practice can go a long long way. And my mind is fizzy with all sorts of ideas. So all in all, I'll be doing a lot more of it in the future.

Have a wee squizzy at this, isn't this gorgeous! Would you believe it, it's vintage Chinese fabric from the 1950s. China has a vast, wonderful ,and turbulent history. During the 1950s, China was going through the great leap forward. If you are interested, google it and have a wee read in Wikipedia. Anyway, here a couple of pieces of fabric from that time. Aren't they just beautiful. At a time when everything was hard and bleak, look at the colour and the design!


Coming from a textile design background, when I look at these pieces, I think a lot about who the designer must have been, and the people who did the printing, and about their families and their lives. I feel like I have history in my hands, and I can't help wondering about the stories that lay in the threads of the fabric. Which leads me to ...


This.

The good folks at Itizen have come up with these. Labels for you to put on the stuff you make. But, and here is the cool part, you can write about the story that went behind what you made and log it on their website, so when the item you made gets passed on, the giftee (is that a word?) can log in and see the story and then as the item gets passed on and on and on, the story behind the item gets logged and grows.

I just love love love this. If you go to the link above, they will send you a sample pack for nix. But I have to say that nothing will leave my hands now without one of these attached to it some way or other.

This, in a word, is awesome.

ITs been weeks and check this out ...

HI all. Its been a little wee while since my last post. I will say that it has all be down to family stuff and life stuff and needless to say, my blog had to sit in the back ground for a bit. : (

But .... I'm back : )

I have had adventures with freee motion quilting and I will write more about that on Tuesday but for now, might I encourage you if you don't already to head over to Ryan's most excellent blog and have a good long read but also don't forget to entre his give - awy. I don't know about you, but I would sell my man's kidney for an Accu Quilt Cutter.

I have nothing to show, nut will have some pics of my free motion whatever it is, when I get back from class on Tuesday. So more then. See, haven't even been able to sew, no wonder I feel ancy.

Saturday Afternoon With Eda update...

I thought I would keep a wee update of this quilt here when I think there is enough to show.

This is the quilt that I would have made for my Nana if she was still here with us. I really wish she was, but there you go. And this is the quilt that I am going to put in the Katoomba Quilt Show. Katoomba because that was the big town for Nana. She met my Grandpop in Wentworth Falls, and married there. As the quilt progresses, I'll get some pics of those special places she went, because they will play a part in the quilt too (but not in the way you might think ^-^)

Anyway, its a quilt with a story behind it, and here is the beginning!