Mile a Minute, Boldly I Went and birds

One day I decided to tidy my scraps - by colour - I had a lovely time and finished up with several baskets holding my idea of colour sorting.  Country, bright, autumn, pastel, jewel and at the end I was one basket short.  The pile was of black and insipid as opposed to pastel, so I made a Mile-a-Minute quilt.

Other people call them Crumb quilts, or Bloke's blankets but to me the Mile-a-Minute is so apt remembering the weed that was the bane of my husband's life.

I have no idea what the proper name of the weed was but it grew everywhere on our hillside section and resisted our efforts to contain it.




Here is a detail

I've made several quilts as a result of tidying the sewing room, I'll look them out to share - just today I was putting a top and its pieced backing onto the pile of similar objects when I happened to notice a piece of fabric that is just crying out for me to design a quilt around it - what do you think?

Maybe something along the lines of my Something to Crow about quilt?  Maybe I could adapt the house blocks and/or tree blocks; I think I'll leave the horses to speak for themselves.

The main quilt I want to share with you is called, "Boldly I went" - if you remember Star Trek on TV in the old days you will remember the voice over.........to boldly go.......well, I have remarked before that I am something of a pedant, and I could hear my English teacher [language teacher as opposed to literature] dinning it into our heads that you did not split the infinitive!  One of my sons remembers this tirade well, said he had no idea what an infinitive was but he would make sure he didn't split it or he would have his mother after him! However, he will be happy to know that I have finally let this go now that I have read a marvellous book, "Woe is I" by Patricia T O'Conner.

Anyway, that's how my title came about!  I seem to remember several of my friends were making log cabin quilts, I decided on a black and bright block and started chain piecing.  After only a dozen or so I realised I didn't want to make them all the same size, so I did some simple math and ended up with this.

Blocks of different sizes that I liked the look of, I had the earth and some unknown planets,  so I made several more and put them together like this.

I like the red planet

Just to the left is the nova, and you can see the great quilting done by Bary Scott when he used to live up the coast at Te Horo.  I told him the story of the name and he suggested spaceships and stars in the black using a variegated thread and each planet had a different design.

I had this marvellous shoe fabric just waiting for the right place, I couldn't cut it, now could I? so it made a great back

No flowers on my blog today, but I thought I would share these with you, late this afternoon I heard a bird singing and there, on top of the demolished kowhai was this bird -

The thrush was singing his little heart out - it was glorious!  I listened for ages and then got my camera, he was still there.

As I turned to go back into the house I glanced up at my neighbour's roof, there was a starling sitting on the television aerial, as they often do, but he/she was belting the daylights out of this large twig - I have never seen this before

See the next photo shows it is much smaller -

I wondered if it was because the starlings nest under the roof of this house and perhaps this piece was too big to get under the guttering??

It must be spring!!

Here's another pompous thought for the day, "Progress must be well ordered to endure."  I suppose it is true but it does sound a bit preachy.......

Nice talking with you
June