More about the Nano-thing

Nano is going better than I thought it would! I might even have more than 30 000 words by tomorrow. It's about a girl and her quilt. So the story is called "Blanket". I'm still not sure whether I have enough plot for the words left. But this whole writing process surprises me: Sometimes the plot goes in directions that I had no idea about!

I haven't read anything I've written yet. November is for writing, not editing.

For anyone interested: NaNoWriMo! Go check it out! There's pep talks and forums and stuff! It's fun!

The NaNo-thing

I'm doing NaNo! And it's actually not that hard. I write 1700 words every evening. That's totally doable! I didn't expect this, because I thought that one would have to write every minute one breathes and is not at work. And I am at 7377 words so far! And I'm so not going to delete even one of them! Ha! And I even get a tiny bit of quilting done on the side. My kitchen looks a mess, though... ;-)

Quilting blogger

I'm now on there.

Quilting Blogger

Maybe someone is going to comment now! Maybe I need to do other stuff.

Quilting blogging will be a bit less in November, because I'll do NaNoWriMo (or at least try...) I'll be meeting all new people tomorrow for a first meeting of Nanos in Mannheim. It's exciting! Although I'm not sure whether I'll manage writing that many words in a coherent way... But it'll be a story with a quilt in it.

Handquilting II (There will be more... It's a bit like Rambo...)

It takes forever... I'm done about 10 %.



And this is the backside. It's some batik. Big batik fabric, so I didn't have to piece the back. And the batting is wool. It's kind of fluffy, but really nice and soft. And warm! Because it's a bit more puffy, it's also a bit harder to quilt smaller stitches. But then I don't really care about that!



But it has to be hand quilted because machine quilting makes it a bit too hard. And I want it more soft and cuddly for the couch.

And this is finally the "Owl Quilt" for Nils. It should have been geese... And I don't know what the fabric on the back is called, but it's all soft.

Handquilting

The biiiig quilt gets hand quilted. After the first hand quilting project (lap size quilt) I was pretty certain that I didn't want to go through this again. And now here I am, hand quilting the biiig quilt... Why? -- Well, I did some machine quilting on a little test-sandwich. And either I was quiting to closely or there's something else I did wrong, but the sandwich turned out to be pretty hard. (Plus my machine quilting isn't something I have practiced... So it's pretty crappy!) Then I hand quilted a bit (not that my hand quilting is that much better...) and that part turned out to be waaaay softer. So the decision was pretty clear.

And now I'm hand quilting and I'm actually finding the meditative side in this process. It's soothing. I'm letting go of the "the quilt has to be ready at some stage". I'm just doing it. It doesn't matter how far I get every session (well, actually, it does, but not while I'm doing it, but rather when I'm done for the day). It doesn't matter how tiny or big my stitches are and that the stitches over the seam allowances aren't that good looking. And I have no idea how to fix that. It's just nice to sit there with my quilt, quilting along and let my mind wander. I didn't expect this. I thought there's be lots of cursing and fretting with it and all. So I'm quite surprised! And pleasantly so!

The Owl-Quilt for Nils has reached its owner and I'll post it next post!

Regulas Wasser

So the biiiig top is ready! I actually sewed all the little pieces together. And it turned out O.K., despite the fact that I didn't square up the squares. I figured that it should work out in the end, as they probably all varied around some mean size with some standard deviation and somehow the quilt top is almost flat. And at the quilt store in Munich I got a big square ruler, so that next time around I can actually square up all the squares and save some nerves.

I named this (not ready) quilt "Regulas Wasser" (Regula's water) because I got the patter from a book and the quilt and instructions are by Regula Emmenegger. She has a really nice quilt store in Bern in Switzerland (http://www.stoffkeller.ch/). It's where I bought the book and actually saw the original quilt. And I figured that squares didn't sound too complicated for the first quilt. And I really liked the idea that I could do my own arrangements of all the squares. I don't think I'm big on following detailed instructions and such. So this was perfect! Plus I really like the colours. They're not quite right in the photo: The upper left corner is a lot lighter that what it looks like! And the orange is brighter. But it is quite big, the top, so it's not too easy to get a good picture.  

In the mean time, I finished another baby blanket for a friend of mine's son Nils. But I won't post that before I've actually sent it off!

Off to work on Monday, unfortunately, after three great weeks of holidays.

Quilting!

Originally I started this for documenting the holidays in Botswana. And keeping family and friend at home updated about that. But now I'm quilting and it seems everybody who's quilting has a blog with quilts too. So I will too! 

Here's the quilt for one of my nieces, Lena. And I have no idea how to put this somewhere else in the text. It's yellow on the back. And now it's holidays again, so that's it for today!