La Piscine

I'd try to write a whole post en francais but I know my limitations!  My quilt is finished, christened, and photographed in a rare burst of September sunshine.  Et voila:




The inspiration is the Swimming Pool quilt from Jane Brocket's book, The Gentle Art of Quiltmaking, with slightly smaller squares in the centre to make the best use of my fabric which included a whole heap of 10"x10" squares from Cotton Patch sample packs.

The centre 'pool' has free motion quilting to give a rippled texture and look,

and for the border I quilted straight lines about 1.5" apart to give the feeling of a tiled edge to the pool, although if anyone has tiles like these around their pool I'm deeply jealous (and not just because it means they have a pool!).  The border fabric is a Free Spirit print designed by Valori Wells called Chandelier which just happens to be in my favourite blues and perfect for the colours of the quilt. 

To do the lines easily I filched H's roll of masking tape from his studio and taped up against each line of stitching:

and then used that as my guide to sew along it with a walking foot.

Easy as pie and the masking tape comes off the fabric nice and cleanly and I got (for me) pretty straight lines.

For the backing and binding I used the same fabric, Kaffe Fasset's Persimmon Blue print - I like to think it's what you see if you were floating on your lilo, sipping a mojito in my fictitious pool, staring up through the trees to a deep blue sky.  Clearly I envisage my pool as being somewhere nice and hot, and it would be an unforgivable blast of realism to recall that this pool is in fact in an autumnal Warwickshire.


Happily, I am not alone in my wanderings into the realms of fantasy, because as soon as my back was turned and I popped inside to put the lens cap safe, I found a few friends had dived into the enticing depths of my pretty blue water:

Miss Violet was the first to don her frilly bathing dress and take the plunge,

And her charms soon ensured that she was joined by a gentleman friend.

Somehow I suspect from her expression that Violet is more focused on her length times than the optimistically 'accidental' encounter with her fellow swimmer - he looks far too hopeful to be instantly successful in winning her over.

Meanwhile the local family of ducks have gathered to cool off and to do what they can to alleviate what appears to be a nasty case of love-pox in littlest duck.

And in all of this, the portable bar chugs around, topping up the drinks!

Carie's Pool, opening in the south of France soon!

And why France you ask? well it all comes down to a little matter of these two blocks, and a few more like them:

Cut from fat quarters bought for me by H in Paris on our first wedding anniversary, and put to perfect use in this quilt big enough to wrap both of us and a baby bear.

Speaking of which:

Desperate times call for desperate measures.

Frustration thy name is quilting thread

Abandoning all pretence at housekeeping and good wifeliness after the meatballs extravaganza, I've been passing the waiting time with a little quilting.  Well actually, a big quilting.  Over the weekend I added the borders to my swimming pool quilt and pieced the backing and the binding and on Monday I swept the usual accumulation of detritus off the dining room table and set up the sewing machine.

The boy has been eating his cereal off a very small corner of the table ever since but he has learned to suffer for his art/my art/his snuggly quilts and raised no complaint.

Last time you saw the quilt it looked a little like this:

Well a lot like this if we're being perfectly honest and acknowledging that yes that is a photograph and not an artist's impression of said quilt.  It was also May, and I looked like this:

Such a cute little bump - I bet I could still touch my feet and everything.

Anyway, I digress.  The point is, this swimming pool is not too far off a king size duvet now that it has borders added which makes it the largest thing I've ever tried to quilt with my lil ole machine.

The plan was to free motion quilt the middle in a swirly pattern to look like water, and then straight line the borders to look more like the tiled edging on a pool.  I threaded the machine, loaded the bobbin, loaded the spare bobbins, changed to a fresh needle, remembered to set the bobbin tension a smidge higher, lower the feed dogs and take the stitch length down to zero, and off we went.

For 10 inches of quilting.

Then the top thread broke.

In a shredded, fizzled out sort of way.

I re-threaded, re-set and started again. 12 inches maybe this time.  Then the top thread broke.  Again.

I tried changing the needle, resetting the bobbin, playing with top and bottom tension settings, consulting the manual, all to no avail.  I'm not sure whether I'm going to tell myself that I've proved that I have perseverance in spades, or that I'm just ridiculously stubborn when I admit to you that I quilted half of that quilt, and got to Tuesday afternoon before I admitted defeat and, in a finely balanced judgment call, chose a trip to Quilters' Den in Warwick above cutting the quilt into lots of tiny pieces, burying it under my back patio and denying all knowledge.

Only the facts that it was raining and I haven't got a waterproof that fits and I can't bend over to accomplish the interment efficiently swung the vote.

Happily Anita was full of sympathy and suggested another new sort of needle, as well as helping me pick out a spool of thread from every variety she sells (or thereabouts) so that if all else failed, I knew I'd have something to quilt with.

The new quilting specific needle seemed to work for a little bit but then we were back to the same old problems so I switched thread.  And the sunshine came out after the rain, angels sang and bluebirds danced a chorus line along the whirlygig washing line.

I finished the stippling last night and the border quilting this morning and all that's needed now is a good podcast or two and a few hours to sew down the binding and tidy up the gazillion loose ends and we'll be done.

So my note to self for today (apart from 'try not to be a prat') is: the sewing machine loves not the Cotty thread.  Buy it not no matter how pretty it is.  The sewing machine loves muchly the YLI machine quilting thread.  Buy it all and make the machine purr.  That is all.