Annies Crazy World

Over the last few weeks I have shown you my miniature cloths line quilt and my visual journal sketches of ideas for this cloths line seam…Below is a 1″/12″ scale cloths line that I modeled on the one from home, I made it to display my miniature quilts at a quilting exhibition, the Amish quilt on the line is 4 1/2″ square.

I have also shown you the garments that I have knitted and sewn to go on the line. The photo on the right was the idea behind the dress, mum described the dresses as being like a T shirt with a skirt on the bottom…I have also chosen to use a pink singlet, a G string, and the Y Fronts.

I have chosen the items for the line so that they represent the washing of the young and the old, boys and girls and from long ago and recent times…

some of the cloths are pegged with dolly pegs, some with coloured plastic pegs and some with cyclone pegs which a brother made from twisting plastic covered wire into shape, called cyclone pegs because they hold the washing on the line in very strong winds…I finished the scene by adding a tennis racket leaning on the post and and a pair of thongs in the foreground…I have uploaded a bigger image on flicka

This seam is not the first quilt that the cloths line from home has inspired…a few years ago one end post which had rotted over the years snapped of at the ground when a nephew was swinging on the line…his younger sister started using the pole as a balance beam and joined by her sister they danced on it, I took some lovely photos of there dance and a friend used those photos to make the journal quilt below as a sample for her book A moment in time, available from Creative Living Media.

On this seam I did tiny Fly Stitches to mimic the perferations on the edge of stamps…I have also used t shirt transfer to make the extra stamp, I will probably add more stamps to this seam but will wait until I have stitched the seam at the side.

The plan was to use T Shirt transfer for the Y Fronts on the line but I have been unable to get a clear transfer and then today when I assembled all the garments and took a good look the T shirt transfer looked flat and out of place against all the 3 dimensional garments…so what else could I do but knit them…I used a single strand of stranded embroidery thread for the knitting and a white rayon thread to define the lines at the front and to work 2 rows of buttonhole stitch around the top for the elastic…and I won’t tell you that there is an opening in the Y Front.

This morning I went shopping for the Border Fabrics for mum’s quilt so that I could take photos and have swatches to put in with my entry form for the Canberra Quilters Exhibition…Entering it in the Exhibition also means that the 4th August is my deadline for finishing…That gives me 7 weeks

In the middle of this block you can see the start of the clothsline seam scene…I am not fitting nearly as much washing as I thought I would on the cloths line, I have narrowed down the garments I want on it but there is to much white…What can I change, the singlet is the most obvious because they do come in colours but Dad’s were always white…

then I remembered that they weren’t always white, the occassional one was Pink from going through the wash with something red, so a pink singlet it is…I have taken artistic licence and made it a darker pink to get the added contrast against the white.

I used a single strand of DMC stranded cotton thread and the tiny sock knitting needles and I knitted a singlet, I knitted the back and the front at the same time so that I didn’t have to worry about counting stitchs…I got myself confused with how to do the neck and armholes and I had dropped stitches and had all sorts of bother, despite how I cobbled the top together it is really cute but I knew that I could do better, so I knitted another one…I did have to concentrate hard while doing the neck and armholes but I am thrilled with how well my second attemp worked.

I covered one join with Wheatear Stitch, this weeks TAST Stitch… if you look carefully you will see that the stitches on the right are slightly different to those on the left end, I was going under the loop instead of under the straight stitches…it does look better when done under the straight stitches but I didn’t bother redoing the missdone stitches because the thread almost blends with the fabric and you do really have to look carefully to see it.

Some years back mum settled on a style of dress that is quick and easy for her to make, she varies it with different colours, trims, made from cotton jersey it is easy to care for, it can be dressed up or down, looks nice on her and most importantly is comfortable, she has many of them and I wanted to make one for my clothsline…Jersey is not a favourite fabric of mine and at first I thought I didn’t have any, then I remembered the box of Barbie Doll cloths where I found a lovely print jersey that I think mum would like, it is an outfit made by my daughters other Granny and the Question is Do I Cut it Up? How far do I go in the pursuit of creativity?

Umm best do an experiment to see if I can actually make a dress as small as I want it, (about 1 1/2 inchs high)…For my experiment I used a piece of very old T shirt that I use to clean my glasses…it took a bit of trial and error but my experiment was so successful that I won’t need to remodel Barbie’s dress, even the colour looks good on the background that it will be on.

I did use the the wire guy, he was flat enough not to distort the fence which was what I thought might happen…I painted the silk ribbon for the fence adding extra flexs of black after stitching it…just a few stitches of green add texture to the grass…
and I was going to make wooden stumps but when it came to it I thought the simplisity of embroidering them would suit the scene better letting the focus be on the bat and bowler…So Howzat!!!

That’s 26 Blocks Done…4 to go

For those that may like to know more about cricket Here is an explanation of the game.

And I will leave you with a Humours description of Cricket You have two sides, one out in the field and one in. Each man that’s in the side that’s in goes out, and when he’s out he comes in and the next man goes in until he’s out. When they are all out, the side that’s out comes in and the side thats been in goes out and tries to get those coming in, out. Sometimes you get men still in and not out.

When a man goes out to go in, the men who are out try to get him out, and when he is out he goes in and the next man in goes out and goes in. There are two men called umpires who stay all out all the time and they decide when the men who are in are out. When both sides have been in and all the men have out, and both sides have been out twice after all the men have been in, including those who are not out, that is the end of the game!

Above is my first visual journal sketch for a backyard cricket scene seam…you will notice that there is a lot more detail in this sketch than what my finished seam will have, the purpose of this sketch was to explore and play with ideas.

I made a cricket bat in preporation for this seam but then I lost my way, The only other detail from my sketch that I felt I had to have in the scene is the fence, because the only rule that I remember is that ‘Over the fence was six and OUT’ (to discourage big hits which had the potential of breaking the neighbours windows) but every way that I could think of doing the fence was going to take a lot of fiddley work (OK I can hear you all laughing at me but there is fiddly and then there is fiddley) which was putting me off…and then I received a comment for the knitting scene seam which simply read ‘The result is really worth the work’(Thank your Vero), it was a really timely reminder of why I put the work into creating what I want because the results are worth the work, Vero’s comment sent me running to collect fabric, paints silk ribbon and threads…

The silly thing is that its not going to be as fiddley to stitch the fence as I thought that it was going to be…

The first thing to be done on the block for this seam is to paint the background…I use Chromacryl Acrylic paints and start with a wash of colour covering the area I want painted.

When the first coat of paint is dry it forms a base on which I add more detail, for this one I have done patches of different greens, with a touch of brown and I have added a trunk to make a tree in the background.

And that is as far as I got today…

…Because last night a friend lent me a pair of sock knitting needles, they are so skinny and I just couldn’t resisttrying them out…I have photographed them, on inch graph paper together with the size 14 needles that Sharon lent me, the ones I made from stiff wire, the size 4 crochet hook (inherited from my Nana) that I use and I will explain the items that I made when one of them appears on the Cloths Line…by now some of you will really be laughing, all I can say is that these are the first kind of fiddley, the kind I actually revel in).

When Sharon loaned me the size 14 knitting needles she also showed me some old needles that were bicycle spokes that had been sharpened to a point, I wondered if the emery board would be sharpe enough to file metal…I found some wire that doesn’t bend easy and the emery board did the job, they are not as nice to knit with as the commercial needles but they did work…

…So what can I knit with them…Ummm I will want cloths to hang on the cloths line…It took me a few attempts to get the sizes and patterns but I am delighted with just how well they worked, particularly the 3rd singlet which I did with crochet cotton and…

…the third dress which I did with a fine embroidery wool. I started with twice the number of stitches as I wanted for the finished bodies and knitted knitted 2 stitches together for the row between skirt and bodice…I knitted the back and front at the same time so that I didn’t have to count rows, did the skirt in garter stitch because it is easier to do and has added a nice contrast and crocheted, using a tiny hook that I inherited from my Nanna, the sleeves after joining the back to the front at the shoulders (the image shows it with 1 sleeve done), I also ran a thread around the neck line to tighten it up…I have found knitting these quite addictive and do hope that I have it out of my system now.

Sharon has lent me a pair of size 14 knitting needles…they were to big for the thread I had been using so I seperated the threads of some wool so that I had a single ply…it is bigger than the piece I knitted on the skewers but for this seam bigger may actually be better and it was much easier to knit with the metal needles…Sharon also suggested that I put coins in the photo to give an idea of relative size.

Above is my Visual Journal sketches for this kite scene seam, which wasn’t working untill I added the cloud…

The cload is a piece of cotton batting stitched on with buttonhole stitch.

An appliqued kite with embroidered cross bars would have been just as effective but I couldn’t help myself from making a miniature kite from wire and fabric.

A bead doll is flying the kite.

I like this seam because it is the first of the scene seams that I have been able to work onto a vertical seam…

Below is the finished block 23…7 to go.

Above is the sketch in my visual journal for a knitting scene seam…I can remember my mum knitting, she did it because she had to but she hated it, until she got a knitting machine…A knitting machine would be very difficult to embroider but I reckon hand knitting will remind the family of the knitting machine that mum did love.

I used an emery nail file to file the ends of skewers to make needles small enough for the miniature knitting I need for this seam, The first piece below is a practice run to get the feel for the size, the second piece to work out the pattern that I want to do…The pattern is in memory of a much loved jumper that mum did hand knit from scrapes of wool, it had rows of diamonds about an inch high and was passed down from child to child.