On one of those 'why not?' days, I convinced myself and two friends (collectively known as Nil By Mouth) to enter the Soul Siam quilt competition. A June deadline gave us months to come up with ideas and make the quilts, or so we thought. I think entering this contest has been the hardest quilt related thing I have done (and judging by their moans, the other two have been struggling also).
If it could happen it did (except for making the actual quilt!). I came up with a design I really liked over the course of some days and dyed the fabric. However, I think the funky colour scheme I wanted to use just wasn't working. I called in one of my quilt colleagues who agreed the choices were wrong. In the end I scrapped that idea. I moved on to a new subject and drew up the plans for it.
Quilt number two got as far as construction. It stared to fall apart when I couldn't find gold paint for the background fabric. After a day of driving across Bangkok, I managed to buy up every pot of gold fabric paint I could find and none of them were my preferred brand, Setacolour. This mixture of fabric paints gave me a huge piece of fabric that felt like rubber. I was a bit worried about how I was ever going to quilt through it.
The face went well though it was really fiddly to construct. I did a face on white fabric, but it didn't look right so I unpicked it. The face was supposed to be dirty off white, but when I used off white fabric it just looked flat. I decided to use my Inktense pencils and lightly colour in contours. Here is a good tip to you, if you do something that you find meditative, get a friend to say stop!!! I just kept colouring away, listening to an audiobook and generally enjoying myself. I woke up the next morning thinking, what the heck (okay it wasn't heck) did I colour it like that for? I loved the look, but it wasn't the right colour. After much soul searching and advice that nobody would know the difference, I decided to unpick all the appliqué and put it on another off white background. I got as far as unpicking the eyes and some of the gold highlights before I acknowledged that my heart just wasn't in a third face construction. It was screwed up and thrown into a corner.
Meanwhile, I booked my trip back to the UK and totally forgot that I was making a quilt with a deadline. My trip moved the deadline forward a week, which is okay when you have a quilt, but not when you haven't!
I decided to go back to my original plan, but in a more realistic colourway. I dyed more fabric for this quilt in the new colourway. By this point I have lost count as to how much fabric I had dyed and painted for the previous two quilts, but it was about to step up a notch.
I dyed fabric numerous times to get the background and backing fabric and then on checking the quilt rules, realised I had been working to the wrong size on ALL the quilts. I dyed additional fabric to join on, realised when it was sewn together that it didn't look right and so put the whole lot back in the dye pot (well bucket), then I accidentally put too much dye in! More by fate than chance, I liked the colour for the background fabric, so that was great. I hated the backing fabric, but heck at that point, who cared?
The next problem I had already anticipated, my sewing machine. The poor thing has been on a slow and painful death due to never having been serviced and inability to find parts for it in Thailand. The Bernina dealers here had attempted to repair it twice, but it was a make do and mend job. Apparently it wasn't even that because as soon as I switched it on all the buttons on the front except the speed buttons, failed to work. I can no longer lift the presser foot and in order to do so I have to switch the machine off and on, which lifts the foot. Then the stitch card stopped working. At this point you can bet I am hoping to win first place in the competition to get the sewing machine!!
To add to that, the leg broke on my sewing table!!! Yes, I was begining to think the quilting gods were conspiring against me.
Well nil desperandum, I have been able to limp slowly and very painfully along with this quilt and if I work every hour I am awake, I may just make the deadline.
So, you want to know what the flower dog has to do with my quilt right? Absolutely nothing at all. But let's face it, after that tale of woes, don't you want something as silly as this to laugh at?
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