Rat(s)

I heard the scrabbling above my sewing room again. DH was still disinclined to believe me even when DS walked into the kitchen one night (the kitchen is above my sewing room) and surprised a rat up on the counter. Then I found a plum pit on the floor and thought DH had dropped it until we discovered an apple had been gnawed overnight. So we had to put all the food away into either the fridge or cupboards and get the Council pest contractor in.  Meanwhile we shut the cat into the kitchen each night.  The rat man came on Friday and immediately found a dead rat behind the kitchen cupboards.  He's put poison down behind the baseboards where the cat can't get to it.  DH is still hoping it was a single rat that somehow wandered into the house perhaps through the open basement door when we were in the garden. The rat man will come back in a few weeks to see if the poison has been taken up at all.  Hopefully it was just the one and there are no ratty relatives still wandering around.

I swapped my days this past week so that I could be free on Friday to travel to the Festival of Quilts at the NEC in Birmingham. FoQ bills itself as: "Europe’s leading patchwork and quilting event attracting over 25,000 quilters from all over the world. The show is a celebration of quilting in all its forms, with over 300 exhibitors offering essential supplies, world-class galleries of quilts from leading international makers, 350 workshops, talks and demos plus a magnificent display of over 800 competition quilts. It is the ultimate patchwork and quilting experience."

I would strongly disagree with the last statement, having had the good fortune to visit Paducah and Houston shows in my time, and it isn't a large show by American standards.  But it is large enough that it is a challenge to 'do' it all in one day and I certainly didn't do the quilts justice.  I spent the first few hours shopping from my list. 

I got some cloud fabric for the top border of my One Block Wonder quilt - visible hanging down from the top of the design wall.  It's not a perfect match but I think it will do.

I looked on every stand for 30s fabric for the border of my 30s Sampler quilt and did not see any 30s yardage in the entire show.  A handful of stands had 30s repro quilts on display and were selling patterns, or FQs. It just shows how out of fashion I am, lol.  In the end I chose a red modern floral fabric which is sort of 30s in feeling, but it reads as a lighter value than I wanted.  What do you think?

Also on my list was a new seam ripper (broke two this year), a new pair of Fiskars orange-handled scissors for snipping threads (and wow are they ever expensive now, £14.50!) because I lost my old ones, and some applique needles (I got some Clover needles but also some interesting Tulip needles from Japan).

Also on my list was a Blocloc Half Square Triangle trimming ruler after seeing these being used in a Youtube video to square up HSTs.  They have a ridge underneath which butts up against the seam allowance. Hopefully this will increase my accuracy when making smaller HST units.  Other purchases included a half-hexie ruler which I will use in cutting spare hexies for my One Block Wonder quilt, a small Fiskars turntable cutting mat, some cheap snap purse frames, and a pattern for a little sewing pouch with accessories.

There were half a dozen Japanese traders near the display of some selected quilts from the Tokyo International Quilt Festival.  I bought a kit for a cute little zip purse from one (although I think the instructions may all be in Japanese) and on another stand a kit for a 3-D kimono wallhanging.  I tried out a few words of my terrible Japanese on the latter lady, she was astonished and delighted and launched into a flood of Japanese as she pulled out the instructions and probably explained it all in great detail while I just stood there helplessly not understanding a word.

I saw many other lovely things for sale and of course lots of fabric, but the few things that really tempted me just seemed to cost more than I felt like spending. It was fun to look.  At midday I joined the enormous queue for the sold out trunk show talk by Jenny Doan, the American Youtube star from Missouri Quilts.  She was lovely and chatted with the audience like we were all old friends.  FOQ had chosen from her offering of talks a lecture on how rearranging or cutting up HSTs could generate many different quilts. Her husband Ron was holding up the quilts while Jenny talked. It was surprising how many nice quilts you can make from such simple elements. I enjoyed it but felt two hours was too long (hot room, hard seats).

By mid-afternoon I was only just getting to the quilt exhibits and was quite tired by then.  I enjoyed the antique Baltimore Album quilts in a visiting exhibition from the International Quilt Study Center and Museum.  Most of the winning quilts didn't do much for me as I tend to have traditional tastes, but there were some other lovely entries on show.  Another year I think it would really be better to do two part-days at the show rather than try to cram it all into one day, but then I would have the added expense of accommodation and meals etc.  The train schedules make it at least a two hour trip for me but longer if the connections don't align well so not really feasible to go back and forth on two successive days.

I finished the little sunflower cross stitch kit I started on our holiday to Cumbria.  The yellow parts of the flower were all fractional stitches in two shades of yellow which I failed miserably to stitch accurately according to the chart. So the flower heads are not really as the designer intended but look ok I think.  Now I will stitch them into some sort of needlecase.  The kit suggests a simple folded felt case but I think I will try something a bit more interesting.

I've started to sew the vertical hexie strips for the One Block Wonder quilt but am struggling a bit with aligning the rows.  Now that the seam allowances have narrowed the hexagons, the layout wasn't really working with the panel and I had to insert an additional hexagon in width.  That threw everything else out of alignment and some of my unsewn vertical rows have gotten a bit mixed up on the right hand side of the layout so I need to do some repinning until I'm sure it's right.  I don't want to end up sewing the wrong half hexies together.  Attending FoQ made me feel like I would like to do a lot more sewing but it's hard to find time as I am often too tired in the evenings.  Not like my younger days when I would regularly sew until 11pm.