Canada has barn quilts. And barns.

Lots of you know that I recently spent two months in Canada*.  An amazing time was had, and I hope to write a few more blog posts about what I got up to when I was there, but for now I want to start with barn quilts. And barns.

I'd heard of barn quilts, but I'd thought they were just an American thing. But Canada has barns too, so why not barn quilts as well?! 

A barn quilt is a big quilt block painted on a piece of wood and stuck on the side of a barn. They've been around for hundreds of years, farmers used all sorts of folk art to decorate barns in the past, but in the last few decades they've had a resurgence.

They are often used to draw tourists to small towns, with barn quilt trails leading visitors from one place to the next. These barn quilts I photographed are all around the tiny town of Ailsa Craig, in south west Ontario, where I spent a week at the Ailsa Craig Quilt and Fibre Arts Festival.

One of our lovely hosts, Mary, spent an evening driving Clare, Catherine and myself around miles and miles of lovely countryside. There were more barn quilts I got to see but didn't photograph because the light was getting pretty low.

The south west Ontario countryside was beautiful. Quite flat, lots of farming, gorgeous trees that were just leafing out for Spring, and lots and lots of great barns.  I loved the shapes of them and the colours, so different from New Zealand.

The iconic Canadian maple leaf had to feature somewhere! If you want to know more about the barn quilts in Canada, you can visit the Canadian barn quilt website, where you can read stories about the people behind them and find maps if you want to follow a barn quilt trail.

As well as new barns, there were also lots of older buildings. Such great shapes.

Mary knew who owned this one, so we were able to get up close and personal with it.  There are also lots of barns that don't have barn quilts, but are still decorated in some way.

And then I got to rural Nova Scotia, and I found SO MANY brilliant barns! Unfortunately we were driving a hulking great camper van by then and Hubby couldn't really pull over for me every time I saw something I wanted to photograph (sad face emoji), so lots of these next pics are taken from a moving vehicle.

Gloomy.

Nova Scotia has quite red soils, nicely echoed in the rust on this barn.

That's the Bay of Fundy in the background of the barn above. It has the highest tides in the world and when the tide is out there is acres of red tidal mud.

How could you not love everything about this big red beauty?

This one (above and below) is a rebuilt approximation of the barn on the Anne of Green Gables historical site on Prince Edward Island. This property was were L M Montgomery spent a lot of time as a child and was the inspiration for the house called Green Gables.

And I found other great buildings too, like this wharf shed in Maine, US.

And last, but not least, how about this abandoned house on the hill in New Foundland?  I hope you enjoyed my little structures of North America tour.

*That goes some ways to explaining the big black hole in my recent blogging activity!

Moving in to the new studio

Last week saw us move our son into his new bedroom, which means his old bedroom was now free to become my studio.

(happy dance, happy dance, happy dance!)

The first order of the day was moving all my fabric into the cupboard.  The fabric had been living in cardboard boxes on the floor of our bedroom.  Not convenient to use, nor convenient to walk around.

Just that one little job made a huge difference to the usability of the house and to how much I loved the new room!  Seeing all my pretties nicely loaded up on clean white shelves was such a great feeling, immediately inspiring and I kept seeing intriguing colour combinations that I hadn't noticed before.

But there was no time to start playing with fabric!  I had to get the design walls up.  They had also been resident in my bedroom, just leaning against the wall, in the way, with the annoying habit of falling on me in the middle of the night.  Hubby helped out a little here.

I unpacked my HQ Sweet Sixteen and was very relieved that after a year in storage, she still purred - that is once I put the needle in the right way around....!

I've set up my Bernina 440 and the Sweet Sixteen in front of the windows with a work table in between, so I'll have plenty of light for working during the day.  And if it gets too bright, the curtains seperate so I can pull them to exactly where I need them.  I have to have my cutting mat and ironing pad on that worktable for now, which is not the best height, but workable, and there is a little storage underneath.

The wall opposite the windows was the only big full wall, so that's where the design wall had to go, and I wanted my design wall big.  I've never, ever regretted a large design space and in my opinion the bigger the better.  It gets plenty of light for viewing quilts, and for taking photographs too.

I have a set of drawers set up under the pre-existing shelf and tools hanging from under the shelf.  Eventually I'd like to have a bigger set of drawers here, wider and slightly longer and at bench height.  It would have my cutting mat set up on it at perfect cutting level.

In the picture below I'm standing in the doorway to the room.  Behind the open door is another door that leads into our bedroom.  It's a leftover from when this sewing room was a porch, and we never open it.  We have plans to take it out and build a recessed book shelf where it is, so that will help with storage.

I was all set up and ready to sew this weekend just been.  Conveniently it rained, so I had the perfect excuse to test out my setup the WHOLE weekend.  And I'm very, very happy.  I need a better sewing chair, preferably with wheels that can swap from machine to machine and then everything will be perfect!  Happy sigh.

Studio Planning (again)

We've been living off-boat/on-shore for about a year now and about nine months in this particular house.  I'm feeling well settled, in fact, it's starting to feel too small.  I'm resigned to the fact that however large a space we have to live in, we'll soon fill it, so it's probably best that we stick to fairly small abodes!

This house is only 90 square metres (970 square foot) and it only has three bedrooms and one bathroom.  It does have three metre wide decks on three sides of the house, so that has given us more 'living' space, but we knew we would be looking at expanding the house as soon as we could.

One of the reasons to extend is to give me an area to sew in.  Hubby promised a dedicated space when we moved out of the apartment and into here - it was one of my conditions for settling for a smaller place.  In the meantime, I've been squeezing into the corners:

My machine takes up one corner of the living room

And using the hall as my storage space:

The funny coloured square on the wall used to be a window.  It's in the process of being filled in because we've been extending the house on the other side, and eventually there will be a big floor to ceiling cupboard on this side.

We've (well, really it's been newly retired Hubby doing all the work with executive design decisions by me) filled in one of the decks on the side of the house and have created a fourth bedroom, another w.c and a new entrance way.

The new entrance looking right through the new bedroom to the other side of the house.

I'm looking out from what used to be my front door to the new entrance way and the new w.c.

And the new bedroom, awaiting paint and flooring.

It was finished just enough and just in time to install my sister, brother in law and nephew who are visiting for a couple of weeks.  And now that they are just about to head home, we are gearing up for another push to get it all finished.  That means plastering the ceilings, painting, flooring, plumbing up the loo and then installing my son in the new bedroom.

Which gets me to the point of this post.  I get to takeover his old bedroom for my studio, which means I get to plan my studio layout!

This messy bedroom will be my new space. I didn't clean up, I'm sure you all know what teenage boy's rooms are like!

It's 2.25 metres wide and 4.2 metres long. The windows run the whole length of the front wall, so two whole walls are taken up with glass - good for light, but not great for storage solutions.  And in here, I want to fit my: 

• HQ Sweet Sixteen machine and table, 
• my Bernina 440 on my Sew-ezi table, 
• a big wardrobe type cupboard for fabric, 
• a cutting surface, an ironing surface 
• and a design wall.  

Hmmmmm, time to get planning.

More boat renovations

Every week sees more progress on the renovation of MV Cerego.  It's taking longer than we hoped, but we knew we were being overoptimistic when we originally said six weeks, so we are not surprised. 

I'm getting a bit jaded now as Hubby stays late after work to get more done, then weekends are filled with him on the boat and me looking after the children.  In the beginning we all went down to the boat, but now it's too smelly, wet-painty, messy and dangerous for the kids.  I love my kids, but 'solo-parenting' can wear you down!

When I get like this (whiney), I start trying to spend five minutes a day writing down the things I'm grateful for.  Like a healthy family, a good job, the opportunity to live on a boat, down to the ridiculous - like being thankful that ALL the chickens went into their pen without requiring chasing!  It works to remind me to get over myself. 

On to the boat pictures.  Above is the newly replaced belting, complete with a coat of primer.  This bit of wood was completely rotten, but it's not structural, instead it's designed to rub against docks etcetera and so is 'sacrificial' as such.

The top deck had a few rotten bits too.  They've all been replaced now and everything sanded back ready for fibreglassing.  The boys have got over half of the fibreglassing down now.  This really needed to be done as there were a few leaks coming through from up here.  Not good!

Here's my dear Hubby in his fibreglassing coveralls - pretty flattering aren't they?!  Don't worry, he never reads my blog.

Beside him is the wall where my sewing corner is going to be.  It had a funny cupboard and bench thingy built to cover the pole in the middle.  The cupboard and bench were even more awkwardly shaped than the pole so they've been ripped out and there is heaps more usable room now.  You can see where we've ripped off the ceiling panelling too - these beams will all be painted glossy white.  Below is a before pic.

Talking about glossy white, here is the former dark, dingy, dirty fish hold!  It's all shiny and bright white now and ready for the carpenter to come in and start building floors and walls and bunks.  Once the building is finished then everything will get a last coat of paint.

I snuck in a thread holding unit that was just MDF timber and the magic spray gun painter has turned it a pretty white too.  My friend gave me a giant sized thread cupboard last year before she left the country but I don't think it will fit on the boat, so I'm getting other options ready.

The carpenter couldn't start on the walls and floors, but he has started on the doors.  He's made two cabin doors and the square one is for the engine room.  They will remain as a timber finish, like the one on the left.  On the work trestle in the front of the picture you can see the small door he's working on for the engine room hatch.  Can you see the double thickness?  They are all constructed like that, as will be the walls.  Very substantial.

That's it for the update.  I'm looking forward to when I can show cabin construction, then I'll really feel like we are making progress.

Have a great Sunday everyone.

Update of the renovation of the Vessel Cerego.

I played with a photograph of Cerego in the app called Moku Hanga - and, with just a few commands, made her into an interesting, and I think, beautiful picture.

In real life, Cerego is not looking a pretty picture.  In fact, she's looking a right mess.  I keep telling myself that she has to look worse before she looks better, but sometimes it's hard to remember that when you are tripping over a bunch of wires, sweeping up rusty, cruddy insulation crumbs or pulling out piles of greasy, unidentifiable junk from the lazarette (another new word - it is the back store room/hatch/cupboard thingymabob).

The picture above is the main saloon.  The R2D2 looking thing is a heavy duty vacuum cleaner (and it's needed, believe me).

The entire boat needs re-wiring.  It's a big job, but it's simpler and safer than trying to sort out all the patching and bodging and adding that's been done over the years.

We are pulling off the dark ceiling panelling (that wasn't very well installed in the first place).  This needs to be done to re-wire, but we aren't going to put it back on.  We will paint the ceiling white.  We don't mind the beams - it's a boat after all - and it gives a little more head room and the feeling of light and space.

The top-deck is tarped up to try and dry it out so we can remove the few spots of rot and then fiberglass the whole thing.  She flaps and rustles like some worn-out, forgotten and unloved circus tent.

But one area where you can see a vast improvement is the fish hold.  All the concrete and insulation is gone (she floats about four inches higher in the water now).  The tar paper is scraped off the back bulkhead and the first coat of paint has gone on.

So, to keep myself positive, I have taken a photo of this much improved space and am using it for the wall paper on my iPad.  It reminds me that a huge change can happen in a short space of time, it just takes effort.  I also use it to remind myself to be thankful that we got her so cheap, so we are able to afford some help - we are not doing all this work ourselves!

At the beginning of the year, my 'word' that I wanted to pay attention to was action.  When I think about it, that word must have penetrated my subconscious, because it was me that spurred my husband into the action of buying this boat (after some initial hard-selling on his part).  We talked about it one weekend and bought it on the following Wednesday.  Now I'm thinking my word needs to change.  Perhaps to effort?  It will take effort to get Cerego liveable and effort to get us out of here and onto Cerego.  Or perhaps flexibility?  We are going to need plenty of that as we adjust to our new space and lifestyle.  Whatever my new word, I think I'm ready for the challenge.

PS - I still quilt.  I've been making many moons lately for various projects.  This is a picture of a gathering stitch I'm doing around a freezer paper template - works well and achieves a smooth circle.

Hand Dyed Fabric - lighten up

I squeezed in a little fabric dyeing this weekend.  I need to get some lighter colours, some tints, to round out my hand dyed collection.  I also need to get some shades, which are blackened colours, but I discovered I've run out of black dye so that wasn't happening today.

They are very clear and bright.  I think I need to muddy some of my colours up a little to get some more interesting colours, but these definitely add a lighter aspect to my collection so I'm not unhappy with results.  I could also do another round of dilution in the orange and fuchsia, but I ran out of soda ash soaked fabric.

A brief explanation of how I dye my fabrics:
I take my prepared for dyeing fabric and rip it into fat quarter sized bits.
I write a number on the corner of each one for record keeping purposes and then put them in a bucket of soda ash solution, roughly 1/2 cup soda ash to about 8 litres of water.
I use procion mx dyes and I mix about 1 1/2 teaspoons of dye powder to one cup (250 mls) of water.
Then I pull out a piece of soaked fabric, wring it out and squirt on my dye.
If I want to make a mixed colour or dilution, I aim for about 1/5 cup (50 mls) of dye solution per fat quarter.
Leave it sitting for as long as you can (I often leave it overnight), then rinse and wash etc.
REMEMBER: use gloves, a mask when the dye powder is exposed, and utensils and pots reserved only for dye use.

The rest of the weekend has been taken up by the never ending housework, baking for lunch boxes, stitching with my quilting group (if you listened to my podcast yesterday, you'll know I got in a bit of hand binding), helping hubby build a deck outside our back door and painting another window frame (second to last one!!).

And now I think I'll settle in for the evening with my hand binding on my lap and a cup of peppermint tea and my hubby to keep my company.

The Whiny Sniffler

Head colds always get me down.  They sap my energy and leave me wanting to do nothing but read.  (Unlike my crazy daughter who always seems to have boundless supplies of go-go juice!).  And read is about all I've been doing lately (The Liveship Trader series by Robin Hobb if anyone is interested, sci-fi fantasy escapism at it's best).  And I'm just managing to keep the house from drowning in chaos.

Maybe I'm languishing because I know that when I'm better I have painting to do.  Lots of painting!  I know I should be really happy that my studio is all but done, but instead I have a whiny monologue running in my head.  "It's going to take ages.  Can't we hire someone?  I don't really know how to paint a room."  Moan, moan, moan!  I need to kick myself in the butt and just get going.

Then I need to source a laundry bench, the floor needs to be sanded and varnished, the bathroom needs to be painted and my boy's bedroom wall needs to be painted.

And then it's ALL DONE!