Monthly Archives: May 2010

Finished Quilt Top

After at least ten hours of sewing yesterday, my first full-size quilt top is finished!

It’s about 150 x 200 cm (59 x 79 in), and the pattern is called Plain Spoken. It’s from Weeks Ringle and Bill Kerr‘s book The Modern Quilt Workshop.

The colours of this quilt were inspired by the colours in our living room, especially the couch, pillows and the table runner:

Now I’ve got to make up my mind about the backing fabric (I’m also going to include at least one row of the front pattern, since I had to re-sew four of them because of a difference in seam allowance), the binding and the thread colour and pattern for the quilting. Any suggestions?

The Plain Spoken quilt pattern seems to be very popular – take a look at other people’s Plain Spoken quilts on Flickr or Dioramarama’s Modern Quiltalong. There also is a Flickr group with photos of other quilts from The Modern Quilt Workshop, the Modern Quilt-Along.

(Wow, three posts in one day, that’s more than I usually manage to do in a month these days!)

So many podcasts, so little time

My daily commute is about one hour, and I like to listen to podcasts or audio books while driving. I subscribe to This American Life and Radiolab as well as The Quilted Cupcake, but I also like to listen to something else for a change. Did you know that the BBC offers 262 podcasts? I found them via the MetaFilter thread BBC World Service Documentaries:

“BBC World Service has over 500 audio documentaries you can download. The subject matter is incredibly wide ranging, for example, internet cafés, the influence of Islamic art on William Morris, South African female AIDS activist Thembi Ngubane, Yiddish, the importance of cows, novelist Chinua Achebe, financial risk management, Obama as an intellectual, the physical and emotional effects of a car crash and many, many more. If the quantity and variety are overwhelming, you can subscribe to a podcast, which delivers a new documentary to you every single day.”

I plan to listen to some of the documentaries for a start, but have also subscribed to A History of the World in 100 Objects – the first 30 objects/episodes are online so far, and the next set of programmes begins on 17 May.