I've had some requests for the instructions on how to make the coathangers. Here they are:

Equipment Needed

• 5m eyelet lace
• 1 ball 8 ply yarn
• 5mm knitting needles
• needle
• scissors
• padded coathanger
• pillow stuffing

Instructions

1. Cast on 65 stitches
2. Knit 4 rows
3. Knit 1 row with the lace
4. Knit 3 rows
5. Knit 1 row with the lace
6. Repeat steps 4 and 5 until 5 rows of lace have been worked
7. Knit 4 rows
8. Cast off

Christmas 2001, and Anne surprised me with a silk tie. She got the tie body from somewhere on eBay, and did the silkpainting herself. The style is like the Escher tile patterns, with light blue and white colours so it goes with my suit. I've worn it a few times on special occasions, like the 2002 work Christmas party. It's a special tie for special occasions. I'm really happy with it.

Right now, the piano quilt is draped over the railings upstairs. All squares have been sewn on. It's waiting for the black keys to be sewn on, and a border attached, a hanging pocket. Then it will be finished and we can get it up on the wall.

It took time to get the base of the basket right, but eventually Anne was happy with it. Once that was done, the squares were ironed down, then sewn together. Anne attached a deep blue border to the quilt, and it was ready for the final embellishments.



Here's a closeup of the flowers with a bit of the straw basket.



Anne wanted to add to the "basket of flowers" effect, so she attached two little butterflies above the flowers.



The final touch was a ribbon around the base of the basket's handle.



And here's the finished basket quilt, with butterflies and ribbon.



Anne finished the basket quilt early in 2003, and took it back to Australia and gave it to Louise.

One of the patterns Anne spotted in the hundreds of quilting books she has purchased through eBay, was a basket of flowers. She adapted this pattern and came up with this pretty little quilt. It's a gift for Louise, except Louise doesn't know it yet, and as Louise only gets email and can't do the Web, Louise won't know about till it arrives in a parcel on her doorstep.

Anne had a lot of problems with this quilt, making the background colours match. The background of the flowers and angled bits of basket didn't match well at the start and she had to pull it apart and start over again a few times. As you can see, it's a very light coloured quilt and it was difficult getting that light background to match.



She also had problems getting the base of the basket right. These photos show the incorrect bottom. You can see the correct bottom in the photos of the finished quilt.

All the squares have been ironed down, and the quilt has been pinned back up for final checks. Note that the white squares have been attached for the white piano keys. The black keys will be laid down on top of them next.

Anne occasionally makes silk scarves for friends and family, and she keeps a few for herself for special occasions. This is a blue/grey scarf she cut and painted and finished August 2002. It has two beaded butterflies on the ends. She made it as a farewell gift for Angela, who moved to Hawaii last year.

The piano quilt is very close to completion. Anne finally got the fabric squares organised the way she wanted them. It took her years to get the colours and patterns matching. I think that the larger a quilt is, the longer it takes to get everything matched and placed.

Here we see the quilt having the squares ironed on to the backing fabric. This is the last step before sewing them down.



Here's the left hand side of the quilt spread and displayed to check if it's going okay.

The giant piano quilt is temporarily stalled. Quilter's block. Anne has temporarily moved on to other fields. Silk painting is one of them. These are two small silk paintings she has done. The designs are stained-glass style and came from books about silk painting. Anne painted them and then had them framed, and she's mounted them on the walls at home. She didn't tell me she was going to put them on the walls, just put them up to see if I would notice them. This is a long standing feud between us. I claim to notice all, and Anne knows I don't. So the first painting went up on the wall and I came home deep in thought about some work matters, and because I didn't notice it in the first few seconds, Anne was triumphant. I did spot the second one when it appeared. I like them a lot. Bright, colourful, pretty, and best of all - home-made. The personal touch is what makes them so special.

Another new skill. Anne's been making these delicate little beaded purses. They take days and days to make, and the work is very fine, threading all those tiny beads together. Anne has a few for herself for dress-up occasions, but she's given a lot of them away to special friends. They are designed to be work around the neck, just as decoration although they are functional and can store coins and other small items.

Where does Anne get cloth? I get asked that a lot. There are lots of sources - craft shops, dress shops, WalMart, eBay. Heaps of places. It takes time to develop a good range of suppliers.



There's a large group of people who make quilts. They buy chunks of cloth and cut them into the two inch squares they need. To get the variety they need, they would have to buy an awful lot of cloth. So what a lot of them do is swap or sell their excess squares. Anne buys a lot of batches of squares on eBay to get the variety she needs.



Whenever we go to WalMart, I will stop and fondle the electronics and see if there's anything I really want, and Anne will disappear to the back of the store where they keep the cloth. She gets large squares of cloth and takes it home and slices it up into the small squares. She also goes shopping on her own and comes back with large chunks of cloth. She drapes the large squares all over the loft railings till she slices them up, and then the small squares spread all over the floor on aluminium trays, and then get carried all over the rest of the house when they statically stick to the cat's fur.

Anne has bought a new book describing a new craft technique called flower pounding. She takes a piece of cloth and washes it in a special solution. Then she dries it and arranges flowers on it, then tapes them down. Turn the fabric over and lay it on a block of wood. Take a hammer and pound the hell out of it until all the juice is gone out of the flowers and the colours have transferred to the cloth. Turn the cloth back over, remove the tape and pull off the poor smashed carcasses of the flowers and cast them away. Iron the cloth, draw borders around the colour, and voilá - a new craft item.

This technique was developed by Ann Frischkorn & Amy Sandrin and if you want the full details on how to do it, go and buy their book Flower Pounding.

I'm sure that there's an element of therapy involved in flower pounding. If you walk into a room full of women wielding hammers and pounding flowers and grunting, it definitely makes a man pause for thought.

The photos you see here are the first stage of the process. Anne has merely transferred the flower colours to the cloth. Sometime in the future, hopefully, the cloth becomes a quilt cover. When this happens, I will show the photos of the finished product.

Anne made this quilt for sale on eBay. The quilt is a riot of flowers with a dark purple border. That purple border is the bane of our lives. Look at the photo. It looks black. We can't take a decent photo that shows the colour properly. It's a deep rich purple colour in good light. We haven't put it up on eBay yet because we can't get a good enough photo to show that border colour. The quilt is completely finished, even including the rod pocket at the back. Here you can see us using a broom handle to demonstrate the finished product.



This is another attempt to take a photo in natural light to show the purple colour. This is in our bedroom near the big window, and Anne has managed to get a bit of the colour on the right. Note that huge thing underneath the quilt. That's Redrum's tail.



Now this photo manages to catch much more of the purple. It also shows the broom attached to the broom handle holding the quilt up, and shows less of Redrum's tail.



This is a closeup of the quilt corner. The purple looks really black. If Anne used lighter borders, they would photograph better, but the then they probably wouldn't match the quilt as well.

Anne does the occasional bit of demonstrating, showing how to make the quilts. She's made two sunflower quilts in the process. One is half stitched, and one is fully stitched. Anne keeps them in the car and whips them out to show people how it's done.