Our Quilt is going to America!

Whoa, life has got a bit crazy lately and is unlikely to recover for a couple of weeks.

The quilt Janice and I made for the Human Rights Challenge, (which won one of 2 awards and which you can read about on this blog) is currently being exhibited in Parliament until the end of next week. I attended the opening reception on Monday evening, very nice (Bellamy's does a very nice line in nibbles, including a 'melt in the mouth' beef fillet steak bite.) I found out that the two winning quilts are being sent to the USA to the State University of Michigan Museum's upcoming exhibition called "Quilts and Human Rights" (Jan 15 to May 15, 2008.) What a lovely surprise for us! Apparently we were supposed to already know about this, but due to a glitch in an email addy the correspondence got sent into the ether, never to return! Now all I have to do is win Lotto on Saturday!!

I have my rookie quilt class to teach tomorrow night and I need to buy a new iron to replace the one that died last week.

It is Cotton On Quilters' end of year meeting on Saturday and I want to hunt out some decorations for the lunch.

I haven't done my junior reports which are due Friday.

I haven't done 2 lots of marking which are not urgent but need to be done by the end of this week (ahem maybe the beginning of next week - the reports have a higher priority!)

Saturday of next week I am travelling to Wellington again to meet up with Linda from Canada, who is visiting New Zealand and who I am taking on a quilty shopping trip. We have only 'met' on-line so it will be fun to meet up in person.

After that it will be the last week of term and Junior Prizegiving and then I need to give my house a cleaning blast. That'll take us up to Christmas.

Somewhere in there my son (he of honey bunch fame) needs to have a 17th birthday celebration of some kind.

As for quilting content, I have:

(a) finished the letters for my Lazy Gal Winter Class quilt:
(b) done a test block for Cotton On Quilters' new banner:
Isn't this a cool block? Janice designed it for us on EQ6. My test block doesn't look very square. I think its the way I smoothed it onto the design wall. One down, 47 to go!

(c) finished the third applique test block using the ladder stitch method. Can't show you a photo 'cos Im soaking it to try and get out the supposedly washable kids' felt pen - well, what do I expect with red I ask myself. I'll have to get the napisan out to see if that will help. As far as the method goes I found it took me twice as long as the freezer paper method. Maybe because the daisy flower shape has 8 inward curves. No hand applique method is going to be quick, I suspect.

Well, that is enough content for about 4 post's worth. You are getting it all at once 'cos I know I wont get blogging again until at least next week (see above!)

More on Applique

So, I still haven't got back to the hand applique. Got side-tracked onto the Lazy Gal class. But my friend Ruth got this book from USA (second hand)
It shows how to use a ladder stitch to applique. I'll give it a go and report back soon (or not so soon, as the case may be - I really don't know where the time goes to)

A rush of blood to the head!

Just because I have nothing to do (ahem!) I have joined an online class called Lazy Gal Winter Class. The challenge is to make a Christmas themed wall quilt. The only rules are you have to make the quilt up out of your own head using no templates, no patterns, no EQ6, not much measuring, just in a free-pieced, improvisational way. I think I'm allowed to use applique. It is being run by Tonya Ricucci of lazygalquilting.blogspot.com. It's called a winter class 'cos it's winter - in the northern hemisphere! I couldn't resist the challenge of adding a kiwi summer Christmas perspective to the group blog. I knew exactly what I want to do almost straight away. It will remain to be seen how far I get :-)

Here is my first effort for the words which will be on the quilt:
You can check out what the other members are doing by clicking on this link or the link in my side bar.

Wahoo! Here it is!

I got the binding on the raffle quilt finished so I was able to take it to club today. Pretty darn good even if I do say so myself. Still have to hand stitch down the hanging sleeve and do a label. When that is done we will get a better photo of it.

A big thank you goes to all the club members who worked on this quilt and to Bev Dyke from Nelson for her fantastic quilting, and many thanks to Kim Diehl for giving us permission to use her design for our raffle quilt. Tickets will go on sale towards the end of January next year.

Guess where the fabric was?

I knew the left over backing fabric for the club raffle quilt would be somewhere. I just needed help finding it. See this innocuous pile of left over batting all neatly tied up, sitting on top of a supermarket bag with boxes of Basics Nappy Liners - the kind that melt with heat and are used for art quilts and which are no longer available here in NZ- not that I'm skiting here, you understand, and not that I've done anything with them since I got them :-) Of course this pile is waiting to be put away, along with a myriad of other things of the quilting kind:

Guess what was tied up with the batting underneath?

Yep, the missing backing fabric. It took Frances to find it. I picked up that pile last night, I know I did, but I didn't look underneath did I? Did I remember that it was the left over batting from the raffle quilt? No I did not. I sometimes wonder where my brain is. Still, it was just as well I didn't put the pile away, otherwise we would never have found it!!

The hanging sleeve is machined on and I'm off to do some hand stitching and watch the first episode of Glenn Close in Damages. I hope it's good. It's about time there was something decent on the box.

Back from the Quilter

The raffle quilt for our club is back from the quilters, yippee! Bev has made a fabulous job of it:
I have machine stitched the binding on and it just needs a hanging sleeve put on before I hand stitch the binding down. Then it will be done. I just can't find what I did with the left-over backing fabric. I'm sure it is somewhere. . . around here. . . umm. . .