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!)

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.