Mentioned in Dispatches

I haven't made any progress on the modern mystery quilt that I last blogged about but I have been working on other stuff. I have have just returned from our biennial Quilt Symposium, which this time was held in Taupo, and I am thrilled I made the honours list with a merit award for this quilt called "Up the Garden Path"

The next Symposium will be held in Palmerston North in January 2015. You can check out the details here

That Was Quick!

The Sunday before last I had a baby shower to attend. As usual I left it very late to start a quilt but on the Thursday evening I started this quilt and I finished sewing the binding on in the early hours of Sunday morning. I think that is a record for me (well it was a fairly simple construction, inspired by this quilt). The parents to be were thrilled to bits. I used some lovely flannel fabrics I had stashed away.

Remember this?

This quilt top had been hanging around for a long time. I had tried quilting it 3 times only to end up with puckering. We had a Chris Kenna workshop at our club last year and I was talking with her about the problem I was having. She suggested grid-basting it with soluble thread. So I did and it worked a treat. I was able to free-motion the whole thing with no puckering at all. It is weird, though how it looks so rippled when only parts of it are quilted. It is not until the quilting is finished that it lies flat. It is now called Left Over Tabasco Sauce
 

Here is a a close-up of the quilting:

I haven't been totally Idle . . .

I haven't really been totally idle over the 6 months since I last blogged. Really!

I had a lovely quilting time at my friend, Lorraine's place last weekend. I sewed a few crumb blocks together into this top and spent the rest of the time making more!

I love to sew crumb blocks when my brain won't cope with anything more demanding. I don't worry about matching or exact 1/4" seams or which way seams get pressed. I just sew. I find it really soothing and it usually warms me up to go onto something more demanding. This top, when it has had an accent border and a final border on it, is destined to become a community quilt. Pretty busy quilt top, eh?

A Memory of NZ

During the holidays one of my home stay boys returned home to Germany. He had been with me for six months and had been a real joy to have. Very outgoing and good company. He wanted something quilted to take home so, while he was on a 3 day holiday in Auckland before he left NZ, I made him this:

Needless to say he was visiting the sky tower on the day I made the quilt. It is from Gail Lawther's book "Glimpses of New Zealand". I bought this book when it first came out but this is the first time I have made anything from it. I started at 4 am (sleepless night in the middle of the holidays!!) drawing the pattern to full size. Then I went back to bed for a bit more shut-eye. I got up at about 8.30am, selected fabrics and started sewing it. It was finished and the binding was on, ready for hand stitching down, by 10pm that night! That is a pretty quick quilt - but I admit I had 3 days to myself so there was boiled eggs and toast soldiers for dinner that night.Altogether a perfect quilting day.

I highly recommend Gail's book. Apart from the subject matter, of which I am undoubtedly biased, the book is a sampler of many different quilting techniques in a manageable format. It would make a great series of tutorials for a group of newish quilters looking to learn non traditional techniques.

Off it goes - without the label!

I did finish quilting this quilt a couple of weeks ago but since school started I have had little time to sit at the computer to make a post (well, that's my excuse and I'm sticking to it). He, of Honey Bunch fame, moved on Sunday to his new flat for his second year at Uni.This quilt was supposed to be finished a whole year ago, ready fall the Halls of Residence. Well, only a year late. At least I got it done for the new flat:-)
It is called 'City Slicker'

The only trouble was I forgot to sew a label on it and when I remembered I ran out of time.I hope he looks after it!

The colour above isn't quite true. This close up of the quilting is better:

Quilty Weekends

I have had two really great quilty weekends in a row. Last weekend was our club's mystery bus trip and this time I wasn't the organiser. So I got to sit back and enjoy (well, 'sit back' probably isn't quite the most accurate description since I was driving one of the mini buses and it was a manual gear change and the ladies started counting how many bunny hops I did!) The day was fantastic and the highlight was visiting Greit Lombard. She made us feel very welcome and gave us THE best afternoon tea. Thank you Greit, your generosity was awesome!

I didn't take my camera on the bus trip so I have no piccies - darn!

Today I visited the Taranaki P&Q annual show. I loved Sharon Duthie's quilt "Inner Peace Evolving to Chaotic Existence" which won first prize in the 'Log Cabin with a Twist (wall hanging section) challenge. It was beautifully, beautifully hand quilted. Here is a detail shot:
I thought is was a well-deserved winner. And, yes, I did remember my camera this time.

Back to the more mundane things. I have finally finished this scrappy strip pieced quilt which I started a couple of years ago. I am calling it God's Eye because it reminds me of the "woven on two sticks with any scraps of wool we could find" God's Eye's we used to make as children. I think they are American Indian in origin (but don't quote me. I've been known to be wrong before, vbg!)
Only a million more scraps to use up :-)

It's a finish!

Yes, I finished a quilt.

No, it's not the Ugly, Ugly one. (But maybe this quilt might be in the running to win the Ugly, Ugly prize??)

This is a quilt for a 7 year boy called Brian who likes sport. I don't know Brian but I hope he likes the quilt he is going to receive. Our community quilts project this year is to make quilts for children who are under the care of the Open Home Foundation. They provide respite foster care for children at risk. We were given a list of first names, ages and interests from which we could choose someone to make a quilt for. I really like this idea of making it more personal.
The name of the quilt is "Golf Plaid Here". The green fabric is a print of golfing motifs. Sporting themed fabric (indeed, any 'boys' fabric) is a bit hard to come by. I found the golf fabric in one of our local shops. I had probably been there for a while because it was very reasonably priced t under $20 per metre. There was just enough left on the bolt for this single bed sized quilt. I drew up the woven stripe pattern and it was pieced with partial seams. It took a while to figure out how to put it together with the least mucking around and the most chain piecing, but once I had it worked out I got the top done in 2 sewing sessions. I can't say I love it I don't like that particular shade of red) but I trust Brian will like it enough to cuddle up in it.

Ugly, Ugly?

Do you ever find yourself making a quilt which seemed a good idea at the time, but when you get nearly all the way through you decide it is the most hideous thing you have ever seen? I was trying to come up with a relatively simple design for a beginner quilt using just half square triangles and a minimum amount of cutting. I came up with this:

Now, the maths of this really appealed to me. 8 fabrics of 1/2 metre each in a 'rainbow' effect. With an extra metre to do the extra strips at the top and bottom, making a total of 5 metres of fabric. Cutting was easy, with 8 triangles from a width-of-fabric strip. Piecing was easy, big triangles, not too many pieces. No border, just needs a binding after quilting. Comes out at single bed size - great size to make. Easy to quilt if you do zig zag lines. Simple huh? So simple I cut another one out of floral fabrics before I pieced this one together.

So why do I hate it? It is very bright, much brighter than this picture shows. It probably looks better on a bed than it does in the vertical plane. But it is just not 'doing it' for me. It has been hanging around my sewing area half quilted and I just can't get enthused to do any more. Mind you I am free motion quilting it fairly densely. I am considering it quilting practice. I'm doing different free-motion pattern in each of the colours. I will get there in the end. The floral one is still languishing in pieces, aaarrgh!

Selected!

I haven't posted for a couple of weeks but I have been busy sewing. After taking Dena Crain's Darned Quilts class at Symposium I decided to try the technique again, this time with a different shape. The motivation was a very quickly arriving closing date (2 weeks!) for the National Association of New Zealand Quilters Illumination Challenge. Well, I do work well to deadlines :-)

My inspiration for my Illumination Challenge quilt was the prologue to John's Gospel which talks about the light shining in the darkness and darkness has never put it out.

I started with this free-curve pieced background:
Then I added embellishments and decorative stitching:
I cut flame shapes and ended up with this (sorry, the colour in this photo is a little bleached):
It has been selected to tour as one of 20 quilts. I will find out after 6 June if it has won a prize. All quilts in this collection have to be for sale, so you never know, even if I don't get a ribbon someone might buy it. Wouldn't that be nice?

Symposium classes

Now I have recovered from a full-on week at Symposium (well, not fully recovered - I still have some things to unpack from my bag - at least all the washing is now up to date) I thought I would show you the results of the two classes I did. The first is the 2 day Layer By Layer Landscape class with Gloria Loughman. Instead of doing one of the patterns she provided I decided to draw up my own design based on what I could see out of the window of the cricket pavilion at Wellington Girls College. With windows all along the front it was an excellent place to sew. I took the class because I thought I would be doing a more abstract landscape, like Gloria's class samples. I am no artist so it was with some surprise I found myself sketching out an 'original' design!
I didn't get as far as other students and there is still quite a bit of work to do to get it finished. There are 5 sections to this small quilt and I pinned them together so I could hang it up for the other students to see. The big blank space in front of the 3 town houses need some greenery and there is still a tree to put in and the Mt Victoria tower to add in the sky line piece. Gloria is an excellent teacher and I enjoyed the fact that there were a variety of techniques we could use to put in a 'layer'. The houses look like they are on a bit of a lean - windy Wellington :-) Actually the weather was great for the whole week, only one slightly yukky day.

The second class I did was also 2 days, with Dena Crain, called 'Darned Quilts'. The technique involved curve-piecing a graduated background, adding embellishments and then cutting shapes (circles were the easiest to start with) out and swapping them around and re-stitching them back in. Very interesting and a great way to try out all those fancy stitches on the machine that I normally never use.
I think I'll call this one 'Sunrise, Sunset'. It just needs basting up, quilting and binding. It will measure about 53 cm wide by 74 cm high (21" by 29"). I wonder if I can finish this one before the end of the holidays?

My new best friends . .

. . . are this dinky pair of curved embroidery scissors, a can of spray starch and some bee-ooo-ti-ful YLI #100 silk thread:
Yes, I've started some hand applique. I'm onto a new project which I aim to get finished before 14th January, 2009, in time for the entry deadline of our next National Symposium. I was halfway on the way to sewing a pattern I bought a year ago which I thought I might enter. It was for a lovely wall hanging and I had decided to enlarge it to queen bed size and make a new quilt to use on my bed. Then I read the entry rules which state entries have to be original designs. Jam on the brakes and come to a screaming halt! It took me a some time to get over the 'oh darn, I'm not going to have enough time to make this plus another quilt' feeling and come around to the idea of putting aside the first quilt and make up my own design. Which I have and it has some applique. Normally I would fuse this, but I don't like raw edge on my bed quilts (O, la di dah, doesn't that sound snobby? Like I've got a huge stash of bed quilts to ring the changes with - not!)

The scissors I picked up on a sales table earlier this year, thinking 'I've always wanted a pair of these curved scissors'. I was delighted to find that the price was further reduced when I went to pay for them. The spray starch is for ironing the edge over the freezer paper. It smells like home baked biscuits around here at the moment, I'm using so much of it. I'm not normally known for my hand stitching skills. In fact I was told very clearly (grin) the stitches on my test piece were way too big, hence the silk thread. Which is wonderful to stitch with. The thread just disappears and I can get really, really tiny stitches. Of course I know really, really tiny stitches are the aim here, but how come no one ever tells you in the quilting books and magazines that the tinier the stitches, the more of them there has to be?? And the more of them there has to be, the longer it takes to stitch something down?? Huh! What was that deadline?

Night Metropolis

I tried to make this post last week but my internet connection and/or blogger was not playing nice. After waiting for ages I lost the post completely. Who knows why these things happen? I gave up and went to bed instead.
I've put the last stitches in the binding of "Night Metropolis" - apart from a label. I hope the picture is clickable so you get a better view. I quilted the 'windows' on Janice's Swiftquilter. I was pretty impressed with how straight I got the freehand stitching:
Bur I have to confess I was going to quilt the grey' window ledge' as well but it didn't go so well so I stopped and ripped out what I had done. Stitching lines on a 45 degree angle was much harder than going up and down. I did the 'in the ditch' quilting on my own machine after I did the windows. I found it too hard to keep the stitching next to the seam line on the Swiftquilter. After that I decided it didn't need any more quilting :-) Considering that I used scrap batting the quilt hangs reasonably straight.

I am impressing myself that this quilt has taken only a couple of months to finish. It is growing on me. I'm feeling an urge to make another one. I bet my scrap pile still won't look any smaller!

In New Zealand We Call It Tinny. . .

. . . when things are lucky or work out just right, and so it was for the latest rookie quilt I have made for my beginner lessons. I had just a tad over the right amount of binding to overlap to do the diagonal join. The border fabric is quilte busy so I decided to join all the off cuts to use for the binding. I did a rough measure and this is how much overlap I had. Just right for trimming to the 2 1/2 inches overlap required for 2 1/2 inch double-fold binding.

This is the finished piece. I've called it 'A Touch of France' because of the colours used. It measures about 74 cm by 80 cm.

Colour Challenge

Janice has just reminded me that she hasn't seen my entry for the colour challenge in our upcoming exhibition, so here it is:
We had to use analogous colours on the colour wheel. It is the size of an A3 piece of paper. This is a miniature of a bed sized quilt from (I think) Quiltmaker magazine. Does a challenge have to be totally original? The challenge for me was in having the analogous fabrics to be able to do it. Does that count? I was going to make the plum colours weave under the purple ones, to add my own variation to it, and had made extra blocks to do that, but when I put it together I forgot I had them and now it is too late. Never mind.

Getting Ready

Phew, a second post this month. Things must be improving!! Just so you know I have been a busy beaver, this is a pile of quilts which are going into our club exhibition next month:
Sadly, they are not mine, I just helped get them ready (but it looks impressive doesn't it?) Our exhibition is only 5 weeks away, yikes! You can check out our guest speaker Barbara Bilyard . I am looking forward to seeing some of her quilts close up. She has a reputation of being a "hard case" so it should be an entertaining evening. I get the honour of opening the formal part of the evening, so if anyone has a good speech they want to exchange for fabric you know what to do :-)

I wish this one was mine!

I found some more retreat photos I forgot to get off the camera and here is a quilt on one of the beds. Frances had the privilege of sleeping under this beauty. Karen at Parklee has just recently finished it. She said it was for her son and daughter-in-law but they didn't like the colours, until the quilt was finished and then they liked it very much! (Apparently they were tough out of luck having already turned it down - I guess it was a case of looking the gift horse in the mouth!) I like it too. I wish it was (or should that be 'were'?) mine.
I think Karen said the quilting was done by Jacqui Karl. Jacqui does fantastic work on her domestic Bernina. She is a wonderful tutor and makes beautiful quilts in a wide range of styles. We have her booked for another workshop next year.

This is the quilt that I slept under (an "oldie but a goodie"):

P.S. I forgot to say that Frances said I was allowed to say she was in her jim-jams early of Friday night at the retreat (see her nightie in the photo in the previous post.) She said that a lot of you will totally be able to relate to that!

That deadline is a wonderful thing!

I haven't posted in a while and have been "gently" reminded by a couple of friends that I haven't (grin). My excuse is that I have been working on my entry for the NANZQ (National Association of New Zealand Quilters) Elemental Challenge. I have been cutting it a bit fine (as usual). Today is Wednesday and the closing day is Friday. Got it finished last night and in the mail today. Should get there in 1 or 2 days they tell me at the Post Office. I hope they are right. Aren't deadlines a wonderful thing? I would never get anything done without them.

The challenge involved interpret the elements – Air, Fire, Water, Earth – in any way you wish in a quilt that must measure 150cm high x 50cm wide. This is an unusual size for a quilt. I chose Air and I wanted to show the idea of the weightlessness of air. It didn't turn out the way I was hoping but since I was doing it I have entered it anyway. It tlooks more like a thunderstorm than weightless air so I called it "There's a Storm in the air". It is my first time of entering a NANZQ challenge so I have entered it in the rookie class. I'm going to be brave and post a detail piccy:

More Country Quilting

Frances and I went out to Janice's yesterday so Frances could have a go on the quilting frame. We were going to take Lorraine with us but we couldn't get her to answer the door. We thought she must be having a really good sleep but it turned out she had ended up in hospital in the wee hours of the morning. What a bummer. She is home now but is awaiting surgery. I hope she doesn't have to wait too long.

Frances decided to quilt the top she made last year at our club's mystery half-nighter. She thinks it is too bright but I think it is just great. I think she is going to give it to her nephew.

Frances pinning on her quilt:

Still pinning the quilt!
Getting underway:
What happened here? Are there any technical-minded quilters out there who can explain how this happens?
The back of the quilting:
Finally finished:
Pretty good for a first effort I thought. I just lazed around while Frances did all the hard work. I was going to do some hand applique on the club raffle quilt but France's daughter Amy came out with baby Georgia Rose to see what we were getting up to. So I had a lovely time being a pretend grand mother giving her lots of cuddles and kisses and playing on the bed that Janice has in her studio (great idea having a bed in your studio!) In fact I might have fallen asleep if I hadn't had Georgia Rose to keep me entertained. We were joined by Kaz, the German Shepherd, who did a good job of barking when we arrived.

Steamy Summer Sunrise done in a week!

I am mighty pleased with myself. I finished my art piece today and have called it 'Steamy Summer Sunrise'. It measures approx 30" by 38". I did the edging using varigated rayon thread and a 3-step zig-zag stitch with the stitch length at 0.2 and the stitch width at 7 (Elna 6005) and then I trimmed close to the stitching with scissors. It is not hanging totally straight so I am going so wet it and block it in the hope that it will behave a bit better. The photo shows it smoothed against my design wall where it behaves nicely, but hanging in free air it is not so good. I need to make a label and hanging sleeve but it is as good as done!

I showed it at quilt club today and several people were very interested in how I had done the edge. One thought I had gone around 3 times and another thought I had used a triple needle!
Close-up of the quilting:

Left edge:

Bottom edge:

Right edge