Symposium

Next year is the National Quilt Symposium - these happen every two years and next year's is in Queenstown, one of New Zealand's premium tourist destinations. I registered my interest directly after the last one as I have for the last three but I didn't really think I would be able to go. I didn't get to the last one in 2009 either. However, the cards fell right and my good luck was to be invited to join Helen in the motel room she had booked months ago. So I'm going! and I'm very excited about it too :-)

We thought that it would be a good idea for the girls from Wanganui to have a t-shirt so we shopped yesterday and found a red singlet tunic that suited us both. NB: we don't know of any other club members attending symposium but if you are reading this and you are attending and would like a t-shirt - please let me know!) The shirt we chose has a picture on the front (black, silver cityscape) but it was getting difficult to find exactly what we wanted so we decided that we could put our logo on the back. We chose a singlet tunic so that we could wear other t-shirts under it and hopefully could wear it every day. I played with our Cotton-On Quilters logo on the design programme and came up with something I thought was fairly decent. I printed a couple out on to transfer paper and ironed them onto plain white cotton. Here is mine, sewed on with two rows of (stylishly) careless heavy black stitching.

Quilt Show Challenges

Our club, Cotton-On Quilters is having their bi-ennial quilt show in March 2011. We have three challenges - two of them are open challenges so if you are interested please contact me and I will sent you the information. One of the open challenges is Make Us Smile - size to be A3 size (12"x16").

Here is my entry for that challenge. I know its not stunning. But I made the background as a demonstration of weaving at our club one Saturday. It was a large weave so that it was quick to demonstrate. Then I wondered what I was going to do with it. This is the result - and its an entry!

Did it make you smile?

The second challenge I am working on is only for club members. We are to use this fabric:

and make a quilt that is no larger than 36" on any side and no smaller than 24" - Any subject. My quilt is going to illustrate the children's song: "I had a little nut tree, nothing would it bear, but a silver nutmeg and a golden pear. The king of Spain's daughter came to visit me and all for the sake of my little nut tree".

Here is my working drawing with a piece of tracing paper on top. The tracing paper has the lines for my background pieces and the tree. The working drawing was put together in an art programme on the computer then printed out full size:

And here is the background and tree pieced. The flowers have been cut from the challenge fabric and placed on the tree but not sewn down yet. I will quilt the background before I sew the flowers, golden pear, silver nutmeg and girl's faces on the top. I am going to use photos of my grand-daughters for the faces, not the clip art ones shown in the working drawing.

I will put a border around this part before I put the faces on and I'll stitch the words of the song on the border.

A Finished Boat

All finished apart from the label which I will do on the computer this morning. The quilting would have been a bit smoother if I had taken the Juki off the Swiftquilter but I didn't, I used the Pfaff instead. Also, if I had tidied my sewing table and spread some silicon around it might have slid a bit better too...

Oh, well.

Further Development

I had another happy few hours in the sewing room today, working on the boat I started in the unstructured piecing workshop. Here is progress. I have pieced boat sails down the left side and across the bottom using the method we were taught for the stars.

The top and bottom borders are not yet completely pieced or sewn to the rest of the quilt top. In fact the medium triangle in the top right hand corner is just folded and pinned to the dark one. I am in two minds about that, whether it should be a light one with the dark as in the bottom left hand corner. I welcome your comments :-)

A Weekend Workshop

I've spent the weekend at a quilting workshop run by our club, Cotton-on Quilters. Griet Lombard taught 16 of us how to piece blocks without a pattern or a ruler! Check out the club blog in a day or two. I'm sure there will be pictures of all the blocks made by the class.

Griet showed us how to make a star, house, tree, boat, cat and girl and boy figures. But I didn't get that far, once I had made the boat I got stuck on it, making a frame and more stars to go with it so I didn't make the boy and girl figures. I intend to make another border or two for the boat before I'm finished. I was really pleased with how the colour palette turned out on that. And yes, I know the flag on top of the mast is flying the wrong way and the prow is at the wrong end of the boat - I was all set to rip and resew that but they persuaded me it was ok to be wrong....