Look what I won!

Our first day back in our NZ house I went to a local Quilt Show.  Really good venue in one of the church halls in town. Lovely quilts, all displayed very well. This is a new annual show, only started last year. The idea of a couple of local quilters who felt there were quilters who did not belong to clubs so were unable to display the lovely quilts they made.  There was a raffle in aid of St John's Ambulance so of course I bought a few tickets and - amazingly - I won Second Prize which is a beautiful Zig Zag Quilt. I really like Zig Zags and once made a scrappy one for a baby quilt gift.

I love the white backgrounds to the different coloured zigzag stripes. And my favourite colour, aqua for the boarders and binding.  I am thrilled!  It's a lap sized quilt so I know I will use it back in the UK.

Here it is:

 I have signed up to be part of a Bee making quilts for Siblings Together. We have a Queen Bee for February, Tanya, and she has already given us our block which is a 20" Log Cabin design. Ideally with a solid fabric centre, all the logs in the same colour as the centre but as many different fabrics as you like.  As I had the opportunity to make them yesterday afternoon I decided to seize the moment and make both of mine.  One in pink and one in green as when I looked at the very limited stash I have here in NZ, I discovered I had most in those two colours. I didn't have any solid green fabric so chose one which has a butterfly design that I think stands out fairly well from the surrounding logs.

Here is the green one which my computer has unhelpfully turned around so that the dogs and sheep aren't walking along the horizontal.

 

I have made loads of log cabin blocks before but never any this size!

I will mail them back to the UK when I am next in town.

 

My husband went fishing with our next door neighbour yesterday and caught some gurnard, my favourite fish. It was absolutely delicious. I made a dish of roasted vegetables to accompany the fish - all the veggies (pumpkin, onion, green and yellow courgettes) were from the same neighbour's garden.  So, a VERY local meal!

 

 

 

 

There is no such thing as a mistake

A remark Bonnie Hunter made in her last Quilt Cam rang a few bells in my head.  She said that she wasn't too precious about points meeting and being perfect and would fudge if she could.  This is my way of thinking too - life is too short to agonise over perfect points and I am not concerned about the Quilt Police!

Many years ago I had the good fortune to attend a lecture by British quilter Dorothy Stapleton.  She has a wonderfully quirky style of quilting, some of them almost cartoons. She uses a lot of free motion machine writing on her quilts and makes scenes using small Log cabin blocks.  I bought her book called "Log Cabin Landscapes" and made the following wallhanging:

 

A French house set in a garden.

 

There are some great ideas in her books - I recommend them to you.

 

One of the things I remember Dorothy saying in her lecture was that "There is no such thing as a mistake - it's just a design opportunity".

 

I have never forgotten that sentence and have put it into practise so many times over the last few years.

If points don't meet ( for instance in pinwheels) cover "the mistake" with a button or an appliqued heart or flower or whatever fits in with the theme of the quilt.

 

Back in 1999 I made five single bed quilts for the 5 great nieces and nephews that I had then (lots more since!)

 

As I was quilting one of them I discovered my seam stitching had come apart in a couple of places. What to do?  The quilt contained various ladybird novelty prints so I fussy cut and fusible webbed a few ladybirds and dotted them around the quilt top, making sure two of them covered my poor seams. Then I hand blanket stitched them and my "mistakes" became attractive "design opportunities"!

The quilt has stood up to years of wear and tear and washing so the appliqued ladybirds did their job.

 

Another design opportunity came when I made a very colourful Log Cabin quilt for a friend's birthday.  Again, at the last moment I discovered a couple of shonky seams when I was hand quilting.  This time I appliqued hearts made from red fabrics and bound the whole quilt in the same red fabric.  Worked a treat and looked as though that had been my design from the very beginning.

 

Thinking about quilts I made years ago reminded me of a quilt I made back in June 2004. 

The Patchwork Group I have belonged to since 1997 had a challenge.  We  all made the same block in yellow and green fabrics of our choice (so long ago I can't remember how many blocks we made and swapped) but eventually we put them together with cream sashing.  I chose a cream background with gold Chinese looking writing.  A long time before text prints were invented.

 

I decided to add appliqued ivy leaves, creating the leaf templates by drawing round ivy leaves from my garden .  I also added large olive green buttons which came from my husband's aunt's sewing box.  She had died two years before so they were a reminder of her.

 

I called the quilt "Ties that Bind" which I felt was very apt at the time, as the quilt blocks bound together the members of the Patchwork Group along with memories of Aunty. Since then two of the ladies in my Patchwork Group have died, one quite recently, so the quilt is even more poignant.

 

Here it is:

 

And a close up of the hand quilting, ivy leaves and buttons:

 

 

Quilts are an amazing vehicle for memories and therefore very precious.