We make quilts for all sorts of reasons. This one came under the heading of “because I wanted to”. I have long admired Lone Star quilts, generally hand pieced and traditionally quilted, but it wasn’t until I saw the Plains and Pine Big Sky Star quilt pattern, that I was moved to actually make one. This is almost an old quilt for me. I completed it about a year ago, but just hadn’t blogged about it as it was about to hit the show circuit (where it did pretty well), and I wasn’t in a place to work through what…
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It is currently December, and so quilting plans for the new year have begun to pop into mind. Over the past few years I have been interested in doing a temperature quilt, and so planning this in December, ready to kick off in January seems to be the logical thing. But I am starting with some questions (in no particular order): What is a temperature quilt? First thing first – what is this? When I was growing up, stuck to the wall next to the phone was dad’s rain chart. Each morning he would wander out to the garden and…
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I was influenced. You know when you go to the shows, and watch the demonstrations and write the user case in your head to convince yourself that this is something that you “need”. It has turned out that this thing I bought myself (as a reward for something, could have been surviving a Monday), is worth every cent. I bought myself an AccuQuilt. I now have a collection of dies and a head full of ideas of how I want to use it, both for traditional reasons, but also to have a play with something new and play with colour…
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I have been quilting for decades, but it took me becoming actively involved in my local guild before I would even consider entering my work in an exhibition. The first “exhibition” I entered in was for the completed Down the Rabbit Hole quilt top, with Sarah Fielke. At the end of each year Sarah runs an online gallery-style exhibition for her completed block of the month quilts and quilt tops (from any year). I had managed to keep up with the block of the month journey (2017 must have been a quiet twelve months), so I entered the completed top…
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Over the past few years I have made more of an effort to put my work “out there”, to enter exhibitions or online hanging events, and one of the things I am finding interesting is my own reaction to feedback. I have sat on these thoughts for a while now, over a month, and seriously debated saying something about it. But better out than in. We all know the Quilt Police – or at least have heard of them. Quilt police aren’t exclusively young or old, judgemental comments know no age restriction, but they can be nasty and unwanted and…
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I have always loved antique quilts. Baltimore Quilts, Civil War Quilts, English, Australian, American, Welsh… it has never really mattered where they came from, it is the story that they hold in their stitching which has intrigued me and fascinated me. It is these quilts which drew me to quilting in the first place. But truth be told, I don’t make as many of them as I would like to. I have been looking closely at the Chester Criswell Quilt for a while now after seeing a modern interpretation of one made by Michelle Law (pictured below). I thought, in…
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Inspiration can hit at the most amusing of times. I had wanted to make one of Jen Kingwell’s Steampunk Quilts for quite some time, but hadn’t quite settled on the what theme or the how. SO there I was sitting in a movie theatre bored out of my brain (can’t remember what the movie was now), and thought about some fabric that I had seen someone make a Star Wars themed shirt out of on Instagram. Fussy cutting that, how hard could that be? Turns out I needed a LOT of fabric for this one. Enter the Fandoms. We love…