Comings and goings

Just because I’ve not been around here much doesn’t mean my life has become completely bereft of fun. Quite the opposite, in fact! I will probably take a couple of posts to tell a few stories, but I might start with last week.

Last week I went to Sydney for my annual sojourn to the Sydney Quilt Show, and this is the fifth time I’ve entered. I love this quilt show. Heck, I love this quilt guild! I always have the best time catching up with my besties. I feel like I belong there - it’s kind of hard to describe, but everyone there is so open and warm. It almost makes me want to move closer to Sydney. Joking - I love Canberra too much. But coming up here for the week each year is always a great holiday and a break from the everyday, plus I will never complain about a week off work!

My quilt this year is called “365 Stars Around the Sun” and is made from 365 hexagon stars that I made from birthday to birthday. There are a lot of meaningful blocks - made to represent friends that passed away, moments with my family and friends, walks in nature - you name it. This all makes it an incredibly personal quilt and it has shot up the charts to be my number one. I can’t wait to hang it when it finally comes home.

The entire top was pieced by hand using the English Paper piecing technique. I machine quilted it with vertical lines 6/16th inches apart and hand quilted the centre blocks with Perle 8 thread.

A couple of weeks before I started quilting  the quilt, I was decluttering my dress fabric stash and rediscovered a cotton-linen fabric designed by Melody Miller, originally intended for a skirt. I absolutely love the fabric but it would have been a horrible skirt on me as its definitely not my colour. But it became a fabulous quilt backing!

 

Sadly I managed to acquire both a virus and a pretty painful condition in my hands and thumbs called DeQuervain’s Tenosynovitis just as I was about to start the quilting - so the straight lines were a struggle to do without hurting myself further. 

But I did it, and I've promised myself I wouldn’t do any hand stitching for a while, but not before I performed a happy dance when it was all finished. 

So Sydney last week was great. I spent some time volunteering at the show and also at The Applique Guild of Australia table in the guilds area. I didn't need to buy anything except pins,  new ergo scissors and a cutting ruler, but in the end I bought just one piece of fabric and a heck of a lot of coffee! The quilt show was incredible - you just can't believe the amount of talent on display until you actually go to one of the Sydney shows. 

My hoop sample has been on display at the quilt show entrance this week again so that’s always a thrill. I really should offer to make another one sometime soon.

On Wednesday night I attended Blak Box at Barangaroo with a friend. It was amazing.

And on Friday night I headed to the Sydney Opera House to head the Central Australian Aboriginal Women's Choir. Most amazing night of my life.

I’ll leave you with a photo from a rainy Tuesday when Rachael met me at my favourite slice of heaven, The Fabric Store in Surry Hills. What a couple of goofballs! Honestly though, she’s one of my favourite people in the world so it’s always a blast getting together. One day we will get the pink dumplings we ordered, and not the green ones, hey Rachael? ;)

Actually I’ll leave you with one more photo - of a spectacular sunset as seen from my back door a couple of weeks ago. 

Back sometime soon with stories on my trip to the Blue Mountains ... for quilting of course! 

Lucy Boston went to the circus, and then she went to Sydney

Hey hey chickadees! How's everything going? Stuff is pretty cool here. Went to Fiji, went to Sydney - you know, just a typical year!

For four years now I have entered the Sydney Quilt Show, and it's always a blast. I have made the BEST quilting friends thanks to the Sydney show. For me it's worth the effort and expense of taking time off work and staying in Sydney for at least 5 days so I can firstly have a little holiday and me-time, and secondly so I have the time to catch up with everyone at the show! This year was a little different - my lovely mum decided to fly down from Cairns and stay for a few days, which was just wonderful! She'd never been to a big quilt show before, and she also got to meet my friends (and she loved every single one of them).



This year I decided to finally finish my Patchwork of the Crosses quilt and enter it. This pattern is a little different to the typical Lucy Boston version however - instead of one inch pieces, it used 1 1/2 inch pieces, and the blocks are also appliqued onto a background, not joined. I bought the pattern from the designer Cherry Pie Designs, at the last ever Darling Harbour show before they demolished the convention centre, and showed it at the first ever exhibition at the new Darling Harbour convention centre.



I was fairly pleased with how Lucy came together as a top. The striped border was thanks to my stubborness at being obnoxious about my fabric choices, my husband's insistence that a red and white circus stripe would be perfect, and the latest Tula Pink tent stripes hitting the quilt store at the exact same time. I honestly thought, on getting home, that I'd made a mistake getting red and cream, and not red and white, but it kinda turned out perfect! (Perfectly obnoxious, that is!)



The quilting was when things went pear shaped. I started quilting a diagonal line from the top corner to the middle, turning 90 degrees towards the other corner. And then I repeated it every 3/8 inch. This started going a bit awry towards the middle of the section, but I persevered. By the time I got back from Fiji in early June, I finished off that first section and was faced with a massive bulge at the middle of the side border. So I spent two days unpicking it all - one quarter of the quilt, just gone. The bias blocks and the fact I hadn't cut out the fabric at the back of the applique had done me in, creating puckers and bulges, and if it hadn't been for mum coming all that way to see me and my quilt I would have withdrawn it from the show.

I ended up quilting horizontal straight lines 3/8 inch apart, and it turned out a lot better than I expected! It's not at all perfect, but I don't do perfect, and I was just happy it was done and not too much of an embarrassment to be hanging at Australia's biggest quilt show.

Phew.

And then this happened.



I will admit I did get a phone call from QuiltNSW the day before I left for Sydney. And I will admit I was really shocked at getting that phone call, especially given my category - Pieced Quilts, Amateur, predominantly machine quilted - seemed to have a really large number of entries (33) in it. Perhaps I'd won the meat tray*. Or they'd just made a massive mistake and had called the wrong Michelle.



It was pretty sweet having mum there with me when they called my name out at the awards ceremony on day 1. She was so excited, as was I. I think I was just in shock that this had happened for the second year in a row, but the difference was that last year I knew my quilt was awesome. This year I was happy just to have entered it!



So yeah, there she is. Lucy Boston who went to the circus one day, and to Sydney the next, and earned a pink and red ribbon for her efforts.

While I'm talking about the Sydney Quilt Show (which was awesome by the way - so much colour! 410 amazing quilts!), I'll tell you more about the hoop display that QuiltNSW erects near the front entrance of the show. Last year was the first year they'd done it and it was so successful and got people talking about the different techniques and styles on show. I was asked to submit a hoop quilt of my own for this year's show, so I replicated my Across the Universe quilt but on a much smaller scale.



And here are the some of the other hoops - pretty chuffed that one of the hoops that my quilting bestie Rachaeldaisy made was hanging close by mine. I'm imagining they never stopped talking, much like the two of us :)





I think this post is long enough now, so I won't share with you the other quilts at the show. Hopefully soon though!

I haven't entered the Canberra Quilters Exhibition this year, for a number of reasons, so Lucy is now safely hanging on our living room wall at home, above my nana's table, and behind the orange sofa. She seems pretty happy, and she has increased the happiness in that room ten-fold.



*there's no meat tray, but there should be.

Sydney Quilt Show

Well hi there! It's been almost 5 months since my last post. Life got a little, ah... well I won't say "busy" but a better word is "distracted".  My husband had a second hip surgery in early February and then had (and still has) some pretty serious complications, so there was that. And I started a new job in an entirely new field, so there was that too. And I'm running the house single handed and becoming a master of the meal prep, so again. And I entered the Sydney Quilt Show with a quilt that wasn't even a finished top yet.

(People (of the flummoxed type, I expect) sometimes ask why I enter quilt shows given that while I am obsessed with quilting, I don't take the whole exhibition and judging thing or even quilting seriously. AT ALL.  Look people - if you haven't worked it out yet, it's so I have a reason to finish quilts.)

So I entered the quilt show with an unfinished quilt, and I worked really, really hard to finish it. And it totally paid off, because not only did I get a quilt finished, I also got this!



I got a phone call from the President on the Sunday morning before the show that I had won "something" and to say I was shocked would be an understatement. In fact, when I was standing with my friends at the awards ceremony last Wednesday I was convinced, after they had called out the judges commendations for the small or wall quilt (amateur) category, that they had made a mistake in calling me, so sure was I that it must be one of those awards. Nope. Second.



Yep. Chuffed.



The quilt is called Seven Garden Maze and was designed by my good friend Cathy Miller, also known as the Singing Quilter.  She made hers originally in silk dupioni and it is STUNNING.  I decided to pick homespun for my version (solids, the cool kids call it) except for the ocean blue which is a Kaffe Fassett shot cotton. The borders of each maze are not black, but very dark brown (from memory Kona Espresso).



Each hexagon is 1/2 inch. I machine quilted each wedge from side to side to form it's own secondary labyrinth. I also faced it with 1/2 hexagons because quite clearly I was insane - just this sewing of facings took me a couple of weeks. I handed in the quilt to the person-before-the-dropoff-person just in time.



So Sydney! It was pretty spectacular. I spent 6 days up there, and unlike last year I didn't injure my back the night before, or get laryngitis while I was there. So this year I got to talk! And walk! And spend heaps of time with friends new and old. I had a fantastic time. I spent three days at the quilt show, mostly volunteering, with the highlight being day one. A group of us friends stood together at the awards ceremony, and then this happened (and this is only a few of us who won ribbons - aren't we a talented bunch?)...







The biggest surprise though was when my lovely friend Rachaeldaisy won best of show! I've stolen this photo quite blatantly from the guild's Facebook page, because it is just so classic (and we were all a bit emotional!).



What else about Sydney? Oh there is so much. I took photos of quilts but don't have permission from the makers to post them (because I forgot to ask), so instead if you want to see some winning quilts (including Rachael's amazing masterpiece) go to the QuiltNSW website.

Oh, and one last thing. I decided to start another new thing (all the other new things are meant to be in a post all of their own, there are so many) and this new thing is the Panama Pyramids sewalong. Linda Collins from Quilts in the Barn is running the sewalong and while she was working at the Quiltmania stand during the show, she brought along the original antique quilt that launched a 590 member sewalong. And I got to hold it and stroke it and really appreciate that amazing yellow. Aren't I lucky? It's absolutely beautiful.



It was a fantastic show. Heck - it was a fantastic week! A friend came to stay for a couple of days early on and we went to the Isabella Blow and Collette Dinnigan exhibitions. I had dinner with friends, and the Sydney Spoolettes. I met up with my quilting friends at the show each day, met some online friends finally, had a little meet up with some beautiful women from The Applique Guild of Australia who were visiting the show and I got to take the first and last ferries from Circular Quay with my friends Di and Di most days.



By Saturday I was buggered and so ready to go home so I got to the airport a bit earlier and sat in the sun at Gate 19 and stitched some of Chester Criswell while watching the planes take off and land. That was nice. I might have snoozed a bit. And since I got home to Canberra I have been absolutely freezing after the warmth in Sydney. But I can't wait for next year.

I've entered the Canberra quilt show in August with another unfinished work in progress. I have 32 days to finish it. And it's queen sized. Ha.

Finished: Maple leaf quilt

All the way back in 2011, there was a little exhibition in New York which displayed over 600 red and white quilts from the one private collection. The event lit up the online quilting world and all over were amazing visions of red and white vintage quilts in cabinets, and hanging from the very tall ceilings. It was just breathtaking (and I so wish I had been there to see it!).

So when The Quilters' Guild of NSW announced that would have a special category in 2015 for red and white quilts, I knew I had to make one and exhibit it! My original plan was for an improv art quilt inspired by a particular favourite work of mine by Piet Mondrian, but even though I sketched it out, bought all the fabric and made several blocks, it just wasn't coming together on the design wall so I scrapped the idea.

In the end I went for a simple design using the fabric and quilting to create the impact, and I am so glad I did. Friends, meet my red and white quilt, which I've named North-West.

No, I did not name it after a Kardashian baby. No, I did not even know who the Kardashians were until recently, and I certainly didn't know there was some poor child named North West or Drain Pipe or something.

(Seriously though, Drain Pipe would be a pretty cool Kardashian name)

I used a simple maple leaf block. Can I just say how much I love this block? I have no idea if there was a faster way of making it, but I worked it out in my head and then realised it needed a stem, so I just flew by the seat of my pants on that too. Everything was made too big and trimmed down to size using my Bloc-Loc ruler (the greatest tool ever invented for quilters).

Anyone who knows me will know that red is my favourite colour. So I thought I had quite a substantial red stash. Turns out I did not. I had red with other colours, but not enough reds that "read as red" which was one of the quilt show rules. So my good friend Bron allowed me to raid her stash one afternoon. I cut enough fabric for four blocks (thanks Bron) and then realised much later that I hadn't cut any stalks out. Wah! But I don't mind embracing the quirky in quilting, so I added some of my favourite ever text fabric by Kumiko Fujita so that each of Bron's leaf stems has a little message.

All 25 blocks of the top came together very quickly, and then my battle was how to quilt it. I've mentioned before that I had stupidly described the quilting as "swirling through the leaves" in the catalogue description, but in the end I didn't have it in my to do circular or curvy quilting. This quilt was screaming out for directional straight lines in a thicker thread, so I used Aurifil 28/2 weight thread in 2024 White.

I started from the middle edge of the quilt and turned the quilt 90 degrees at the middle point and made my way back to the other edge. I was after an arrow in the north-west direction. Sigh. You just can't take the geographer out of the geography department. I echoed this design every half inch. I wasn't intent on perfection and was happy for some wobbles here and there as it gives the leaves more movement, like they are about to blow away (I don't know where they'd blow. East South East perhaps? Down the Drain Pipe?)

This half inch quilting was going really well. It was mindless, I could meditate or listen to music ... and then I realised I was going to run out of thread. And I didn't have any way of getting more of that thread. And also I was really, really getting sick of the half inch thing. So in the last row of blocks at the North and West side, I quilted straight lines an inch apart, intersecting them within the furthest most north-west block (known to non-geographers as the top left hand block).

And the concept worked really well! It definitely prevented the quilt from looking too boring and this is where using the Aurifil thread in the heavier weight definitely paid off.

Here's the back. I don't know why I'm showing you. It's pretty boring but I like how you can see the shape of the blocks through the back.

The label however is not boring. It was provided by the Guild when I got my acceptance letter and I love it. It's based on Maree Blanchard's red and white quilt exhibited at the 2013 show. Maree sadly passed away earlier this year, but she and Bob James still had a beautiful red and white quilt in the show.

As for the show, well what can I say? It was spectacular. I managed to get laryngitis just before the show and I wish I'd been able to ask permission from the quilters there to show you more quilts ina  blog post.

I was lucky enough to do white glove duty in  the Red and White category section on the first day of the show. There were over 110 quilts in that category! I did not intend to dress to match the quilts but there you have it. It was really busy and everyone loved seeing the quilts. If you want to see more of the winning quilts, check them out here.

What else can I say about this quilt other than I absolutely love it? Even though it's been made with my usual simple block design, the fabric selections and the limits of a red and white palette make it quite different to my usual quilts which tend to be a cacophony of fabric and colour. Because of my general dislike of sashing, there is nowhere for the eye to rest, but you also get some interesting secondary patterns in there too. I don't think this maple leaf quilt will be my last, do you?

Details 

Pattern: Traditional maple leaf pattern
Size: 60 " by 60 " (12 inch blocks)

Fabric: Scrappy "reads as white" background, and fabrics from my stash and Bron's stash for the "reads as red" leaves

Quilting: Straight line quilting done by me

Thread: pieced with Rasant, quilted with Aurifil 28/2 Weight thread.

Batting: 100% white cotton

Started: January 2015

Finished: June 2015