Colourful birds

No, not my English Quilt friends Rae, Gail and Anne

Jill hosted our sewing day this month, and there was plenty of colour, both in the amazing birdlife visiting her garden throughout the day, and in the projects everyone was working on.

As one for whom the local wildlife in our suburb, not far from the CBD, consists pretty much of the cat at the foot of the bed, Chester the world’s best labrador, and the occasional cockroach disappearing under the door, I was entranced by the king parrots, pink galahs and rainbow lorikeets in Jill’s leafy lower north shore environs.

Sitting inside around Jill’s cosy fire, six of us stitched away at various projects.

Rae managed to finish off the hand quilting on this exquisite Japanese quilt made from the leftovers of a much bigger quilt currently being machine quilted (watch this space!).

Gail, Jill, Robbie, Anne and I worked on our pieced version of the Joseph’s Coat quilt, using Ardco templates in Tea Leaf design.

Gail’s using Liberty fabrics, including some of the reproduction fabrics produced for the Victoria & Albert Quilt Exhibition last year.

Jill’s rich  earthy brown is the perfect foil for her aquas and ultramarines.

You might recall I’m using mostly Kaffe Fassett fabrics in mine, with a white spotty tone-on-tone for the background.

Robbie’s petals are in delicate pastels.

And Anne’s using Kaffes too, but in a palette of blues.

Because we can never have just one project on the go, Anne also brought along her applique medallion for the Lynne Alchin quilt, Laurel’s Stars.

And Jill showed us the blocks she’s been making for Chris Jurd’s beautiful quilt Deauville, from Quilter’s Companion.

Four of us have made various adaptations of the Frederika Josephson quilt (seen in Dr Annette Gero’s book The Fabric of Society) so it was somewhat appropriate that from Jill’s deck we could look across the bay to the land on which Frederika Josephson and her husband Emmanuel lived from 1853 to 1873 in their house, Riverview Cottage.

Di