Among my souvenirs {The Pymble Quilt}

I have another quilt to share with you before I fold it up and pop it into a removalist box to do what quilts do best: protect things that are rather fragile (whether they’re animate or inanimate).

The Pymble Quilt isn’t the work of my hands. It was a gift, made for me by many beautiful friends from St Swithun’s Anglican Church at Pymble in Sydney as a farewell gift. The year was 1992, my husband had been the rector there for 10 years, and we were moving on to St Andrew’s Cathedral where he would take up the position of Dean of Sydney.

This quilt holds so many memories of our time living at Pymble!

It was during that time I had my first travel article published after a particularly wonderful stay in Florence. My friend Shirley chose to embroider the Duomo, adding the final sentence of my article.

Deirdre made this one, representing our playgroup. She sneakily enlisted my mother’s help to get me to hand over some scraps from my own fabric stash.

Roey knows I always need to be reminded of this. We’re still firm friends, by the way. In fact I’ll be having lunch with her tomorrow.

The comfortable house that was home to us and our three children for 10 years. Joy embroidered this.

Jane’s cross stitch friendship hearts remind me of so many friends.

Melanie’s silk ribbon rosebuds must have taken many hours!

My initials have never been represented as elegantly as here in this block embroidered by Sandy.

And just in case I should forget who was responsible for each block as I grow older, someone thoughtfully embroidered this grid on the quilt backing.

Many others, less confident about sewing a block by themselves, still managed to make a few hand quilting stitches, and their names were embroidered on a pick satin ribbon and sewn to the backing as well.

For 21 years the Pymble Quilt has hung in pride of place on walls in our two subsequent homes, but as I’m downsizing rather drastically I doubt there will be a large enough wall to hang it in my next home.

Perhaps I’ll finally wrap myself in it, and it can protect this rather fragile quilter.

 Di

In breaking news…

It seems my Daisy a Day quilt is in the shortlist for Viewers’ Choice in the Bloggers’ Quilt Show currently being run by Amy of Amy’s Creative Side!

It’s not a very short shortlist, and in very distinguished company but I’m excited just to have made it this far.

However, if you’d like to have a look at the 24 finalists {or even vote for Snippets ‘n’ Scraps} you could click here.

Daisy a Day is entered in the Favourite Bed Quilt category (it’s number 51)

Voting finishes on Friday 30th May.

Thank you!

 Di

May Photo a Day Digest 2

Day 7 – Something beginning with F

Fez, on a market stall in Jerusalem last year.

Day 8 – Shape

Circle

Day 9 – A snack

Day 10 – Stars

On fabric, of course.

Day 11 – A smile

That’s Mr J’s specialty.

Day 12 – Mother

Mine is looking pretty (and pretty great) at 87.

Day 13 – Sunset

Over Sydney Harbour.

 Di

Bloggers’ Quilt Festival ~ Daisy a Day

I’m a little late to the party, as usual, but I just couldn’t resist joining in the fun of Amy’s Bloggers’ Quilt Festival again. Twice a year she hosts this mammoth event attracting some of the finest show-and-tell you’ll see in the entire quilting blogosphere.

After my debut last year I’m back again, this time sharing my all-time favourite quilt (so far!), Daisy a Day. I’m entering it in the Bed Quilt category.

The moment I saw this design by Sandra Dart in Australian Patchwork & Quilting Vol 19 No 7 I knew I had to make it. Hers was called Waiting for Russell, but I named mine Daisy a Day because to me it looked like a carpet of daisies.  It’s also traditionally been known as Tea Leaves, Lafayette Orange Peel and Lover’s Knot.

There’s something about those petal shapes and the round, secondary patterns that’s just a delight to look at, and the idea of a pieced version of this classic Orange Peel shape rather than the popular applique version really appealed to me.

For my background I used a white-on-white spot, and then I hit my humungous scrap bag for some of the brightest, happiest fabrics I could find for the “petals” – Kaffe Fassett brights, jazzy stripes, dots, florals, even geometrics. In they went!

I used a 12 inch Tea Leaves template by Ardco, which I bought here. The rough, grippy underside made cutting the shapes easy on my sandpaper board.

It took me just 18 months to make the quilt top and I loved every minute of this journey. It lifted the spirits to look at these pretties every day!

The decision to hand- rather than machine-quilt was an easy one. I wanted my quilt to have a soft texture with the quilting visible, so I quilted in the white spaces 1/4 inch inside the seams.

With so many pieces to quilt I was worried I could easily miss one (or ten!) so I pinned every white space with a safety pin, counting them as I went. Then it was simply a matter of pulling out the pins as I went and, so that I could see my progress, I marked off the pins on a card as I went.

Amazingly it only took me 5 weeks to hand quilt this queen sized bed quilt.

 

With such a riot of colour in the petals I could have used just about any shade for the binding, but as usual bright pink called to me the loudest!

Stats:
88 in x 96 in (approx)
Daisy petals - Kaffe Fassett brights, along with other bright, modern scraps.
Background fabric - White tone-on-tone spot from the Polka Party III range by Holly Holderman for Lakehouse Drygoods
Warm & White Cotton batting.
Pieced and quilted by me by hand using Aurifil 40 weight thread in white (2024).

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Now off you go and enjoy all the other quilts in this fun Bloggers’ Quilt Festival for Spring 2013. The Bed Quilt category is here but there are plenty of other categories too.

Pick your favourites because next week you’ll be able to cast your vote for the best quilt in each category as well as Viewers’ Choice. And you can win for just leaving a comment on Amy’s blog.

Go on. You can do it while you drink your cuppa, and you won’t get sore feet looking at the exhibits .

Di

You don’t see this very often

It’s unusual not to see tables piled high with finished quilts at our St Mark’s Quilters monthly workshops, but last Saturday we had just one finish, Gillian’s colourful kindy quilt made from a fun space themed panel.

 

But never fear, there was activity aplenty as Blankets of Love (for RPA Newborn Care) and kindy quilts (for the KU Marcia Burgess Autism Specific Kindy at Liverpool) were planned and cut…

Pieced

 

 

 

 

 

Quilted

 

Bound

 

and admired.

 

 

Perdita made this magnificent Double Irish Chain quilt for her daughter and, at our insistence, brought it along for “Show and Tell”.

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Finally, two more things you don’t see very often…

Someone (Cath) so fanatical about the colour purple that she has matching  iphone and ipad covers, and a thread bin, scarf, spectacles and rolling luggage all colour co-ordinated.

And a rare shot, taken by Cath, of me working on my latest quilt for The Marcia.

Di