Thank you!

Brrrrrr!! Big Ted and I nearly froze our little socks off as we set out very early on Monday morning for the Card Day organised by the Rose Bay Committee for St Luke’s Care.

After sewing, knitting, and stuffing* toys for weeks (and weeks!) Di B and I had stuffed* her car to the limit with our treasures, tables, hangers and all the paraphernalia  for our stall, and we were just a little excited once we had it all laid out. So excited, in fact, that we completely forgot to ask someone to take a photo of the two of us on the day!

We had lots of help…

Others on the Committee had made those cute little monster softies, and cooked delicious meringues, cheese biscuits, marmalades and chutneys, and Di B’s mum, Margaret, had made jars and jars of her lemon butter and green tomato pickles (and she grew the lemons and tomatoes herself!).

Two of our St Mark’s Quilters (also Committee members) helped too - Di C donated four beautifully made baby quilts, and Moo made four of her baby playmats in bright fun fabrics, as she does every year.

Thank you everyone!

Even the job of keeping our money safe through the day was made easier with the multi-pocketed sewing aprons Linda gave us a couple of years ago.

Finally, you – yes YOU, my wonderful bloggy friends – are to be thanked for all your encouraging comments, support, prayers and general warm fuzzies. Mwah!!! XXXX

The craft stall was a HUGE success this year, and raised MUCH more for St Luke’s than it ever has before. Indeed, the entire fundraising event yielded a great result and will enable the hospital to buy more hand-held scanners to use with their state-of-the-art computerised sterilising system.

* * * * *

And another Thank You, this time to all of you who were kind enough to vote for my quilt “Alhambra Romance” in the “Favourite Applique Quilt” section of the latest Bloggers’ Quilt Festival run by Amy of Amy’s Creative Side. My quilt didn’t win, but it was a thrill just to have made it into the finalists.

Amy will be featuring interviews on her blog with some of the entrants, and if you keep watching one day you might see a mention of someone you know

Di

* Just quietly, we were rather stuffed by the end of the day too!

Bloggers’ Quilt Festival–now it’s nomination time!

What a flurry of fabulous flaunts!

Pop on over to Amy’s Creative Side (you know you want to!) and take a look at the almost 600 quilts that quiltmaking bloggers the world over have entered in the Bloggers’ Spring Quilt Festival.  Make sure you’ve made yourself a nice cuppa, and a chocky bikkie or two, because you’re going to be there quite some time clicking on all those Mr Linky links.

Even if you haven’t entered a quilt you can still win a prize in Amy’s Random Giveaway just by leaving a comment at the end of her blog post. You’ll be in with a chance for one of the HUGE array of prizes any quilter would love! What generous sponsors!

 

The Bloggers’ Quilt Festival has now entered stage 2.

It’s Nomination time, so if you feel like nominating my quilt in the hand quilted or hand applique category (or any other category you think it qualifies for) I promise I won’t stand in your way . You can read more about “Alhambra Romance” here, and it’s entry #313 in the festival.

Here’s the Nomination form .

I love how Amy has created lots and lots of categories. She’s really trying hard to give everyone a chance.

Or perhaps I could just borrow my beautiful daughter-in-law’s red shoes (in the photo above), close my eyes, click my heels together and make a wish…?

Di

Why not!

That’s exactly what I said, to no-one in particular, when I read that Amy (of Amy’s Creative Side) was once again holding her Bloggers’ Quilt Festival.

So, inspired by my dear friend Linda’s win – but in no way placing myself in her league! – I’m entering “Alhambra Romance”.

Please excuse me if you’ve seen it before, but since I tend to take the scenic route when I make a quilt I don’t have a huge pile of finished works to choose from, and this one is definitely one of my favourites.

When I offered to make my son and soon-to-be-daughter-in-law a wedding quilt I expected them to ask for a nice, simple modern quilt, not something along the lines of this tiled wall they had seen at the Alhambra in Spain. Gulp!

It’s amazing what a Mum will do out of love for her offspring, and with little more than a deep breath (but with a sinking feeling inside) this mathematically challenged Mum tackled the geometry involved in drawing up a grid for the tile placement on this over-all design that had inspired Escher’s art!

Over a period of around 5 months I hand appliqued each tile onto the single quilt-sized piece of background fabric, leaving narrow spaces in between to look like grouting, and the quilt travelled with me as my handwork on an extended holiday to Greece, Egypt, Jordan, Italy, France and England. Some of those tiles were stitched in places as romantic as a café beside the Grand Canal in Venice, and as unromantic as a hospital in Cairo (don’t ask)!

Finally, I hand quilted around each tile and finished the quilt just in time for their wedding.

I think they liked it!

Now I’m off to check out all the other fantastic quilts in the Bloggers’ Spring Quilt Festival – are you coming too?

 

Di

Please vote for my quilt in the Aurilil Thread Quilt Contest

(I wasn’t going to ask, but…) If you liked my Alhambra Romance Quilt you might be interested in knowing I’ve entered it in the Aurifil Thread Quilt Contest. Please click here if you’d like to see it again and would like to give it a vote.

The competition ends tomorrow.

Thank you very much,

Di

Alhambra Romance

Have you ever looked back at something you achieved and asked yourself “How did I ever do it?”

Yesterday my sister-in-law, Sheridan, currently wandering around Spain, sent me this photo she’d just taken of an intricately tiled wall at the Alhambra in Granada.

I’ve never stood in front of that wall, never even been to Spain - but ah, the memories!

Back in 2005 I offered to make a wedding quilt for my son and future daughter-in-law. They happily accepted and I slid a small pile of quilting magazines in their direction for them to choose a design.

“Not necessary!” they protested. What they would really love would be a quilt inspired by this wall in the Alhambra, because it was while they were on a holiday in Spain that they became officially engaged.

Gulp!

Oh, how I wished I’d paid more attention in maths at school as I scribbled and doodled, studied tessellations and lost a lot of sleep trying to draft a pattern. I was quite pleased with myself when I finally managed to reduce the tessellations to a grid of equilateral triangles, and draft the little curvy swoosh shapes.

I decided to make “tiles” of the positive shapes (chocolate, green, blue and rust) as well as the negative spaces (beige), and after marking my whole cloth background fabric with the triangle grid I planned to applique these “tiles” across the cloth leaving narrow spaces in between to represent the grouting. Using hand-dyes for my tiles gave them a more realistic appearance, I think.

But the challenge of creating the wedding quilt didn’t stop there. I pre-cut all the tiles, pressed them to cardboard templates using spray starch, and bagged them up. Then I took the whole kit in my cabin bag on a 3 month long service leave holiday my DH and I took across Europe and the Middle East.

“Alhambra Romance” was stitched in some amazing locations including a café beside the Grand Canal in Venice, a villa in the Tuscan countryside, the terrace of a hotel near Petra in Jordan - and a ward in a Cairo hospital where I was admitted (initially to intensive care) with severe dysentery.

If these two dear people had not given me a nudge I would never have ventured so far out of my quilt-making comfort zone, and I would never have experienced the absolute exhilaration of clearing those hurdles and finishing such a special quilt.

Have you ever made a quilt that took you totally out of your comfort zone? How did it feel?

Di