It’s that time of year again

To everyone else it’s a Bridge Day (as in playing cards), one of two annual fundraisers staged by the Rose Bay Committee for St Luke’s Care.

But to Team Di it’s our opportunity to support St Luke’s Care through the craft stall where every dollar goes to this excellent hospital and aged care facility.

Di B and I usually spend several months stitching, knitting, crocheting and embroidering items we hope will appeal to the ladies who come to play bridge. Many hands make it work, adding to our stock handmade items, lots of home-made marmalades, jams and relishes, and biscuits and petits fours.

Last year we raised $3,500 on the craft stall alone, and although we haven’t been able to give so much time to creating goods this year it looks as if we’ve still raised a very respectable amount.

Padded coathangers are a perennial bestseller, and we has lots of fabric styles, from modern to traditional.

 

Di B made a single Sit Me Up Donut and we placed our ‘model’, Lucy, inside to show how a baby fits in it.

Her Spot the Dog toy bag was eye-catching on the stall.

These cute kitchen memo boards made with blackboard fabric were new this year.

And it just wouldn’t be a craft stall without some of Di B’s segmented baby balls, perfect for little hands to grasp.

My owl backpack buddies are meant to hang from a school backpack and help to easily identify whose it is.

 

A little fine embroidery sells well too, and this was a hankerchief keeper that I bought with the drawn thread word already done, and then I embellished it myself with a shadow embroidered bow.

By the time he hit the craft stall this little fellow I embroidered was also sporting a sweet satin ribbon tied in a bow round his neck.

More of my bears, crocheted this time.

Our non-committee friends were generous with their talents and time too. Isabella made these bright Scandanavian dolls, along with some pretty bird softies. Lyn made some of her trademark crochet brooches, and Gail made several pairs of little girl’s cotton play shorts.

 

 

Here we are, Team Di, awaiting the arrival of our shoppers bridge players.

 Di

To Tasmania with love

The St Mark’s Quilters came together for our June workshop today under leaden skies and chilly air, thinking of our friends in even colder Dunalley (Tasmania). This town (population little more than 300) lost its school, police station and bakery, as well as  dozens of homes, in a devastating bushfire on 4th January this year.

Two weeks ago, with the assistance of Toll who gave their services for nothing, Di B and I were able to send them a box of 16 bright and cosy quilts made by our group. Here’s how our local newspaper reported our group’s gift.

 

Inside our church hall today we kept warm doing what we love best, monkeying around with fabric and making quilts.

Quilting team Susan and Sophie have been very busy since we last met, and arrived with three sweet little Blankets of Love for RPA Hospital’s Newborn Intensive Care Unit.

 

 

Margaret must have visions of hexagons dancing in front of her eyes after this lot! A pink and a blue Blanket of Love.

Inspired by Di B’s demonstration of the simple Shoo Fly block last month Margaret made all these from primary coloured fabrics in her scrap bins. How effective is that! This quilt, and those that follow, is going to an autistic preschooler at the KU Marcia Burgess Autism Specific and Early Learning Centre (otherwise known as “The Marcia” – for obvious reasons!).

Here’s another scrap quilt (below) from Margaret, using the quilt-as-you-go technique.

Barb’s enjoying having more time to make quilts in her retirement. She arrived with these beauties.

 

 

 

 There’s just too much for one blog post, so please pop on over to the next one.

Di

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

Just slap me (gently) across the face with a fat quarter*

…if I ever again start whining about not being much of a finisher.

Admittedly my big quilt finishes are so rare it’s been rumored there are small principalities where a national holiday’s declared when Di comes to the end of stitching a binding down. But when I trawled back through this year’s photos I couldn’t suppress a tiny “Hooray” of my own.

Hey, small projects count as finishes too – don’t they?

I’ve made sock monkeys (“Stella” for Toni’s Auction for Queensland Flood Relief, and “Blossom” for the St Luke’s Hospital fundraiser).  Along with my friends Di B and Gail I made origami bags for the Gumtree Designers’ New Beginnings appeal after the QLD floods.

In addition, for the St Luke’s Hospital (Potts Point) fundraising event mid-year I crocheted and knitted baby bootees and beanies, sewed pincushions and pink origami bags embroidered with grub roses, and created a ‘parliament’ of cute little sock owls.

I sent off two cosy knitted cowls to Sarah, shivering with the approach of winter in the USA – they arrived there just a day before she left for tropical Botswana (but that’s another story!). My dear friends Moo and Margaret scored mug mats for their birthdays this year, and there were baby singlets appliqueed with an elephant, a teddy bear and a ladybug for our new grandson, Jack.

And there were just enough quilt finishes to keep those principalities happy . I had great fun making the red, white and navy hippo quilt for Jack, and tried my hand at a quilt-as-you-go scrappy quilt that went, along with others from St Mark’s Quilters, to help victims of the Christchurch (NZ) earthquake.

I managed to complete several Blankets of Love for RPA Newborn Care, and put the finishing touches on my Scrappy Hexagons quilt which hung in the Victorian Quilters’ Fabric of Society Challenge at the Melbourne Craft and Quilt Fair in July.

Then there were the projects Di B and I worked on together, though when I think back to our stitching days throughout the year I’m amazed we were so productive with all the fun and laughter going on.

We delved deep into our scrap bins for the most colourful and girly fabrics we could find and made a large hourglass-patterned bed quilt for our friend Alicia’s 60th birthday. This was extra-sneaky of us since we’d only just completed a bowtie quilt Alicia had asked us to make for her to give her friend Ian, and she certainly wasn’t expecting to be presented with a quilt of her own at her birthday party in January.

Our St Mark’s Quilters made individual blocks with appliqueed teddy bears which Di and I sewed together into a quilt for the arrival of our Assistant Minister’s new baby boy in the middle of the year.

We quilted and bound a large cheater cloth in time to cover the table in the entrance to St Mark’s for the Advent and Christmas season, and Di helped me sew and machine quilt all the “healing hearts” blocks sent to my mother by Southern Cross Quilters when my father passed away last year. This was a real labour of love.

Finally, there were the cupcake potholders we made as Christmas gifts for our lovely St Mark’s Quilters. Let’s just say the question “Whose bright idea was this, anyway?” might have been uttered a few times, as we tried to wrangle several thicknesses of fabric and batting beneath our sewing machine feet and machine needles constantly broke under the pressure of stitching through Insulbrite. We expended quite a bit of blood, sweat and … laughter on that project .

* Non-quilters, be assured this isn’t some kind of masochistic plea. A fat quarter is just a small piece of fabric (18” x 22”) whose uses include small projects, piecing … and silly hyperbole such as this. 

I have a little more to add to this story about baby Morgan:

One of our St Mark’s Quilters, Ruth, has moved out of town but still makes Blankets of Love for us and keeps up with our doings via this blog. 

I was so excited when, after reading about Morgan, she emailed me this - “You’re not going to believe this! The couple featured were in the cabin next to us on that cruise.” Ruth and her DH shared the same dinner table with Paul and Leanne a couple of times, but Ruth had no idea of the drama that eventually unfolded and was very happy to hear the positive outcome.

What a small world it is – and what an uplifting ending to 2011!

Happy New Year, everyone. God bless you and thank you for reading my ramblings.

Di

Circles of Life

I needed another quilt project like a hole in the head, but when Jenny of Elefantz unveiled her new Block of the Month, Circles of Life, back in June I fell in love with it – and with the fabric range she chose. You might recall I wrote about it here.

(You might need to sit down before you read what I have to tell you next…)

In a complete reversal of my usual form, I’m actually keeping up with each BOM as it appears in my monthly Elefantz home online magazine!!!

 

This is the latest block, Circle of Life.

And these are my two previously finished blocks, Sewing Circle…

…and Circle of Friendship.

Working on these blocks has given me so much pleasure, as I think about the meaningful circles in my life.

It’s also been my pleasure – though in an entirely different way – to make these two blocks as a contribution to Sarah’s gift to Amy.

 

Take a look at Cathy’s blocks here. Sarah has been overwhelmed by the response to her call for blocks, such is the compassion and generosity of quilters the world over. She has more than 160 blocks, but is very happy to accept more.

Email her at sarah@sarahfielke.com for the details.

* * * * * * * * * *

And now I have a special request…

If you live in Blacksburg, Virginia, or know someone who lives there, could you please leave a comment below, with your email details? I’d like to ask you a question. 

Thank you,

Di