Bloggers Quilt Festival

Amy is hosting her Fourth Annual Bloggers Quilt Festival.

The quilt I've chosen for the festival is one I made as part of an online class with Tonya at Lazy Gal Quilting. This is the first quilt I've designed from scratch, I had so much fun doing it and it brings me great joy each Christmas when I hung it up.
Tonya had us choose a Christmas carol and extract elements about the holidays that we liked and turning them into a design, and then we used her tutorials to piece the various elements. I love the two colour combinations of purple and orange, and raspberry and lime, so it was a double the fun to put them together. Because it was my world I got to put New Zealand at the centre, and then I used a little old scrap to make Australia and put it off to left - VBG!! Making this quilt has given me a lot more confidence

Do check out the link above to Tonya's website, she's very talented and has lot's of tips and tricks to teach. I'm off to check out all the other quilts in the festival.

Pinehaven Quilt Show

The Pinehaven Quilters Show was at the Expressions Gallery and the quilts just looked stunning in this setting.

Postcards and more show pics

I took part in a spring postcard swap this month which was a lot of fun. I made friends with the man at the local stamp shop because I wanted to have my postcards hand franked, rather than subjecting them to the rigours of NZ Post's machines. Well the stamp man was not only very helpful, but he took a liking to my postcards and paid me to make him two, so I'm grinning from ear to ear.


More pictures from the Wellington Quilters Show at the weekend... these from the "less colourful section" as you can see.




You can see that these two quilts both have ribbons so the judges were more won over by their creaminess than I was. Though I was impressed with the judging for quilting. The awards for excellence in machine quilting (above) and professional longarm (which I didn't photograph) both went to quilts with simple quilting which connected well with the quilt. That didn't seem to be the case with some quilts where the quilting didn't seem to tie into the quilt.

One of the most exciting part of the show was seeing a Phillippa Doyle quilt with old doillies in, and another quilt inspired by her work. My photos didn't turn out very well unfortunately. I will have to change the settings on the camera before the next show.

Wellington Quilters Show

DH and I drove to Wellington on Saturday for a quilt-y day. The first show was Wellington Quilters. There was a lot of colour on show and I enjoyed seeing quite a few scrappy quilts exhibited, wondering if this is a sign of the economic times, or perhaps I'm just noticing them because that is what I like at the moment.


There was also a creamy section but Blogger is on the go-slow that might have to wait for another day. In the mean time I'll save the bright colours.

Sunny Weekend

We have had more than our fair share of rain but this weekend the sun is shining which makes everything feels good in the world. Yesterday was our monthly quilting day and I made good progress quilting the cot quilt I am making for a work friend.


These are the green inchies from last year's swap, mounted on canvas. The flash really picks up the gold paint, it's not quite that bold. This is hanging over my sewing desk now and I'm really enjoying seeing it there.


All this progress makes me feeling like baking something yummy to celebrate!