What have I been up to?

What have I been up to since I last blogged? 

Well I adopted a new cat... Tillie.

I went to the Quilt and Craft Fair held right here in Palmerston North for the first time and saw the 12 x 12 challenge ColourPlay quilts (which amazed me with their quality) and some fabulous merchant stalls:
 

I braved the cold on the Desert Road and went to Quilt Symposium in Taupo...

 ... where I saw Carole's beautiful quilt in the Tutor's exhibition

... and I went to a class in making Structured Fabrics with Dena Crain - I think the class was more structured than my fabric turned out to be but that's okay.  Here is a layout being auditioned.

I had loads of fun in a class with Jenny Bowker working on Shimmering Triangles with Kaffe Fassett fabrics.  Jenny is an incredible tutor who shares lots of inspiration, funny stories, knowledge and above all she rolls with the flow of where each different student is at.

This is one of Jenny's quilts that she brought along for inspiration.

 

The burst of sewing at Symposium left me realising that I have withdrawal symptoms.  I'm on my last paper now for my course and am really looking forward to getting the machine out when I finish at the end of November.

 

Who am I?

I've been away from my blog for such a long time that anyone reading might well be wondering who this person suddenly posting is.   Thanks for sticking with me.  The lure of study has been strong and I've had my head in the books for much of the last 18 months.  And it will continue for the next 6 months too, but my goal is to be finished by July, in time for Quilt Symposium in Taupo.  I have my fingers crossed that I'll get into a Gwen Marston class, and am very excited about the idea of that.

I have done some quilting over summer.   This is a quilt for friend who is having her third child soon.   The greens with a bit of blue are my attempt at neutral.  I bought the fabrics in Taupo during my Christmas holiday and they just glow against the white.  Big shout out to the Janome shop in Wanganui where I found the beautiful white - they have a great selection of fabrics and had three plain whites for me to choose from.

Adapted from a Moda Bakeshop pattern, ready to bind

The back is actually light blue, with left over squares - love the effect of the sunlight making the pinwheels come through.

And these are the colours of my next project, for a colleague who is having a baby girl. 

Keep dropping by, to see if I'm here, I can't be a boring swot forever.

It's been a while

A lovely bloggy friend emailed me to ask if I was alright because it has been so long since I last blogged. I was shocked when I realised how long it has been.

I am fine, just busy with study, which takes up lots of my out of work time.  My quilting time has been cut back severely, and in line with that, so has time for things like blogging.

The picture is a project I've taken out and looked out a couple of times recently.  It's a row quilt from a swap a few years back... probably 2006.  It has some lovely Oriental prints, and I love the deep colours.  It needs some more rows and probably some sashing to pull it together.  One of the rows, the second from the bottom is longer the others so I will have to tweak that.

Potted colour

A gift for a friend, thanks for something generous she did for me.  I planted these petunias in an old copper kettle.  Very pretty.

And another block on my star BOM.  This is block 7 on the pattern.  I skipped ahead because I was impatient to use the green.

Making a list, crossing things off

A couple of months back I scribbled a list of UFOs on a piece of paper and it was alarmingly long.  I thought I would only have a few, or maybe 6, because about 18 months ago I donated a lot of tops to various groups making quilts for charity.  Alas there were 13 projects on the list.  And to be pedantic there are now finished tops on this list because they  are "out of sight and out of mind" down with the quilting machine.

Now it seems like time to do something about the list so I started assessing some of the projects.  I decided I was never really going to make pink shopping bags (using up the fabric leftover from a Christmas gift to my sister 2 or 3 years ago) so I filed the pattern, put the fabric back into stash and crossed the project off my list. One down!

Assessing projects turned out to be very worth while.  It turned out one of the tops was actually finished... so off to quilting with it, and it is off my list. Two down!

Then I came to the quilt described on my list as "Blue/lime panel" with a note "covert to bag".  I dragged it out, decided that it didn't really need to be a wall hanging displaying my ability to quilt different textures on different areas of a panel that I had stitched different sized borders on.  So before I could fold the fabric back up I found my favourite bag pattern and CUT IT UP.  I added some of my own hand-dyed fabric for lining, and used 95% of the panel.  This is the result.

That makes three down!  Only 10 to go - if only they could all be so easy. 

Progress and something to make you smile

I have made some progress on the forgotten star quilt.  These are the next two blocks.  They are interesting blocks to make.  3 down, 10 to go!

Last year I participated in a Quilters Christmas Stocking Swap and one of the gifts in my stocking was this pansy pincushion made from felt.  It makes me smile, it has such a cheerful look.

How did this happen?

Whilst I've been on holiday I've attempted to do some tidying up.  In the process I found an interesting bag in the back of my quilt cupboard, neatly packed with fabric and some printed intructions.  It puzzled me for a while until I unpacked enough of it to realise it was fabric for a queen sized quilt.  I bought this fabric around the time we moved house, which was a little over 3 years ago. This wasn't a simple kit purchase, oh no.  This involved trips to quilt stores in Wanganui, Upper Hutt and Wellington, and I had to print out the instructions from a Blog over the course of a year.  How could I forget this?  How indeed?

About a year ago my friend Sarah (who accompanied me on the Wellington trip) asked me... "Don't you have another quilt that you're making, remember, we bought fabric in Wellington?", and I said "NO" because I couldn't remember what she was talking about.  Now I do!

This project is now top of my list for 2012