Espritpatch

The Fall 2011 Bloggers' Quilt Festival  organised by Amy at Creative Side, is officially opening today and this time I have chosen to share with you my own and unique entry to a quilt competition that I called Japanese Crests. You have seen this quilt before of course as I used pictures of it for my banner! I did all the applique and quilting by hand (mainly doing the applique on the train to work). I used some of my Japanese fabric, that I love so much on a black background. Once I had finished the 3 panels, I attached them together with fancy thread and beads. I finished this quilt in September 2006 for an exhibition, and unfortunately to this day, it is still not hanging anywhere in the house. Maybe one day, we'll buy a little wood stick to be able to hang it... The wall-hanging looks like this and here are pictures of each of the panels.  Each of the panel represents ancient family crests from Japan. I used patterns from a book called Circles of the East

Didn't achieve much on Friday for the Sew-In Night. Hubby came back from a couple of days away for work just before the kids went to bed so when it was all quiet and I could have sewn, we had a chat for a while, catching up with the week. So when I eventually sat down to start something it was already quite late. I only started cutting out squares for my candle mat swap. At least I have chosen the colours. Yesterday night, we watched the Apprentice from last Wednesday and after finishing the ironing, I managed just a little bit of hand sewing, enough to finish my second OPAM this month. It might not seem like an OPAM because the quilt was almost finished (and it has been in my blog banner since I started blogging) but it is an OPAM to me. I made "In the Samurai's Steps" for a competition at Hever Castle, Kent (UK) 3 years ago in September. It is all hand applique (needle turn) and hand quilted. To display the quilt I had to sew 3 little velcro strips so since the