Happy

I'm afraid there's been little time for blogging here lately, with my sewing machine whirring late into the night for weeks on end. I've been busy making quilts and trying to put my personal 'word of the year' - COURAGE - into practice by entering a couple of competitions for the very first time.

Today I'd like to show you one of my entries, a quilt I've called 'Happy' because that's just how it makes me feel.

{My photos were taken at different times during the process, in varying light conditions}

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I initially entered it in the Quilting Expo at my local Spotlight store, the rules being that it needed to be my own original design and made entirely of fabrics bought from Spotlight.

Basically, I just took a single piece of Spotlight's white homespun, and fused a rainbow of petal shapes to it. Like many quilters, I have a love/hate relationship with Spotlight and their fabrics, but their homespun is one of my favourites. It's so soft and just beautiful to work with, and I always keep many metres in my stash.

I used a double batting for the first time, but rather than use the recommended combination of a wool and a poly batting, I used what was on hand and made a double poly sandwich before appliquéing and quilting the petals in the one process.

Then came the fun part, free motion quilting all that white space!

I might have gone just a little over the top with those feathers!

Finally I bound it in one of my favourite blue prints, an abstract floral that reads as plain, but has enough liveliness to be interesting, if that isn't too contradictory :-)

Then a funny thing happened on the way to the competition. My Spotlight store took down all the signs advertising the Quilting Expo!

 I checked with the store a week before, and again on the day of the advertised event, and on both occasions I was told it was still on, and invited to bring my quilt in for judging.

But there were no other entries :-)

So in the strangest of circumstances, it won! And I won a sewing machine!

Emboldened by my 'win', I summoned up all my courage, took a very, very deep breath and entered Happy in the Modern Quilt Guild Quiltcon competition. This is a juried competition, attracting world wide entries, but nothing ventured....

Of course it was rejected, on the basis of these two photos below from my online entry.

The Quiltcon exhibition judges had clearly given a lot of thought to the sensitive, encouraging wording of their rejection email, but it still took me several hours to come to terms with it. Instagram was alight with excited quilters posting screen shots of their acceptance emails, and pics of beautiful quilts that will hang at Quiltcon next February, and I couldn't help feeling left out of the party.

It wasn't until I learnt that from around 1,350 entries only about 300 had been chosen that I started to feel a little better. 

And then quilters like me, coming to terms with their disappointment, gradually started to pick themselves up, dust themselves off and gather courage to post pics to Instagram of their #rejectedfromquiltcon and #quiltconreject quilts. The trickle soon swelled to a torrent and by the end of the day there was a virtual quilt show of #tunaquilts ('the fish John West rejects', get it?😄)

And these rejected quilts were magnificent!!!!

I have plans for this quilt, and the experience of entering an international competition has taught me a great deal. It's also made me even more determined to become a better quilter.

August's Mini - Come What May

Yes, I know it's November, and like the butcher who backed into the sausage machine, I've got a little behind in my work. The main reason is because, well, in between my day job I've been making quilts like this one.

You may recall, Di B, Sue M and I signed up, back in July, for a 6 month Mini Quilt Club through Fabric Garden. Each month the lovely Sue Miller sends us a different Jaybird Quilts (designed by Julie Herman) mini quilt pattern, and we get together at Quilt Central (also known as Di B's place) for a hilarious time stitching our individual quilts for that month.

I've shared The first of these, Radio Way, in a previous post. It was a quilt I really loved making. In fact we all did. This one, not so much.  For me it was just a little 'busy' and I really found it hard to choose my fabrics because I couldn't get my head around where each one would end up.

This was my selection, all pulled from my fabric stash. As usual, I cut my pieces prior to our stitching day to save time, and to keep myself on track I labelled them all with masking tape.

These progress pics show my quilt (left), Sue's (top right) and Di B's (bottom right).

I'm sorry to say I still wasn't completely smitten with my Come What May mini quilt when the top was finished. So I decided to mentally divide it into squares and machine quilt petals inside each on these spaces.

This way I began to see a secondary pattern emerge, rather than just the pieced pattern which still looks way too random.

Don't get me wrong, I love Julie's quilt designs. It's just how my brain works (or doesn't 😜) with this one.

Come what may, I was determined to make this mini quilt work for me and I'm very happy to say it does.

That's what this Mini Quilt Club is all about for me. Sometimes I'm instantly smitten with that month's pattern, and sometimes it takes a little longer for the love to grow.

Either way, it's exciting to be challenged with new techniques, patterns and colour combinations every month, stretchng myself and moving out of my comfort zone. That's what it's all about.

Show and Tell

Don't you love the way quilters encourage each other when they get together? This month, at our St Mark's Quilters workshop, there were plenty of oohs and aahs as we took time to admire each other's latest creations, not all of them charity quilts.

Di B has signed up for the worldwide Instagram mini quilt swap, and she brought along her finished quilt, made with foundation paper pieced spiral flying geese. I love the way those tiny triangles of Terra Australis 2 in their vibrant colours glow against the newsprint background.

We could imagine how sweet this pattern might be, reproduced in pastels as a Blanket of Love sometime in the future.

Di has also been busy making a birthday quilt for a little boy who lives next door to her. The big braid pattern looks very effective made from a jelly roll in bright prints, and bordered in a vivid blue faux hand-dye fabric. It just needed some border quilting and the binding done before it would be ready to give.

Gail had her completed mini braid quilt, A Blanket of Love for RPA Newborn Care.

That pieced bias binding is a cute variation. We love it when our quilters try something a little different!

Di C made this giant star quilt and quilted it in black thread to emphasize the star.

Clever Di even managed to line up her blocks on the front with an identical star pieced backing.

Michelle has been carefully working on this kindy quilt for The Marcia kindy for autistic children at Liverpool. The fabrics are all doggy themed  and she's going to appliqué those little red kennels and some dogs on that yellow solid strip.

She finished pinning her quilt and started the straight line quilting using her new Bernina walking foot with the ditch stitching guide.

We had some sweet finishes too, like this one by Barb.

This quilt by Perdita is much prettier that it looks here. The delicate shade of powder blue has tiny white stars, and she's backed it with a Winnie the Pooh print in the same blue.

Barb's been playing with HSTs and come up with this pretty diagonal arrangement. Nice!

Gillian made this clever woven-effect heart in a pink and a blue version.

And there was plenty of interest in this clever design, also by Gillian. Look what a little imaginative fussy cutting can produce!

And this one, made by me, has finally been added to the pile.

Of course our two most encouraging.'members' were there too.

Chester took snack time very seriously.

And Matilda just didn't stop smiling :-)

Mini Braid Quilt

My Instagram feed is abuzz with pics of cute and colourful mini quilts right now. They are all the rage among quilters, and now that I've made a few I can see why.

Fast to make, mini quilts give us a chance to try out lots of new designs and techniques without taking too much time, and they're small enough to decorate a wall. 

You might recall my post on August's St Mark's Quilters workshop, where Di B showed us how to make a mini braid quilt using foundation paper piecing. 

I thought this would be the perfect scrap-eater project, and after a rummage in my scrap bin I cut strips and grouped them into four colours, graded from light to darker hues within those colours.

As usual, I had to over-think this one, and instead of picking random colours I found myself making an ombré-shaded braid in pink to start.

I liked it! So I added a second braid in yellow.

And another in blue, but with the stronger shades grouped in the centre of the braid.

Then I did the same when I played with my greens.

Although my original plan had been to make just four braids, it was obvious that now I needed a fifth to balance out the design, so I pressed my purples into service.

By now the quilt was looking a little wider than I wanted, so I added tiny floating half inch wide bars at the top and bottom of my braids, to give it some height.

Mini quilts are also excellent for practising machine quilting. Not as daunting as a large quilt. I started by quilting wavy half feathers between the braids.

Then I echoed the chevron shapes of the braids each side of those little colour bars.

Finally I took my courage in both hands and quilted my very favourite feathers along each side border. Just 6 months ago I could never have done this, but with the help of an Angela Walters class on Craftsy, and lots of practice, I'm starting to feel more comfortable with feathers.

I took this photo in low light deliberately so the quilting shows up.

If you look closely in the pic above you'll see that there are long threads sitting on the surface. These needed to be buried deep in the batting layer, and the easiest way to do this is to use a self-threading needle (I use MatildasOwn).

 Beats trying to push that short thread through the eye of a needle dozens of times, and as long as you pull the needle through carefully, perhaps at a little angle, the thread won't pop out of the eye. I take the needle through the batting for a short distance (an inch or so) and then out again, and snip off close to the surface of the quilt, being very careful not to snip the quilt!

My little quilt turned out much fancier than I had envisaged, and took much more work than I had intended, but I love it.

It used a wide variety of scraps, but at half an inch wide it was rather a frugal eater, and made little impact on my scrap stash.

I used foundation papers designed by the late Julie Wallace of The Quilter's Barn in Victoria to piece together my braids, but her shop is closed now. 

However, if you want to make your own version, you can download something similar (free) from Nikki M's Buzy Day blog here.