October Patchwork

Liz from New Zealand visited us this time for our quilting day bringing with her her first two ATCs. I exchanged one of mine for the second one here. It is really beautiful.

Karen worked really hard on Helen's blue flowers quilt that has been so long in the making. I have included a photo below of the nearly finished borders hanging over the banisters.

Jenny, Linda, Robyn and I worked on other projects. Mine was quilting the "A Peek of Pink" quilt made with the fabric we were given for entering our Wilma's Chocolate Roses quilt in the Sydney exhibition.

Liz put together the Bright Flowers blocks with a lot of discussion from all. It is just amazing what you can do with insufficient completed blocks. It will end up a single bed topper, possibly going to the Aussie Heros quilts.

 After everyone had left for the evening Liz and I decided to put together the blocks from Elaine's Japanese Quilt. We are quite pleased with our work. It was extreme maths to make it fit. Only the borders to go (as shown) until the top is complete.

Geoff, Jen and Ponyo came to supervise and chat for a while.

Artist Trading Cards - by Fabric Artists

Our patchwork day this month was quite different. Robyn was wonderful and put the borders on one of our quilt tops but the rest of us took on a new challenge.

When I was in Mareeba last month staying with friends John and Marion, Marion (an artist) introduced me to the idea of Artist Trading Cards. Blank cards can be bought from art supply shops and the pack claims ... "Artist Trading Cards are a concept where artists create pocket sized artworks so that they can be traded with other artists. This began in the Impressionist age and is popular today among artists who prefer to share their art." They are not sold but swapped.

Marion sent me on my way with some ideas, some blank cards and two cards of her own (top left two in photo below). The deal was I was to send back two cards of mine when I made them on my return home.

So I took out my Kindy Bits box (tiny bits of fabric that are too small to cut a 1.5 x 1.5" square from) and we started creating.

Very soon Karen G had made a log cabin card and Linda had made an applique jungle.

We just stormed onward and at each stage we experimented with ways to quilt our trading cards.

But then the brainwave struck to try binding our quilts. After a bit of trial and error it was decided it was best to use commercial bias binding and to keep the back flat rather than folded as back of the 'quilt' was going to be glued to the trading card anyway.

Our final collection included some from us all (Robyn is going home to create hers from her own stash).

The challenge for this month is not to do a block but complete two 2.5 x 3.5" artist trading cards (this size is really important) and send one to the group for Christmas. We'll have a lucky dip so we will all have our own trading card to keep and one from another member of the group. The winner of your card might even make one especially for you which means your collection will start with three cards!

In all, our September gathering was fantastic. We were only five but had such a creative time and I still havn't stopped smiling. Happy card making and quilting too.

June Patchwork Day

Our day together in June was most productive. We started by finishing up the two part finished quilts we received from Elizabeth's estate. These will join our bundle for charity when an opportunity comes up.

We had lots of fun together arranging the blocks on our design wall and getting them all joined together. We now have two more quilt tops requiring borders and both sides of the design wall ready for our next two quilts - Elaine's Japanese blocks and Lian's Bright Flowers.

We also drew our next lucky dip - Jeanette's Aztec Stars. We spent some time trying to finalise the instructions for this and even cut templates for everyone but I realised when I saw a photo of a whole quilt done with our pattern that it did not look Aztec at all. I have since drawn up Jeanette's original block pattern and will email that to everyone as soon as I've written it up. It is a little more complex but I think it will work.

Of course there was the usually chatting around the table with lots of good food. What a busy, happy crowd we were.

Springwood Quilt Appeal

Karen sent us this update...

In case you haven't seen it, there is an entry on http://bushfirequiltappeal.blogspot.com.au/ about the distribution of quilts donated to the Springwood quilt appeal - they ended up with 1,030 quilts, rugs and wall-hangings.

I can't remember but between Rainbow Connection Quilter, Kogarah Library Quilters and various individuals we donated about 20 quilts to this appeal.

April Quilting Weekend

We had a happy gathering a few weeks ago to finish a bit more of our group works in progress.

We now have enough blocks returned to start putting our Helen's flowers quilt together. The next step is to decide on sashing, borders and binding.

The Quilter's Gift fabric has been incorporated into a disappearing nine-patch and all the rows have been stitched together.

Karen was able to use the big table to trim her experimental jelly roll quilt ready for binding.

Robin had trimmed the bright orange donated quilt at our last gathering.

February also saw the final hemming of the orange quilt.

 Now we have printed the labels for four of the quilts and the purple quilt has been quilted and binding nearly finished. I think next time we might have a little stash of quilts ready for donation. Do you have any ideas of where we can deliver them?

Three donated quilts

Early this year we had three unfinished quilts donated from the collection of the late Elizabeth Brown, a colleague of Karen W's.

The first one is applique and each block is done by a different person. The centre two blocks are partly hand quilted in magnificently tiny quilting stitches. Karen is currently trying to find the group that did the blocks to see if they want to complete it. Otherwise we might donate it to the Quilters Guild who will have someone that is happy to continue the tiny quilting.

There is a simple but stunning purple quilt top of foundation pieced blocks. We have decided to just back this one and quilt it simply as it is already quite heavy with the foundation fabric.

This bright quilt only needed to be bound, photographed and labelled. The binding is now on and I'll put up a picture of the finished quilt after our next weekend together.