Brisbane Quilt Show Part 2

As some of you know this past week saw Brisbane host their annual Queensland Quilt Show.   I travelled to Brisbane with a few friends for our big day out!   I took lots of photos and have grouped them up, so today I will share some traditional quilts and some quite wonderful small works of art that caught a lot of attention!  The works are exquisite as you will see.

Quite apart from the modern take on the traditional skills of the needle, we all love to see traditional designs.......and no quilt show would be worth its salt if there wasn't a Dear Jane standing proud, she sure has survived the tests of time.......

Hexies too!!! no show would be complete without these dear little blocks!!

This Baltimore was entirely hand appliqued and hand quilted in the most beauitful even little stitches, truly a work of art!!!!

From memory, this next one is a hand-dyed whole cloth, which was exquisitely machine quilted!!!!

This next collection of small art/scenic quilts was just incredible, the photos really do not do justice to the intricate work each piece required to get the results the artist strived for.

Each little masterpiece is iconly Australian!

Even the Hill's Hoist (Australian made clothes line) made it into this collection!!!!!

The head of our shy little platypus, here in the bottom, middle.   The frames you see are also made of fabric!!!!

The top row, middle, was beautifully textured, to represent the bark of our native trees.

Our famous cricketer Sir Donald Bradman featured also.

This next art quilt was also just amazing to see!!!  It has a lot of ribbons to its credit - not sure who the maker is.

I hope you have enjoyed seeing what Queenland Quilters had to offer this year, something for everyone!!!

Have a great sewful week everyone!
Take it easy,

Merilyn

Brisbane Quilt Show - Part 1

Firstly cab off the rank is of course my latest Barbara Brackman CW BOW!!   We only have a few more to go before we wind up this wonderful commemorative journey of Civil War blocks that Barbara has kindly offered on her blog http://civilwarquilts.blogspot.com/     You can also see all the blocks that our flickr group has done so far too here, http://www.flickr.com/groups/civilwarquilts2011/ 

#43 Right Hand of Friendship

I decided to use the Foundation Paper Piece method for this block, although it would have been easy enough to do using traditional piecing!

These past several days Brisbane has been host to the annual Queensland Quilt Show!  It is a big day out as I live over 2 hours away from Brisbane and had to get up at 0400 (or 0500 daylight saving time).  This year four of us ventured north and had a great day.

 I also met up with a fellow blogger Teresa from All Things Vintage, you can visit her here  http://allthingsvintage-teresa.blogspot.com/  it was wonderful to finally meet, she is a very creative lady who makes the most gorgeous teddy bears!!!   I got a bit distracted and didn't get my camera out to get a pic of all of us, too busy talking LOL!!!!  But after all the excitement settled I did get photos of some of the beautiful quilts that were on show.  There were a lot of art quilts this year, the talent of these quilters/artists is just amazing.

The creative machine quilting in this piece of work was just incredible!!!

This quilt was truly amazing, it had a very Victorian feel to it!!  An enormous amout of work had gone into its creation!!



There were also several Oriental themed quilts as well!

There was a whole display of these beautiful Shibori miniatures!  The beautiful subtle colours of this Indigo dye technique gives a wonderful vintage feel to these unique pieces!

Just love the beautiful Sashiko embroidery stitching in this piece!!!

This Chinese inspired quilt was so intricate in its designs too, incredible work!!! 



Love this little Willow Pattern as well!  I can imagine the number of hours it would have taken to create this little masterpiece!

Next post I will show you some gorgeous mini scenic quilts and some traditional quilts!

I hope you have enjoyed seeing some of what the Queensland Quilters had to offer this year!

Hope you find time to do some stitching during your busy week!

Take it easy,

Merilyn

A Simple Block

I was rather pleased to see this week that Barbara Brackman gave us a simple block!  The past couple of weeks' blocks were really challenging, applique and some really tricky 'Y' seam maneouvres!!!

We're up to # 42 'H' is for Hospital.

The 'H' fabric looks brown in the photo, but it is a real green khaki colour!!!   I have very few yellow fabrics in my stash so my choice was fairly limited, I chose the most muted tones I could find!  It actually looks better in real life LOL!!!

Last week # 41 Red, White & Blue Quilt.

This block was a real doozie to put together!!!  I'm ok with 'Y' seams,  but five on a pieced star really took the cake LOL!!!  I thought long and hard about using an easier alternative block but in the end I bit the bullet and gave it my best shot!! 

It was a slow and arduous task and even then it came out just a teeny bit wonky around the outer edges of the block,  (you can just see a bit of the wonky bit on the bottom part of the photo) oh well! done now LOL!!!

#40 Order Number Eleven.

I really enjoyed putting this block together, although I did have some reservations!  I used Visoflex (in the US I think it is known as WonderUnder), and it sure makes life easy!  I used one of my modern sewing machines (Janome 4800) to do the Blanket Stitch!  I'm pretty happy with it, only hope it stands up to laundering down the track!!!

With this weeks Civil War block 'H' is for Hospital, it got me thinking as I read the research Barbara presented as to the horrendous conditions that women and nurses endured while working in makeshift hospitals near the battlefield, not to mention of course the injured soldiers!  If you check this out, there is one hand-coloured photo of a field hospital in Virginia, what a nightmare...   http://civilwarquilts.blogspot.com/

As a Registered Nurse I couldn't imagine working in such conditions with little or no proper medical equipment and nursing the wounded on the bare ground!  No sanitation, no medication.....
We are very lucky to have such wonderful hospitals with everything at our fingertips, clean, odour free, privacy for our patients etc etc

I then remembered when I first became aware of nursing as a possible profession to follow.  When I was around 10 years old I joined the Junior Red Cross at school (I was educated in New Zealand), we learned very basic stuff, how to bandage, how to clean superficial wounds, how to make someone comfortable and wait for the grownups to come and take over. 

In among some long forgotten trinket box I also remembered I had my little badge, so I went looking for it, and here it is.... 

Now you know I really am a hoarder LOL!!!!  I have kept this with me all this time, just over 40 years!!!  I did have to give it a bit of a clean with an old toothbrush and some toothpaste, as it did look a tad tarnished, but here were the signs of things to come!!!!!

Now that I am all grownup I have another badge...

Like the song says, 'from little things big things grow'..........

I was inspired a couple of days ago to put together a little mini quilt.  Kathy Tracy of SmallQuiltTalk yahoo group http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smallquilttalk/  gave us a little challenge! I wasn't going to do it right away but as I was playing around in the sewing room I noticed a little pile of oddments left over that were calling my name and wanted to play, so how could I resist...  this is the result.....

Kathy's pattern did not have a border, but I decided to put one on anyway, it is marked for handquilting and half hand basted and should end up being around 14 1/2" x 14 1/2" when completed.  Some of those pieces have been around for a very long time, it is so nice that they have found a new life!!!   If I get a giddy-up I should have it completed to show you the next time I post !!!!!

I would just like to mention that recently Blogger was having some issues which meant that I could not leave comments on some people's blogs, it seems to have righted itself now, but was a bit of a pain at the time.
I read that some other bloggers were experiencing similiar problems.

 Rest assured I have been keeping up with your blogs and love to leave comments.  I discovered that blogs which had the 'imbedded' option for leaving comments were the ones I had trouble with, the blogs which had the 'pop-up' comment box option seemed to work fine.  So I changed my blog now to have the pop-up box.

Have a great and sewing filled week and thankyou for dropping by!!

Take it easy,

Merilyn

Getting That 1/4" Seam Just Right

This past weekend's CW BOW was really rather an easy block which I was able to finish in one sitting on Sunday morning!!

#39 Hovering Hawks

Having said that is was an easy block, of course with so many small pieces one's 1/4" seam allowance needs to be very accurate because you can loose or gain (millimeters ) or 1/16" 's very easily.

Because I use my vintage machines to sew with, some of the older models do not have any seam guidance lines on the throat plate which can be a bit tricky!  I guess we have become very comfortable about this as most of the machines now have a lot of visual aids to help us get accurate seams.  Although not always!! some are rather generous as I have already discovered!!!

With this latest block I decided to use my 1956, 201K, it has no seam guidance lines at all, so what to do?? I really didn't want to use an adhasive tape.   I had been looking around and found a nifty little seam guide which adheres (not sticky) to the throat plate and provides a nice little ridge that the fabric can butt up against.

I bought it through OzQuilts in Melbourne.  http://www.ozquilts.com.au/index.html
It is an American product and I was particularly interested in it because it does not have a sticky residue on the side that sticks to the bed of the machine as it is vinyl.

I did learn a little trick though, and that is always great,!! you will notice Tip #6.
I had to make just one adjustment to the vinyl position to get a perfect 5" across the finished 3 strips that I sewed together.

As suggested I sewed three 2" wide strips together, (I cut mine at around 5"-6" in length) and was happy when I pressed the seams in one direction that my practice piece ended up exactly at 5" across.

Whoo hoo!!!!!

My block came up exactly at 8 1/2".

Now this is just a new take on something has had been around for some time, which was the original seam guide that Singer produced to get the same result.  They are hard to find but I have a few of them and use them on my Featherweight and my old  201K, 1953 treadle (pictured below).

It works really well!  But if you are unable to find one for your old Singer, then the modern alternative is a great tool!

This old dear has seen better days and has been well used,  her decals are a bit ratty, she has numerous wrinkes, but she sews like a dream and I love treadling with her!!! 

So if you really want to check out your machines' 1/4" seam capability, do that little sewing check and see if you get 5" or more or less across, that will give you an idea if you need to adjust the placement of your fabric or get a seam guide of some description to aid your sewing.

With the onset of Spring my gorgeous flowering shrub "Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow" is in full bloom.
It has a wonderful fragrance and is a joy to see at this time of the year.  I don't know its proper botanical name, but it is called that because the flowers come in at three different colours depending on their maturity!!!

Thankyou for dropping by!!!  Hope your fingers are happy and busy at your sewing!!

Take it easy,
Merilyn

Back from the Never Never!

I can't believe its been nearly a month since I last posted!  Life sure has a way of getting in the way of my sewing time!  I feel as if I've been out in the Never Never but I'm back with a little to show you!

I've kept up with my Barbara Brackman BOW's which is just about as much as I could get done lately, we're up to #38 Ohio Star.

A friend gave me a Fat-Eighth of the purple print which I just love and was waiting for the right block to come along!   I still have a Fat-Sixteenth left LOL!   The photo really doesn't do the fabric justice, it is such a pretty colour.  

Last week #37 Confederate Rose.

The block Barbara gave us was a simplified version of this block, but she did say this was the original from Blockbase.   I love a challenge so I decided to give this a go, it has several tricky 'Y' seams to navigate through but the slow painstaking effort was well worth it, I would have to say this is my favourite block despite the slowness of its completion!  

#36 Kentucky Crossroads.

I decided to do four 4"x 4" for this block although it only required one 8"x 8".  It was a variation that a few of the other ladies did as well, and the one I preferred.

#35 Star of the West.

I got to use some rust and cheddar colours in this one!

I also got a little creative.....out of necessity!!!!!

The other side of this is.....

I updated my mobile phone recently and really didn't like any of the commercial covers that were available, not just that they were all rather dull colour-wise but I had trouble finding it in my bag in a hurry....so, I thought something more colourful and bright would stand out and make things easier!!

I had a delve into my solids scraps and before I knew it I had a new cover for my phone!

With all prototypes you realise that some small modifications can enhance the overall product, looking at it I can see I should have tapered the edges of the fold-over section, but hey!  it's a cover for my mobile and best of all I can find it in my dark bag in a jiffy LOL!!!!!....and I'm happy with it!!!!

You may remember a little while back I put together a little charm pack quilt for my vintage car!
Well I picked it up from the long-arm quilter a couple of days ago and yesterday I sewed on the binding!
It turned out great, I just love the whimsey of it - I have called it "50's Picnic".

Here is a close-up of the quilting!

I'm in the middle of completing another small quilt, just have to do some handquilting on the borders, so hopefully I'll be able to share that with you very soon!

Just recently also, I had the opportunity to go to the movies, it was one of my days off and I had heard that the new Australian movie 'Red Dog' had received good reviews.

Being a dog lover and a fan of Aussie movies I persuaded a friend to go with me!  It was fantastic!!!! and so was the dog (I believe they used 4 dogs in the making of the movie).  It is set in an Australian Mining town in the north of Western Australia in 1971.   If you are still undecided as to whether you should see it, I say don't hesitate,  you will love it!  You may even shed a tear or two!!!  I could relate to this film because I have lived in an outback mining town and could see the funny side of life in such a place.   The scenery is just superb!
Check here to see a trailer of the movie!    http://www.abc.net.au/atthemovies/txt/s3272052.htm

Another beautiful weekend has come to a close, Spring is here with an attitude I can tell you with today's temp at 32 Celsius (late 80's F), if this is Spring then Summer promises to be very hot indeed!!!!!

Thank you for dropping by,

Take it easy,
Merilyn