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