Here's a few photos...

...but I still need to take some more photos of some of the stuff I've been doing since I last posted (in the dim, distant past).

Some friends came over to my studio one Saturday in August, and we had a great day playing with fabric and paint. My camera skills are definitely lacking because these are the only two photos that didn't come out blurry! The first photo shows Beryl and Anne and the second one shows Lynda and Edith, all hard at work.




I really enjoy the days we have these get-togethers. Having them here at my studio means that I can get the place ready over the preceding week, I don't have to travel anywhere with heaps of stuff and don't have to pack anything up at the end of the day to travel home again. The 'fatigue' part of my MS sometimes becomes overwhelming so being able to have playdays here is great.

This coming week I should be able to get some more photos organised and posted!

cheers
cat

speaking of the Kemshalls

Linda and Laura Kemshall also run the online City & Guilds patchwork and quilting courses ( as well as Creative Sketchbooks and Creative Computing). I've wanted to start the quilting courses for a few years now, and recently I decided that now was as good a time as any. So I'm now doing Level 2 7822-10 Patchwork and Quilting, which is the first course of three. My dream is to be able to do all three of the courses but that will depend on finances. They're definitely not cheap, but are high quality courses of study. I've got a while to decide though.

Module 1 was about colour mixing and fabric dyeing. I've done LOTS of fabric dyeing over the past 10 or 12 years so I got through that module fairly quickly. Module 2 involves playing with acrylic paints among other things, and I'm having a great time with that at the moment. My husband had carved a heap of lino stamps for me this week - I tried but don't seem to have strong enough hands. Apparently plumber's rubber gasket is easier to carve and the resulting stamps work the same. I have no idea what plumber's gasket is, but will try and buy some so we can test it out.

little challenge quilt

Linda and Laura Kemshall are well known in the quilt world. A few months ago they ran a quilt challenge called the 'Love Colour' challenge. You can read about it at the link below.

http://www.lindakemshall.com/LoveColourGallery.htm

I made a little quilt for the challenge, and I'm tickled that a photo of it is on their website! It's a variation of the big fuchsia quilt I made earlier in the year, and was a lot of fun to make.

Busy couple of months...

on the quilt front. In May I went to the State Guild's annual retreat at Poatina. I think it's about the 12th or 13th year we've gone to the same place, and I've missed 2 of those years. It was a tad cold up there in the mountains, but stayed fine while we were there. Here's the website for Poatina village if anyone's interested. http://www.poatina.fusion.org.au/ One day I'll learn how to do links properly!

I got quite a bit of quilting done on my tulip quilt. I did the applique in 1983 - the stitches are about 1/4" apart and all the stitching on both the pink and dark green fabric is done in white thread. Mum had kept the quilt top for the last 25 years then gave it back to me. I was tempted to just throw it out but then decided that it was part of my quilting history so I would finish it and keep it. I'm doing the quilting on my faithful Husqvarna, and enjoying it too. It's going to be 'feathery' - I'll post a picture when it's done.

Thank you, everyone...

...for all the comments! I posted the photos on Saturday night, and on Sunday morning our modem died. It could have at least done it during the week when businesses are open. So today we have a brand new modem and I'm connected again.

Gale, I hope you love Jane's class as much as I did. And yes, start taking photos now! If you can take some closeup photos of your favourite flowers and leaves from all different angles and at various stages of development, all the better. That's if your doing the same class? Even if it is a different class, the photos will still be inspiring for later projects.

Stephanie, the last time you saw my class project it was still a sketch on a piece of baking paper! It was so hot in that classroom that I didn't even get my fabric out of the bag. Just as well because I totally changed my mind about the fabric I wanted to use...about 5 times at least.

Right now I'm going to give my studio a bit of a tidy-up (well, when I finish my cuppa) as I'm having a couple of quilters and their husbands over for a meal tomorrow night. At the moment there are little piles of 'stuff' everywhere - but I do just about know where everything is. After it's tidy I probably won't be able to find anything at all. Sound familiar?

quilt-as-you-go blocks

So far my tally of blocks has reached 65. These will be on their way to Victoria on Wednesday. I have another 20 backings cut to size and oodles of strips cut ready to make more. Most of my bits of spare batting have been used up but I still have a bit left. I've enjoyed making the blocks and can't get over how different they look when they have been trimmed to size and all the raggedy edges have gone.

fuchsia fantasy

At the end of February I went to the Australasian Quilt Convention in Melbourne and did a class with Jane Sassaman. I LOVED the class! I won't go into details about the class - you'll just have to buy her book called 'The Quilted Garden', which has just been reprinted. I took lots of photos of fuchsias with me and designed this quilt using the photos for inspiration. The whole process was so much fun, and I have drawn up a few more designs using the same flowers. I could make a series of fuchsia quilts without even thinking about moving on to any other flowers!

So I loaded the photos backwards. There's a couple of views of the back of the quilt showing the free motion quilting, then a couple of closeups of the front, then a full view of the front. I couldn't get the colour right in the full view - the first closeup is closest to the actual colour. All the fabrics for the flowers and leaves is my own hand dyed cotton, and the blue background is one of the Moda Marbles range.

Please leave a comment and let me know what you think.