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.