Fancy Stitching

This beauty is a first quilt is is called "A Thankful Heart" by Natalie Bird.
I love the watermelon block - seriously cute!.



I quilted it with freehand hearts, swirls and curls, with a bit of continuous curve.

I love these girly quilts, mostly because they don't tend to make an appearance in my house, with an 11 year old boy who won't go into the girl aisle in K Mart (and who is now wearing size 10 mens shoes to school)!

Here we have another fancy stitched piece, and it is mine. Shock horror. I actually finished something - actually, it is one of a set of four and is a Chatelaine design called Micro 1.

It has taken me ages because I am not good with specialty stitches, although I am getting better, and I got stuck on the one-over-one in the centre. This is 32 ct and I needed both my glasses and the magnifier of the lamp to see the centre properly. I think maybe 28ct is what I need to be using!

Enjoy

Belinda

It's not Christmas...

This beauty belongs to Dawn and is a Chris Jurd design. I've loaded the pics the wrong way, so you get to see the back first.

It is heavily quilted with lots of feathers, and ditching to hold the points down.



Dawn has made it with traditional green and reds, but there a lots of florals and some stripes and dots in there, with a lovely floral piece of fabric fussy cut in the middle.

It was a pleasure to quilt, and it is probably going to have to go on my list to do....

Enjoy

Belinda

I'm still here..

Its been a while, but I have been working hard, just doing stuff which I can't show pictures of. However, now that school and music have gone back, my hand work is getting done - slowly, slowly.

These are the blocks from my Kim McLean class earlier in the year. I have nearly run out of prepared blocks, so may have to get my act together this weekend and get some more sorted.

Don't they look great?

So that's it for the show and tell! However I do have some pictures from when we were in Melbourne the other week.

This is a large sculpture along the river ?Southbank? which quite took my fancy and I can see a freehand design in there.

This is a fancy fish eye feature on my camera which I was playing with, and the red stick like things are a sculpture with fabulous colours. Near Federation Square and The Art of the Brick which was a Lego exhibition we had just been to.

Speaking of Lego, this exhibition had a build and play section, so off we went. I assumed the parents would be watching, but no - they had a little place where the parents could play too. Except we had to make a tractor with all the pieces inside a ziplock bag. You couldn't get them out or manipulate them, just build the tractor in the bag. The other lady on our table managed it, but not me. I couldn't keep all the bits together, so put it away before I said bad words! And, of course my dearly beloved managed to do it too.....

Harry's and my tower. He's not really that much taller than me - its the angle (she says, knowing that her 11 yo is already just a tiny bit taller)....

Enjoy

Belinda

Show and Tell

Our local group of Stitch and Chatters run a block swap each year, which involves about 20-something swappers, who swap blocks each month - you know the drill.....

Anyway, last weekend we had a lunch so that we could get as many finished quilts together in the same room (and also give us a deadline for getting the blocks put together, so they don't forever live in a box....Julie.....).

I showed a picture of mine a couple of weeks ago, which went to a friend who needs it.

Anyway, all these quilts are made from the same block and don't they look great!!

So much time was put into making something different and there is not one that is the same. This one actually has specialty sewing machine stitches in the cream. Can't see it very well, but it was a practice piece for learning a new machine. What a great idea.

This one has a border made from the left over half square triangles chopped off from the ends of individual pieces.

This one has a very gentle progression of colour and tone.

This one was finished the morning of the lunch...I think it is going to have borders but we need to work our what is going to work for this particular designs.

Ann's are usually off centre - she works very hard to produce a finished product which none of the rest of us would have thought of . I think she needs to make more blocks to make it bigger because she has nothing to do with her time.. Ha!

I have been hard at work, in between being ill with the dreaded lurgy, but seem to have no pictures to show, mostly because I either don't have permission to show or they are going into magazines and I can't show them prior to publication.

Enjoy

Belinda

Did you know...

.....that there have been this many types of barbed wire around over the years?


We went to Melbourne last week to see the King Tut exhibition, and ended up in the Melbourne Museum afterwards. One of the exhibits was this display of different types of barbed wire. Fascinating. I have some other pics of Melbourne which I will share probably next post if I can get my act together.

Anyway, moving on to other more colourful things...




Check out this beauty! It is a Michelle Marvig design and is done predominantly in Kaffe fabrics.

I have quilted it using both freehand and the Statler and it is a very impressive quilt now that it is done.

It was so large that I couldn't lay it out on my floor, and my DH wasn't around to hold it up, so sorry about the crinkly edges.

Anyway, school goes back tomorrow so I am hoping to get back to some kind of schedule, except that I have picked up the dreaded lurgy so spent yesterday afternoon in bed. I am feeling much better today but have no voice and a terrible painful cough.

Isn't it funny how when you whisper to someone, they whisper back?

Enjoy

Belinda

Flannel and polar fleece

I'll try again.... my last post disappeared into nothing, so maybe there is a blank one out there..

Anyway, this very simple quilt has the top made from fannel and the backing is polar fleece, with a wool wadding in the middle.

It is quilted with a simple stars and circles design from Kim Diamond, but I wanted to show how beautifully the quilting shows up with polar fleece on the back.

It is very forgiving and makes the pattern really stand out. And, with the three warm layers it is scrummy for a Bathurst winter, which is where it is living.

Enjoy

Belinda

Floral block swap

This is one of mine and is the finished product of our local group's block swap for 2010. We had to pick floral fabrics in the required colour for the month and use a floral cream as the background, and then each month swapped the blocks.

I think we had about 36 people who swapped each month.



Anyway, we are having a lunch in the next couple of weeks for our show and tell, but my quilt has been given to a friend who is having some health issues. So this is my show and tell.

Last weekend we went to Wattle Flat to visit with my parents and brother and SIL, and after lunch we had to go for a walk to walk some of it off. So off we went to Sofala which is about 5 mins drive from Wattle Flat (outside of Bathurst, towards Mudgee).

Not much going on in the late afternoon, although this isn't the main drag of Sofala.

Enjoy

Belinda