Have You Seen This Quilt?

This is a quilt I made earlier this year from an Arcadia Jelly Roll and a pattern from Moda Bake Shop. A lot of people liked it and I've shown them how to make it as well as sold kits in all sorts of fabric ranges and colours.
Today this quilt was stolen from just outside the doorway to my shop!
It was hot and the door was closed for the air conditioning. It was a quiet day, with few customers. I arranged the quilts on the display stand so they looked really attractive... so attractive that someone took the opportunity to pop up the lane and lift this quilt from the rack and walk right out into the main street of Maleny without anyone noticing!
I'm still in shock. I came out and saw it wasn't there, then looked around everywhere like it might be hiding.
No- one saw or heard anyone come down the hall, or out again.
So someone got a completely hand made, one - of- a - kind quilt for Christmas for nothing!
It's so sad that people can do that sort of thing. They like hand made quilts, but they don't like to pay for the time, materials and creativity.
Lesson learned by me: From now on, if people want to look at and admire my quilts, they can come right into my shop to do it.
Take care and I hope nothing like this happens to any of you over the Christmas Season,

Ann.

Heirloom Hexagon Quilts

Just finished a workshop for my Heirloom Hexagons Quilt (pictured in the sidebar to the right). Many of the girls have finished their quilts now and I've put together a collage of some finished and WIPs. They all looked fabulous, luscious and brilliant!

The blocks are made quilt- as- you- go so the quilts are reversible. A design wall comes in handy for co-ordinating both the top and the back of the quilt.

When the hexagons are finished the pile up like a stack of delicious fabric pancakes, good enough to eat.

Finally, when you machine sew your finished hexagons together... Voila! Your heirloom quilt is finished!
I thoroughly enjoyed the workshop over three days and plan to do another in February 2010. Maybe I'll see you there.
Til next time,

Ann.

"I Spy" Blast from My Quilting Past

I recently made an I Spy quilt from a design I made about 11 years ago!

I designed a quilt to showcase a collection of fabrics and to teach as a project for my first Patchwork students back in the 90's. At that time it was a collection of Japanese fabrics, with hand-dyed indigo sashing. Then I did it for a couple of new babies, with novelty fabrics as an "I Spy". Most recently, I've re-used the idea in my African Quilts. It's very simple, but greatly loved! I sold a few of them when we first moved to Maleny about 8 years ago.
Recently one of those customers from the past contacted me again to ask if I still made the quilts and if I would make another one!

I said yes, and went to find my long unused shoebox of now vintage novelty fabrics. I looked up my quilt sketch book/planning journal and there found the entire details of the making of the quilt, including the words on the label, fabric requirements and costing. The lesson to be learned: ALWAYS KEEP A LOG OF YOUR QUILTS!
The fabrics brought floods of memories of my little girl, quilts, times, places and feelings from the past...

Here's Doll, always ready to comfort test a new quilt. And I just threw in a peak at another recent commission being quilted. This one's a Random quilt and looks great when finished with a jumbo pompom trim.
See you soon,

Ann.

Wuthering Heights

This is one of the quilts I have recently finished. Having no computer for a while certainly increased my creative productivity (but I missed you all)! I love this quilt.

I had some Morris Workshop Jelly rolls in stock and decided to keep one as they seemed so popular. When I opened it, I wasn't sure if I actually LIKED it! A bit subtle for my usual taste. (Being a Leo, I usually tend to the more flamboyant...) Then of course I couldn't re-roll it back together to sell, so it lay there all loose and dejected for a while. Then I re-read my Mum's beautiful old Wuthering Heights book... saw a simple traditional 16 patch quilt in a magazine and all the William Morris botanical patterns, gentle but strong colours and designs somehow melded in my mind with the story and this quilt popped out!

I used Moda Kyoto Cloth as the cream background fabric. It's 50/50% cotton and bamboo and was beautiful to sew. I used it on the back too, and you can see what a lovely crinkly appearance it gets after washing. I simply machine quilted a cross hatch all over the quilt in a gently variegated neutral King Tut thread.

With bamboo batting as well, the quilt came out of the drier very crinkly and soft, with a lovely drape. I love the way the colours shimmer across the surface, creating an optical effect. It's amazing how these subtle colours and designs can produce such a dramatic result... a bit like Emily Bronte's simple Wuthering Heights story.
I'm making in it Kaffes (Rowans really) with a fuchsia dots background now to see if the effect is the same!Brilliant lime backing...
Till next time-

Ann.

My Computer is Broken :(

My computer is broken! I can't get any photos and I just don't feel comfortable posting from my daughter's computer. It's slow, and different... So for now, I'm just picking up my emails and dropping by blogs. The Fall Quilt Show was great. Did everyone settle in and surf around to see the amazing variety of quilts out there. There are so many talented people in the world of quilting. Thanks to everyone who shared. And thanks for all the kind comments on my entry too!
Till next time,
Ann.

Bloggers' Fall Quilt Festival

Better late than never! This is my quilt Zen Courtyard. Park City Girll is hosting a virtual quilt show, you can click on the button to the right, this link or the heading of this post , to go to her blog and see quilt entries from about 400 quilting bloggers! Every time I look there's more.It was really hard to choose a quilt, but it came down to which one I had the best photos of. I designed Zen Courtyard after seeing a shattered nine-patch and thinking there was a better way to make it and carry the stained glass stripping right to the edge. I wanted to use fat quarters and try out quilt- as -you -go which I had never done before and couldn't follow in patterns. I had a lot of ladies in classes at the time who only wanted to make machine made projects. So the quilt is QAYG, completely machine made, intensely quilted, Stack and Slash and contemporary. Even the binding is all in one machine made in Weeks Ringle and Bill Kerr's stile from Modern Quilt Workshop.
I loved the Lonni Rossi fabric designs at the time and made a whole lot of quilts with her fabrics. This was and still is , my absolutely most popular workshop and I continue to teach booked out classes for the quilt 3 years after making it. It won 3rd prize Contemporary Quilts, in the Brisbane Exhibition, Quilts Across Queensland, Show and was published as a project in Australian Quilters' Companion. I still get phone calls from people making it from the mag, or asking permission to teach it. (Unfortunately I have also seen it in quilt shows and heard of it being taught with out acknowledgement or permission!)This is a close up of the front quilting. I have become very good at quilting in spirals, and I would say, thanks to this quilt I have become a MUCH better machine quilter.
The quilt is reversible and the quilting looks great on the reverse side. I usually have it this way up on my bed. There's Dolly - she just can't resist a new quilt! You can see the label below and some quilting on the back.
I have also been asked for several commissions of this quilt. The one below is made with Pacific prints for my Papua New Guinea family (In an earlier post).
This one is queen sized and uses some furnishing fabrics as well as the Oriental ones to fit in with the client's decor.
Finally, the last version of the quilt is this small one I made for the Down Under Quilts 2009 Calender competition. The theme was "The wonderful World of Colour" and I based my quilt on Christina Rossetti's poem , Colours. The quilt is made from hand dyed raw silk which I fell in love with and bought a fat quarter stack from Dyed and Gone to Heaven. It looks like very soft suede.The quilt made December in the calender!
Thanks for looking and enjoy the show,

Ann.

Fall in Spring

Look at this glorious cactus flower! It's spring in Maleny and this is one of my Christmas Cactuses flowering. It's scabby looking, unremarkable plant but every October it manages to push out about 4 gigantic buds which open into these lovely honey filled flowers. I brought it up onto my veranda so we can enjoy the flowers while they're here. at the end, they drop a big sticky glob of honey. For beautiful flower photos and quilty, crafty ideas, visit Flower Garden. Truly inspirational!

Speaking of Spring, Halloween is not in Fall over here! I love Halloween. It all seems so romantic and mysterious to me, but I've only been Trick-or-Treating with Amelia a few times when she was little. Her father is Canadian, so she grew up with all sorts of Halloween traditions in a country only just beginning to celebrate it.
Now for a current Autumn(Fall) themed WIP. I've just added this fantastic Alexander Henry Halloween fabric to my stock and I had to make something... Decided to use an idea out of Jane Hardy Miller's new French Braid book, French Braid Obsession for the border. It came together surprisingly easily, just with fabrics from my stash and stock. It's about 1 x 1.25 metres. Quite fun! Now I have to quilt it, and quickly, before the 30th.

You might notice the new button at the top af my side bar. It's a Quilt Festival Blog for Autumn 2009. I haven't put a quilt on yet, but am just deciding which one. Click on the button to join or just see some inspirational quilts from hundreds of generous quilting bloggers. Don't forget to leave plenty of appreciative and encouraging comments!
Have fun,

Ann.