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Coming soon! Looks a beauty.
Love the recycle, reuse aspects that patchwork offers us.
- old school dresses brought back to life as pencil cases
- jackets turned into bags
- jumpers into cushions
such a wealth of texture to bring interest to our work.
Nothing much is wasted!! That's why we have so much fabric isn't it? Because its all useful... Every last bit.
I hadn't shared these photos from the AQC in Melbourne. I only took these three. So little time to stand back and take the photos!!
I liked to think of my stand as a little riot of colour calling for attention from the corner of the royal exhibition building!
If you were there I hope it called out to you and took your eye.
It is such fun putting the stand together for each show.
This is the perspective I meant in the last post. Not quite sure why it didn't load the first time! Better luck this time!!
Doodling is a bit of a past time. Doodle on the phone. Back of an envelope. Scrap of paper. Anywhere. The photo is a doodle to fill a background piece of paper and then draw butterflies to fly across the surface. Interesting how stretched your mind gets at the thought of filling a whole piece of paper with doodles. Forced creativity. You get a bit stuck and then it starts to flow.
Doodling has been pretty essential practice over the past year, learning to free motion quilt. Embedding a pattern in my mind until it becomes almost subconscious. That makes it much easier when you come to the quilting. With the pattern built in your brain you can deal with whatever challenges come your way in fabric.
So, practice your machine quilting by doodling. It's cheap and risk free as you're not working with your quilt!
When you have got the pattern set, move on to practice on a quilt sandwich. I'll be back with photos soon.
Lx
Sometimes things look better from a different perspective
I was struggling a little with the outsized leaves and lack of proportion. But when I took a photo I actually preferred it from a different perspective.
We painted in a wet watercolor and the poured salt all over the tree trunks to add texture. Then "painted" with tissue paper and tidied up with some texture with a texta. Fun.
Have you seen Kellie Wulfsohn (of Don't Look Now)'s debut fabric range "Peak Hour" based on her very successful Peak Hour quilt which she designed a little while ago?
Well, here is the original quilt (Patterns available here)
And here's the fabric range, which is such a lovely suite of designs based on the original quilt.
This fabric was such fun to play with! The little cars are an absolute delight...
Here's my first quilt in the range, "Bumper to Bumper"
This quilt is available as a kit and also as a pattern.
In the kit you have three choices of border WHITE OR BLUE OR GREEN (not all three as pictured here).
In the pattern you must know that there are NO applique designs, so unless you have the Peak Hour fabric that Kellie designed for Riley Blake (ie the big car print and the small car toss and the road signs) the pattern is not sufficient on its own to make the quilt.
I loved making every bit of bumper to bumper - though making it in a caravan with my trusty Bernina 440QE was a little challenging space wise at times. And I didn't have all my own supplies with me - so was sorely let down by some rather poor quality quilt basting spray (which I basted in the Camp Kitchen at the caravan park when no one was looking!). But other than blaming my tools and my cramped surroundings I had a ball making this little quilt. And my other surroundings - the beautiful Victorian coastal town and it's sun kissed beaches - were sensational.
What was so lovely about using the fabric was that whilst I sewed it like it was applique - there was (almost) no applique! The borders were just based on strips of the fabric from selvedge to selvedge! There is applique to get from the little cars on the toss print to the orderly flow of traffic around the roundabouts - but there was no applique of little tiny wheels and windows etc. This was super easy for maxium effect. A real timesaver.
It's a single bed topper - from the bottom of the pillow to the end of the bed without any real overlap.
Hope you like Bumper to Bumper!
Laura x