Celebrate Onehunga

I'm just so excited about my next project! I was going to wait until I finished some bits of it but I'm just too excited and I have to let you see what I've been up to.

First, the inspiration for this quilt comes from some prints my Mum has by Kate Spencer. Kate lives in St Kitts in the Caribbean, which is where my parents used to live and my sister is still there. This is one of the paintings and I have wanted to turn it into a quilt ever since I first saw it (in 2004 I think!).

Sometimes it just takes time for an idea to fully develop. I thought about making it a New Zealand quilt. Then I started to think about images I could use and the idea developed into an Onehunga quilt. There are so many cool things right on my doorstep! The old Post Office, Carnegie's library, the old Onehunga Primary School, the Tongan church and so many cute little houses.  How about these images, the mosiac table and chair on Onehunga Mall and the fountain in Jellicoe Park. These are things I love about living here.


Then I also have Cornwall Park just up the road from me. Melanie took this photo of a Cabbage tree in Cornwall park when she was putting together her installation for her final year of her Fine Arts Degree.

I think she did a painting of it. Look what I did with it!


Of course you can see One Tree Hill from Onehunga so I had to paint that too, as it is just now without the tree!



I'm really enjoying making this quilt! Just as well because this one is going to be nine panels, about 2m by 2m or perhaps a bit smaller by the time I make the wonky lines. So I suppose it's going to be 6 foot square. Oh, and I think I'm going to make three of them. I've got so many ideas for panels that they won't fit in one quilt. So what am I going to do with twelve square metres (over 100 square feet) of wallhanging?

Kowhaiwhai Transformations finished

Ok, I've been a bit slack recently and it's taken me until today to finally finish the binding on this. I'll blame Melanie, my daughter. She's been back in New Zealand for part of her summer holidays so we've been busy catching up. All of the catching up has caught up with me! I fallen asleep every afternoon this week.

Anyway, it's done now and will be off to North Carolina tomorrow.  I see that Hurricane Irene looks like it's going to leave them alone. Here's a close-up view of the quilting. It almost looks like trapunto!

Update: I had just checked out a map of the path of Hurricane Irene when I posted this. News reporting being as it is, I hadn't heard about Irene until it threatened the US coast. I wondered if my sister had had any trouble with it but reckoned that no news is good news. When I checked the map it looked like it had been a tropical storm over most of the Caribbean, picked up speed as it headed to Florida but was starting to lose ferocity and head out to the mid Atlantic. Just as well I'm a maths teacher and not a meteorologist because I got it wrong! Mind you, so did Michael Fish in 1987!

Transformation challenge - finalist!!

I came home to some lovely news yesterday. My little quilt is a finalist in this challenge. I have finished it... almost! One last bit of sewing on the binding to do and then I'll take a final photo before sending it off. But I have to go to work first, which is a real bummer because I want to have a look at all the lovely websites of the other finalists! Check them out. http://freemotionquilting.blogspot.com/2011/08/transformation-challenge-finalists.html