Landscape finished over three years later

In 2012 my quilt guild had a retreat. I was in charge of education at the time and decided that we would play a game the first night that was a bit of a challenge. I put the women in groups of three, gave them a piece of stiff interfacing, a glue stick and a pile of fabric and asked them to make a landscape quilt - in half an hour!

This is a link to the wonderful creations they made. Retreat slideshow Later that year we were asked by the main quilt guild, Auckland Quilt Guild, to put on a small display. It was a bit risky but we decided to put these "quilts" into the display. You have to understand that these weren't quilts yet and the fabric was only stuck on with a glue stick and, did I mention already, they only had half an hour to make them! They were very well received with several people from other smaller guilds saying that they liked the idea of the game and would try it out with their guild. The viewers were also really impressed with the work.

Like a good teacher, I made an exemplar for my game just to give some ideas. Here is my exemplar.

Over the past three years this has been sitting on my design wall, thrown in a drawer and moved house a couple of times. I decided to pull it out and finish it! Would you believe it, all the pieces are still stuck on and other than a good press to get a fold mark out, I have done nothing further to this piece before a bit of threadwork and then quilting. Nothing was frayed beyond the usual that you get with raw edge applique. So there you go, why use expensive fusible web when a cheap glue stick does exactly the same!

My finished quilt. I think I'll call it "Autumn by the Lake".

Fiddler crabs

I had to take these photos with the flash so the colour isn't right. I've tried to adjust it so that you get a good idea of the ugliness of my challenge fabric. Pretty garish! But somehow I saw fiddler crabs in that fabric!

I just need to put a binding on it.

I'm particularly pleased with my little crabs in the distance. I just cut out random oval blobs for the first three and painted legs on them. Then when I went around them in black, they came to life. The very distant ones are just painted and then quilted with a dark grey thread instead. I like this scribble outline technique. It suits my messy way of working!

Guild BOM

Counties Manukau block of the month was really cute last month. I hadn't even started it by the meeting date so no chance of me winning them! I really liked it so I made one anyway.

My friend Raewyn won them. Here's the rest. It's going to be a fabby quilt!

Mystery quilt revealed

I've really wanted to post this but I had to wait until our first guild meeting so that the ladies who made it could see it first (apart from a select few who saw it in person :D).

Clown - border still to be added, 36" by 48" so far

As promised, I will share how we did this. 

Firstly, I found an image on www.canstockphoto.com that I thought was simple enough and that filled a rectangle nicely. It cost me about $2.50 and I don't begrudge paying such a small amount. We should be supporting artists - one day it may be my daughter that you are paying! 

Print out on A4 size paper and draw a grid on the image of 4cm squares. That's it on the right of the photo below.

That gives you 6 squares across and 8 squares down. A4 is slightly smaller than that so the outside squares will have more background than shows on your A4 print. Try to position the grid so that the lines cut through the drawing at convenient places. I'll show what I mean in the next diagram.

Freezer paper is 18" wide so you can get three 6" squares across the paper. Tape two sheets together and draw a 6" grid on the freezer paper, 6 squares by 8 squares.

Do we all remember making enlargements in Art at school? Look at the intersections of the drawing with the grid on the A4 print and transfer those marks to the freezer paper grid. Connect the dots - with flair and panache! (see below for hints on flair and whatever!!)


Number the squares on the A4 print and freezer paper pattern.

Cut up both A4 and freezer paper into the squares and attach the 4cm colour square to the 6" pattern square with a paper clip, ready for the needleturn applique.

I made a video for the needleturn applique but it never uploaded to YouTube and I forgot that when I handed in my iPad to school for wiping! I will try to remake it and cover that in another post. In the meantime, I will try to explain how I drew this.

Draw in pencil to start with. Although you are going to try to enlarge the drawing to look like the original, this is an opportunity to change it a bit so that it is easy to put back together again. You may have to adjust the position of the 4cm grid on the A4 sheet depending on how it falls. I found that if I started with a line touching the bottom of the mouth, the nose was divided into reasonable sized sections. If you find that a lot of slivers of colour end up just going over a line, can you shift the grid to get more of a shape falling in a square? You're not going to manage to get it fitting 100%. This is where the flair comes in.

 

Looking at the pattern of the hat on the left, you can see that I made the hatband follow the line of a square on the left side. I really didn't want to have to sew a tiny blue bit and it looks fine as it is. I've also made some of the curls of the hair go into a line as well. I must have drawn the flower about 10 times and I still wasn't happy with it but it ended up looking ok. You can see my many pencil lines!

After adjusting lines, I stuck the pattern on the wall with masking tape and stood back to see if any of the adjustments looked a bit too kooky. More rubbing out and more pencil lines!

Once I was happy with it, I went over the lines with a permanent pen with a 0.25mm nib and then rubbed out all the pencil lines.

This has been a really fun project and I'm very pleased with the results, as were the women that worked on it at guild. Some didn't even realise that this was the project they had worked on! I really fooled them - in a good way. I hope you consider doing this with your group. Send me photos if you do!

This quilt will be displayed at our guild exhibition in May and we will be making a matching quilt at the show. If you are in the Papatoetoe area in Auckland on the 11th and 12th of May, call in and make a square. The quilts will go to children in care. Two lucky siblings should get these ones.

Mystery quilt blocks finished

There were only five more blocks to make so Mum and I finished them off. Here they are after I chain-pieced the rows together.

I tried to trim the blocks as carefully as possible but I haven't fussed too much about matching seams on the applique. A lot of them are amazingly accurate but where it is a little out of alignment, like in the shorts leg above, I've just left it. I think it will add to the charm of this quilt. 

Want to see the whole thing? Not long now... :)

A bit more of the mystery quilt

There's a bow-tie in this quilt!

I've been painting this weekend with my art quilt group buddies (and we still don't have a name!). We all had a go at painting photos, like the ones I did with my family. This was the one my nephew did last year. I'll show you what the women did next month, when they are completed.

Mystery quilt

I have designed a mystery applique quilt for our quilt guild. It's always difficult to come up with education ideas but I struck on the idea of having members teach each other to do needleturn applique. I took a simple drawing and enlarged it on to freezer paper, then cut it into six inch blocks. The mystery is that you don't know what you are making in your block but hopefully when it all comes back together, it will make a great quilt!

One finished block

Denise marking her block. My instructions in the foreground were way too wordy!

Hmmm, what could it be??

We have used fabrics from the community quilts stash so it will a real patchwork picture.

If you are interested in doing a project like this with your guild, I will post instructions and photos of the process when we have finished. Alternatively, you can add a comment here (enable email replies) and I'll email you.

Counties Manukau Quilters Guild Retreat 2012

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