From little acorns grow mighty Oaks

Early in 2013 one of our oldest friends (and his gorgeous partner) had their first child. Naturally it was the cause for great celebration, as all new children are (or at least should be!). The first time father was 50 - my husband and I drew a deep breath....

Coincidentally Pete was an attendant at our wedding, just as David who I made the quilt for in March had been, so of course I started stitching. We went up to visit Pete, Catherine and the new baby, Oak, at the first opportunity. They live very near the top of the North Island in Paihia (we live at the very bottom of the island) so the visit didn't occur until April. Unfortunately the quilt wasn't ready so we took cushions for Oak - one with sailing ships to represent his father the boatie and the other with Union Jacks to represent his mother's heritage. I can't really imagine giving a non textile present so was pleased to be able to give these.

While we were visiting my boys took to referring to Oak as "mum's favourite drug". It appears I may have demonstrated signs of "cluckiness".... surely not....

Oak arrived a little early so he has a big name to grow into and I decided that he should also have a big quilt. I used the same round the world pattern that I had used for Sophie's quilt but used more boyish fabrics and lots that referred to his parents interests in the sea and the environment. It probably goes without saying that it also featured oak leaves which introduced the orange tones to the quilt. It passed muster and will keep him covered for quite a few years to come.

One of Oak's aunts had given him the most lovely eco dyed woollen shirt which was made by Helen Millen from Marlborough. It was fabulous! Another thing I need to try my hand at....

And this leads to a whole other story which I am yet to tell - my fabulous workshop with India Flint in Nelson....

Hello 2014! Starting with a recap on 2013....

Well it seems that last year I fell off the blog-o-sphere. This year I'm going to get back on it!! I blame pinterest and the ipad I bought myself early last year.... easy trap to fall into. However I did manage to keep stitching while I was off the air and I thought that there was no better place to start than with a recap of what I haven't posted about.

Having just been through the photos I took last year, in an effort to work out just what I did do and make last year I've realised than one of the downsides of not blogging is that my memory of what I made is hazier and also much less thoroughly photographed. Given than one of the major reasons I do this is to actually keep a log for myself on what I'm creating (and usually then giving away pretty quickly) it made me realise it's a habit I really need to keep up.... so

In March last year I had a wonderful weekend in Christchurch with friends I had been to school with to celebrate a 50th birthday - at this point I will hurriedly add that I am by far the youngest! One of our party was over from England for the celebrations and the last time he was here I had told him I would make a quilt for him to celebrate his civil union. 

Of course the hitch was I found out he was coming to the event only three weeks before hand. I had to get my skates on! First and foremost I wanted it to be a masculine quilt so I reached for a pile of my kimono fabrics.

I also wanted a quilt that reflected something of New Zealand. David has lived in London for several decades now and although he visits home every few years he still misses NZ and particularly the bush and the song of our native birds. This fabric features Saddlebacks on flax flowers.

Above all the quilt had to be simple so I could meet my deadline. I recalled a Denyse Schmidt quilt that I had long admired and used this as a starting point. Here's what I came up with.

David loved the quilt - in fact I don't think he quite believed it as he was starting to give me a hard time about when he would ever get his quilt and so I disappeared inside to get it, calling his bluff. He was speechless! This next photo is the back of the quilt. I called it "Into My Arms" from the Nick Cave song. 

I know he loves the quilt and it gives him a lot of comfort when he is missing home. I like knowing that at times when I would like to be able to give him a hug that he can wrap himself in it and know it carries my love and ongoing friendship.

 

Stay tuned  for more updates - and Happy New Year!

 

Friendship is the backbone of life

I'm pleased to report that although I've been sadly missing from this blog, I have not been missing from my sewing room. I've been having a highly productive summer - as ever I seem to perform well to a deadline, and this has certainly been the summer of deadlines.

This has been the summer that I have become the parent of a school leaver (one down, two to go) and it's therefore been the summer that my daughter and her friends have prepared for the transition from school students to university students. Many of her friends  have chosen to go to universities outside of the city we live in. It's a big transition for all considered - for the students and for their parents.

For some I've been able to help them on their way with a quilt. This is the third of what I am increasingly thinking of as part of my university series. You might recall that several years ago I made a quilt to remember a special friend who had died of breast cancer - I wrote about it here.

This quilt is for her eldest daughter - it uses a number of the same fabrics I used in the quilt for her mother and a similar pattern based on an idea from Kaffe Fassett. I think of it as a related but different quilt, just as Alice is related but different to her mother.

When I gave her the quilt Alice was stunned speechless, not something I have often seen from her. It was lovely to be able to send her off with something special, but the reason that she raced to the 'top of my quilts to be made list' was due to an off the cuff comment she had made a month or so earlier to my daughter when they had been out together.

My daughter had told her that we were making a quilt together for her friend who was having chemotherapy and Alice's response stunned us both - she asked if she would have to wait until she was ill before I would make a quilt for her.

Needless to say, I didn't think that was necessary and she raced to top of the list. The label carried the same words I stitched onto her mother's quilt - Friendship is the backbone of life. 

So that's three quilts that have gone off to universities with new owners - two to Dunedin and one to Christchurch. A good output for a summer - and there are still more to come.

Searching for Sunshine

It's been a busy few days here since Christmas. We had a lovely couple of days catching up with family and friends over lots of great food. The weather then took a turn affording me the perfect excuse to hit the sewing room. I wound up sewing just the sunshine I was seeking.

 

Last month I bought this wonderful Valori Wells fabric, planning that it would be the main feature of a quilt for one of my daughter's friends who is heading off to do a Fine Arts degree.

 

 

However quilts do seem to have a mind of their own in my experience. I've been looking at various modern quilt sites to find some ideas for some quick quilts as there are a couple I want to make for close friends who are heading away to University over the next few months. I really liked the Lemon Squares quilt pattern by Faith on Fresh Lemons blog and decided this would be just the thing - bright, clean and speaking of sunshine.  



 

 

 

It sewed up quickly and best of all almost all of it came straight out of my stash with only some additional white fabrics needed to add to what I had.

 

 So the focus fabric was re-purposed as a border,

once the central blocks had been framed by a thin border of pencils, designed by Kaffe Fassett. Not only were their colours just right but of course it was a natural choice of fabric for someone embarking on Fine Arts.

This rather vibrant print will be the backing - I picked it out for the colours. They compliment the front well. The funny thing is that the more I look at it the more certain I am that I've seen this fabric before in the home of the very person who will soon own this quilt - I'm almost certain her mother has bought this fabric and shown it to me.

 

As I say, quilts do seem to have a mind of their own.

Best wishes for a Happy New Year to you all.

Let's look forward to lots more creativity and colour in the year ahead.

Hope and Christmas Wishes

I didn't really show you the label on our collaborative quilt but have been told that I should talk about what my daughter wrote on the quilt, and the hopes that went with them. The quilt recipient is one of my daughter's team mates from Waka Ama, which is a sport they both love, of Maori outrigger canoeing.

My daughter chose two whakatauki, traditional Maori proverbs, to use on the label which carried all her hopes for her friend.

He toka tu moana, ara he toa rongonui

Your strength is like a rock that stands in raging water - this affirms an individual's strength and courage.

 

He taru kahika

Walk on, as it is only summer rain falling - It is only a small adversity, so don't let it be a hindrance.

I think she picked particularly well, but I will admit that I am a rather biased mother, as we all tend to be.

My annual activity has been reaching fever pitch - I've been making my yearly Christmas decorations for friends. I know we all do it, but I do wonder why I don't start these earlier - one of the great imponderables. Even with the best intentions I'm sure I'll repeat the exercise again next year.

Four years ago I made black hands - it was not long after my dear friend Denys had died and I had no cheery words that year to embroider on decorations so I chose hands instead. One of my friends gave them the nick name "the hands of death" so this year I decided it was time to make some more with a more cheery disposition to keep them company.

I'm really keen on them - especially the one's with tatting and linen buttons on them. I will be making sure that I keep one of these back for myself. They are of course part of my continuing series of 101 things to do with an old doiley!

So the Christmas tree is up, most of the presents have been wrapped and work has finally ceased for the year. I'm starting to feel that the end of year wind down is almost upon us.

Best wishes to you all for a peaceful and happy time this holiday season, full of joy and hope.

Collaborative Quilting

I'm pleased to be able to tell you that our guest Morepork eventually left us and my daughter and I were then able to get onto the new project that had been our plan. One of her friends is currently having chemo so of course we decided that a quick collaborative quilt was in order to cheer her up. We couldn't get started until her end of year exams were over and time pressure has been on us to get it done.

We picked a pattern by Valori Wells called Olive Rose which is one of her free patterns available on her blog. It uses some large scale fabrics in very big pieces so goes together quickly and looks effective. The quilt is 60 x 80 inches.

Of course I didn't have any of the fabrics Valori had designed for the project but pulled together some that we felt worked well together and that my daughter was certain would appeal to the eventual owner.

My job was to cut the fabrics and to plan layout in consultation with my daughter, while she pieced it together. This basically took a couple of afternoons - quick by any measure.

I then gave her a drawing of what I thought the back could look like with some fabrics we had at hand - this is what I gave her

and this is what she turned it into. Nothing shows our differences more. I would have just started piecing and kept going until it was big enough - she worked out the measurements of all the required pieces so I could cut them. She has a strong maths background - mine is rudimentary.... need I say more!

Of course one of the best parts of working together like this was that I could contract out the bits I don't enjoy - like the pinning!

Here's her masterpiece of a back, complete with label.

 

And here's a small view of the quilt complete with binding. I did most of the quilting in the interests of a speedy finish.

 

We delivered off the quilt on Monday and the owner was delighted. She has spent much time over recent years telling me how much she likes my quilts - and it clearly paid off as a strategy. It was lovely to see her smiling and with it wrapped around her shoulders.

And that's what makes quilting so rewarding! I have a feeling this won't be the last of our collaborative ventures but I sincerely hope it's the last quilt I make for a friend facing chemo. I know I've said this before but I can only hope not to have to repeat myself. Hope is a powerful emotion, so who knows - maybe this time it will work.

Lovely, lovely lace

So here's a wee story for you - a couple of months ago I was the monthly speaker at our Guild. They were doing me a favour really. I wanted to do a dry run through of a presentation I was due to give at the Costume and Textile Symposium in Nelson (another story, for another time).

The talk I gave was about some research I did last year into a donor to the textile collection at Te Papa, our National Museum. The donor was Mrs Phyllis Cousins who, in the 1960s, donated well over 200 items of mainly women's clothing, dating from the late 1800s through to the 1930s, to the Museum.

I'll tell you more about Mrs Cousins and her collection another time, but as part of the presentation I talked about how struck I was by the decorative laces on many of the garments and how dull our modern clothing often seems in comparison. The item which caused me to trail off into this side observation was, I think, this one.

 

A morning jacket from around 1900 it features a particularly stunning lace with what I can only describe as thread balls featuring on the lace edge of the sleeve. The jacket is thought to have perhaps have been a maternity jacket as it has fullness at both the front and back to accommodate a pregnancy.

Then again it may have been this 1905 morning jacket that set me off - both are firm favourites from among the Cousins collection and I felt very privileged to have been able to study and work with them.

However the really unexpected part of this tale occurred a few weeks after my presentation when a parcel appeared in my letterbox containing this lovely silk and lace handkerchief. It was accompanied by this note:

Hello

Did I hear you say at your presentation that you like lace? I do hope you did because I am sending a small treasure for you to be custodian of -----

I know it is very old, the team at the identification day at Te papa a few months back indicated that I should look after it. I know that I probably won't but thought that you might.

It came to me via an op shop collection of linen a few years back. No provenance I am afraid. Comes with no attached strings - has been rattling around my linen cupboard for years.

Kindest regards


So I wanted to say a big thank you to my unknown benefactor. It is a treasure and will be looked after and, from time to time, bought out and admired.

Borders for Frida & the Amulets

A few hours of uninterrupted stitching was all it took to get the black borders onto the Frida blocks and to get all the blocks put together. Sunday afternoon's are my favourite time for stitching if I can manage it - the National Radio has it's Arts Programme on so there is always something good to listen to while I am working away. 

I enjoy this part of the quilting process - It's always exciting to see the blocks  start to come together.

The black borders provide a real frame for each of the fabrics and for the block as a whole and make all the colours seem richer.

I'm yet to decide on whether there needs to be another outer border, or maybe even more than one - I suspect so. Something colourful and lush befitting the garden that Frida had with Deigo. It's going to add some real colour zing to our guest bed - assuming I can keep it off my daughter's bed! Mind you I am the one who has recently been given Frida socks, all the way from the US, so if anyone should be wrapped up in it I think it should be me.

My friend who I made the applique quilt for confessed to me yesterday that she had been reading my blog, although not until after she had been given it. She said she was showing it to her mother to try to show her how long it takes me to get a quilt together. Her mother was apparently amazed that there was a quilt on the computer that looked just like the one her daughter owned! Not sure that she managed to convince her of the work involved really but it gave us all a good laugh.

February? Already??

How did it get to be February? This year seems to have raced away leaving my blog floundering in the wake. There has been no shortage of stitching featuring in my activities - first I had the challenge of getting the birthday quilt finished for my dear friend. There were many days of concentrated stitching leading up to us heading to the beach and the odd meltdown when I was convinced that I wasn't going to get there!

Thank goodness Marilyn was able to urge me on when things got hairy with the free motion quilting...

and the lines that just wouldn't stay straight! The quilt came to the beach with me so I could stitch down the binding in the evenings. The only thing not finished was the label which was stitched to the back of the quilt over a gin and tonic (it appears to be fairly straight!) after I had given it to it's new owner on her birthday. I'm happy to say that she loves it.

It was a tight finish to the deadline - never again....famous last words I suspect!!

So what else have I been doing? While up at the beach I played with a bit more eco dyeing. There was a huge eucalyptus tree on the property so it seemed a shame not to do something with all the leaves that were lying around. 

No sooner were we home than we headed to Queenstown for a family wedding - my job was to get the binding onto the quilt for the happy couple - accomplished but without a photo taken. What was I thinking?

Now that I am home, and life is reverting to normal (back to work, all the children back to school including our two boys starting at two different secondary schools on the same day... etc etc) I've turned my attention back to Frida and the amulets. I've started putting sashing between the blocks and getting it all put together. So exciting...

And best of all it's a long weekend here - with a fair wind behind me I hope to have the top all together before work beckons again on Tuesday.

Happy stitching where ever you are - and a belated Happy New Year.

Fabulous Fabric - Finally

The long awaited parcel from the US arrived this week. Seldom have I been so pleased to receive a text message from my daughter while at work! It was the cause of much celebration and swept me into almost immediate activity. Luckily for me I had the next day off so I spent most of it in the sewing room.

First up I had to finish off the Frida Khalo blocks. Having made 20 I decided that it really did need to be a bit longer so another 5 were made. For a change I had the perfect amount of fabric to cut the feature blocks - it could not have been a single block larger. It was clearly my time for something to go my way.

Having completed that and taken a quick photo, they have now all been taken off the wall and will now wait until sometime in the new year. They still all need to have borders put onto them I think. Time will tell.

By way of comparison, one of my friends has used the same block for a quilt for her granddaughter. Marilyn's version is just about as different from mine as you can imagine - pale and soft with the most wonderful dogs and cats featuring in the blocks. It's hard to imagine it not being adored.

So with Frida tidied away I turned back to the medallion quilt and am delighted to have the top finished without too many further incidents. I did have a heart stopping moment when I thought I had cut the precious border fabric too short but I'm pleased to report it fitted perfectly, once I had removed an errant extra row of checkerboard which had somehow found its way onto one side. How I managed that I will never know - but as I said this quilt has certainly presented me with some challenges.

And I know they are far from over yet - I have one month to get this quilted before the big birthday. It's only 85 inches or 2.2meters square and there's only the small matter of Christmas and a beach holiday standing in between me and its completion....

Oh yes - ever quilt certainly has its challenges!

Every Quilt Has Its Challenges

Those were the sage words of my daughter when she had a look at the progress of my medallion quilt. I had come up with the block design for the next border and having made enough to go down one side of the quilt I had reluctantly concluded that they were too heavy and too large and would result in the quilt becoming far too big.... don't you hate it when that happens!

So I unpicked them, saving the central blocks for the back, and made another checker border that we both agreed looked much better - my daughter was unable to restrain herself from reminding me that this was what she had suggested in the first place.... she was right, she had.... seemed fair enough in retrospect.

So then I decided that the quilt really could be finished off with a border of my feature fabric..... only to discover I didn't have enough to cut borders without joins, which the fabric certainly didn't lend itself to.

Of course at this point you won't be at all surprised to learn that the shop I bought the fabric from has sold out of it.... so after an online search over the weekend I am now waiting eagerly at the letterbox for more fabric to arrive from the US....

I rest my case - every quilt has its challenges.

Making a Medallion - Border by Border

It's not just the eco-dying that has been keeping me occupied this week - it's also my applique attempt which is gradually being transformed into a medallion quilt. I had to make an emergency trip to my local quilt store this afternoon for more cream fabric and thread and it was pointed out to me by one of my stitching buddies who works there that I had been most remiss in not updating progress on this quilt - so here it is, to bring a smile to your face Marilyn.

Fortunately the friend who will be getting this quilt is not a textile person so doesn't read my blog with any regularity, apart from when she knows I am stitching something for her daughters. However, if you are reading, and can work out who you are, you should just stop now! Consider yourself warned.

So here is the progress to date - I started with a green border and moved onto a chequer-board.

Then came a border of a beautiful floral designed by Anna Griffin that is the basis of the colour choices for the quilt. My daughter picked it out as she was convinced that it was just the thing that would be loved by the intended recipient. It will end in a wider border of this feature fabric, quite a traditional English medallion quilt which I hope will be perfect, even if the applique isn't quite.

The most recent addition over the last two days are the 32 friendship stars. My friend and I have only been friends for 28 years, but I was prepared to extend her the benefit of the doubt for the sake of the design. At this point I think we will be able to hang in there for four more years....sounds suspiciously like a Presidential campaign slogan!

And now I am drawing breath and trying to decide what next. I think it will probably be another cream border so that the stars look like they are floating on the surface of the quilt. I'm hoping that's what it will look like anyway and not like a big bandage.

It's been great to have a week out of the office, with far more opportunity that normal for stitching. At this rate the January deadline won't be too much a stretch - although I probably shouldn't speak too soon!

Needle Still In Hand

I'm pleased to report that slow but steady progress is being made on the stitching front at my house - it's not world shattering but from where I stand it's better than nothing.

I have finished the bonnet and it will soon be heading off to Australia to join the Roses from the Heart project. The bonnets have been used in a variety of installations and some have even travelled to the regions that the women were originally deported from for commemorative services. If you are interested in how they are used, and I know Stitchbird was asking, you can find out more here. There are currently activities going on in Ireland with bonnets being taken there to remember the women who were departed from there to Tasmania.

You can't see too much of the rather nice cloth the bonnet is perched above (on a lamp - for some strange reason I couldn't find a ready volunteer to model the bonnet) so here's a better shot. The cloth is one of my more recent acquisitions and my first green cloth. I couldn't resist the cottages.

And today I started some experimentation for a new quilt. One of my dearest friends is having a milestone birthday early next year - I have never made her a quilt so now is the time. Part of the reason I never have is that deep down I know she would like something traditional, with applique - not my usual thing at all. I have humm-ed, haa-ed and generally prevaricated but finally been convinced by stitching friends that I can do this. So today I made a start - a bit of practice to perfect my machine applique and preferred stitching method before I get onto the real piece. Stay tuned - this will be a true test of friendship!

More Kimono Hapiness

Some more kimono moved to my house today... Some are silk and some are wool....

And it seemed to me that they were just asking to be made into a blue, orange and green quilt,

that one day soon will be going to live with friends in London to belatedly celebrate their marriage. I need to get unpicking....