magikquilter July 15th, 2008
These fabric samples arrived a week or so ago from Kara of Delicious Handmade Handbags. She was having a clean out and thought of me…wasn’t that nice of her? She knows I love my upholstery samples and remnants…there were also a lot of smaller offcuts as well. Lucky me! Also lucky that I have almost finished tidying my garage …the work area in the bedroom is also under control now thank goodness …and am sure my husband is pleased as well. He patiently waits for me to move all my stuff around the room before he goes to bed, although I do try to finish up in time to clean up well before he toddles off to bed with his hot water bottle. It is really chilly here at present and due to expenses we try not to have the heater on for more than a few hours a day…so thank goodness for all those quilts and throws. It has slowed me down bit though….I was really getting into the hand sewing but my fingers are too cold to hold the needle properly!
Its terrific fun at present seeing all the pilgrims arrive in Sydney and the groups of them I saw today were very happy and polite …..we live about 15 minutes by bus from the CBD so its not surprising that some are staying here. although the price of hotels etc is astronomical and they said on the news that the average pilgrim is going to spend around $75 a day while they are here….lucky to cover their meals with that around here!
A lot of them are being billetted out amongst local Catholic families so perhaps that is why we have so many here. We also have a large university so maybe they are hosting some as well. When I walked home tonight around six a group of them in their early twenties were going into one of the local internet cafes. Am not quite sure what to do really….when we were preparing for the Olympics Sydneysiders were encouraged to be friendly and speak to tourists and even invite them home for meals etc but they haven’t said anything about this. I said have a wonderful time to several of them and wondered if I should give some of them money for a coffee as a lot of them are on such tight budgets…I shall see what happens when I run into some more …… I will let the spirit move me. Sorry could not resist….after all Pope Benedict knows his history, calling Australia the “great southern land of the Holy Spirit.” Judging by Sydney CBD today maybe he is right even if it took the youth of rest of the world to bring it about. The Spirit may be interpreted differently by everyone and today I saw it as a wonderful spirit of joy in the air…making everyone around the pilgrims a little bit happier.
Tags: fabric samples, Sydney, World Youth Day
magikquilter July 8th, 2008
Been busy undoing this quilt top which is too similar to
the one below which I prefer anyway.
What is the difference you say…well that is part of the problem but mainly because I prefer the softer look of the one above and also because it has the prettiest borders in a floral striped rose print. I have already found a pattern for the other fabric and as it is a little different to my usual I am looking forward to that.
We have had a nightmare 36 hours of not being able to use our toilet due to repairs. First of all after I was told that it was going to be 24 hours we were going to go to a hotel but my husband was then assured that it would only be one hour for the sealant to dry…..yeah right…..and here we are now 36 hours later and it has only now been able to be used. It was too late to go to a hotel by the time my husband got home. All I can say is hooray for Gastro Stop, it is my friend!!!! Daniel and I went to see Get Smart today [wonderful film] and it was wonderful to go to the public toilets ….never thought I would say that!
Tags: broken toilets, Get Smart, nightmares, quilt tops, shabby chic, wips
magikquilter July 7th, 2008
This is the ballroom of a friend who lives in a heritage house in Sydney. Her ballroom is filled with antiques of all kinds and a glorious Persian Rug in Navy with gold and shot through with red. A year or so before I made this I had found the fabric and bought the whole bolt in a charity shop. I had been saving it for making a bedspread or curtains but when she was preparing for a function there [she also hires it for film shoots and allows it to be used for charity events] I suddenly thought that it would look stunning, especially as she uses Willow pattern china in blue for those functions.
After asking her to measure the table ….five metres I think it was…I had a word with her husband just to make sure us girls weren’t forcing our will onto him! He genuinely liked it and he even took photographs of the room before the function so I would have a record of my work. I made the table runner and backed it with the same fabric so that it would be reversible, a square tablecloth for the side table and dozens of large dinner napkins. the fabric was Mandarin Robe by Warner Fabric UK and it carries the Royal Warrant! The other photos are here.
I still have enough offcuts of the fabric to make some throws and I also found some stunning aqua brocade which will look perfect on an ottoman or footstool with a throw. I am saving that for myself and also one of the throws. It is going to be a mix of gold and cream and turquoise with splashes of hot pink..multi textured…I have got to get it finished! It has a surprise fabric in it of Colefax and Fowler. Got you wondering?
Tags: handmade, hertitage, mansion, tablerunner, Warner Fabrics Mandarin Robe
magikquilter July 4th, 2008
Working towards having a selection of smaller articles for my shop and for the new local artisan gallery. Have completed half of the smaller items and already am more than halfway through a few quilts. It was fun and inspired me to tidy up my work area a bit and actually used up a huge pile of fabrics which has to be good. Oh by the way I am merrily uploading all these photos myself now! And they are fully optimized as well. Now that I am confident that I have not pushed these skills out of my brain by learning new ones I have been creating a gallery of quilts and also wips here on the blog…they are up the top under my header in case you missed them. [As well as a book list which is going to take a while to compile]
Tags: artisans gallery, gallery, Sewing, small artisan items, small quilts
magikquilter June 26th, 2008
All bound and tied and pressed…at last! I finished the top of this quilt last September, along with several other strippies, simply strips sewn together making a pattern when put together with the other strips. The process was very simple …. I bought several pieces of feature fabric…..grabbed co-ordinating ones from the stash….then fretted for a few days because I didn’t have enough blacks and grey accent fabrics. My friend asked me to get her some of it too, as usual, so I went back into the city to get hers and the rest of the blacks and greys at the same time. While I was there I bought the cranes in two other colourways so that anyone body else who liked it would have a bit of a choice within the context of the design.
The other two colours are burnt orange and a sage/silver green with more brown than black accents. I luckily have a lot of accent fabrics for those two quilts so did not have to buy any more at the time and also did not show my friend the other colourways as I can only take so much imitation. I actually don’t find it flattering as I go to great lengths to find my fabrics and need to keep some semblance of originality going.
The top was easy to run up, in fact I made several tops in a few weeks in the strippy style, mostly shabby chic ones though. A few months ago I sandwiched this one together using a pair of almost new Laura Ashley curtains as backing and then I tied it, then I took those ties out and quilted it using largish naive stitches in perle thread. I hated it! It just lost all its appeal to me so I put it away until a few weeks ago when I decided to unpick all the quilting stitches and retie it. After binding it with the remaining pieces of fabric joined together scrappy style I was more than happy with the result. I think you will be too if only because it is so different from my usual dark florals and scrappy quilts. It has a contempory feel which I like and I can’t wait to find my black oriental vases and various other china to photograph with the quilt for my decorating with textiles group on flickr, have to keep up with Sally and all the other wonderful people there!
Tags: one of a kind, Oriental cranes quilt, original design, pink black and silver quilt, tied quilts
magikquilter June 18th, 2008
Scrappy Jewels was the third quilt that I made after teaching myself to quilt in 2000 from magazines found at various newsagencies. I had seen a book “Victorian Crafts” edited by Tracy Marsh at our local library and along with a lot of soft cloth dolls for children to take to church and embroidered and embellished crafts and fabric covered hat boxes just dripping with fringing there was decoupage and embroidery and all sorts of things used for “high days and holidays” along with a couple of gloriously photographed Drawing Rooms which impressed me no end! The rooms showed the colours of the day in all their glory. Deep ruby red door and window drapes edged with lush fringing, velvet topped occasional tables and wonderful circular drawing room tables draped with heavily fringed, silk embroidered shawls piled high with books and sewing baskets and fabric and lace embellished writing compendiums. Amongst all this over indulgence of the times a photo of a simple quilt stood out and over a period of a few days I found myself going again and again to that page to feast my eyes on the apparent simplicity of the design.
Probably for its time it was quite simple, after all crazy quilting with all its attendant embellishments was all the rage. I already had several rich floral fabrics in my collection and as the 2003 NSW Quilter’s Guild was/were (?) about to have their annual show I enlisted my husband’s help to get as many bejwelled type fabrics as I could. I had absolutely none at that stage as had been mainly working with florals so I needed a good selection and as we only have two chain fabric stores near us I knew I had to be serious about getting as many as I could at the show.
I will spare you the details of how David mowed over these little old ladies as he elbowed his way through boxes of fat quarters. He claims he does not see people “down there” [he is 6' 5"] but he does not see anything else when he has an objective in sight! The amount of times I said “we quilters just don’t do this”!! Well we exhausted all the florals with black and jewel backgrounds and we, okay me, eventually decided that we’d had enough, after a final walk through the quilts on display of course! I was still astounded that the quilts were so thin as all I had been able to find locally was Tontine polyester high loft wadding. Is there any wonder I tied most of my early quilts?
When it came time to arrange the sewn 9 patch blocks with the alternating 15cm one patches I decided to accentuate the red and green aspects, as I had in the 9 patch, and placed more of those than the other jewel colours. So in all the quilt was eight blocks by eight blocks, and I also used several sapphire and opal blocks to achieve the bejewelled effect I was after. I found a very pretty floral fabric at Vinnies to back it with and at last found a pure cotton batting. I tied the quilt as in the book I think it was only a patchwork top with no batting or quilting that I could discern. I bound it the traditional way in black with coral cabbage patch roses that I had found new as two tablecloths at the local Ted Noffs Charity Shop. Other views are here.
This quilt has been well used as a cover for a chest in our lounge room although I had to move it at times as I lost time gazing at the wonderfully rich patterns, especially in the 15cm alternate blocks. There are two sapphire blocks that are simply breath taking! I have not taken leave of my senses everyone truly! Some visitors over the Christmas period were heard to say, “I can’t take my eyes off that quilt, it is sort of hypnotising me”. Isn’t that just the highest praise?
Tags: hand made, jewel toned quilt, tied quilt, Victorian Quilt
