Due to holiday preparations – mainly lots of days spent baking cookies/biscuits – paper piecing Monday is being delayed a couple of days. I hope to have my new block and the corresponding pattern up on Wednesday.
Merry Christmas… happy Hanukkah… happy Holidays.
This year I decided to make a couple of Christmas decoration wreaths for some friends. I personally find it hard to make Christmas quilts, I do not like the idea a quilt would only be used for a short time every year.
So armed with a hot glue gun, some tinsel and lots and lots of Christmas baubles (sourced predominantly from thrift stores) I started making my first wreath. There are lots of instructions on-line and I decided to go with Georgia Peachz instructions (http://retrorenovation.com/2010/12/11/how-to-make-a-christmas-wreath-out-of-vintage-ornaments/) because I was using mainly vintage glass ornaments. Her instructions are:
That’s it in a nutshell!
What is not mentioned is how many decorations you need. The answer is A LOT. I added some newer decorations for texture and size (mainly the glitter baubles and small glass decorations). The other thing that is not mentioned is how dangerous a very hot glue gun can be. – I now have a wonderful collection of burned fingers, but I think it was worth it.
My colour choice for this wreath was based on a handful of bright pink vintage decorations I had. I used purples and light & dark pinks to compliment the hot pink.
I delivered the first of my wreaths on Saturday and my dear friend, Margaret was appropriately impressed. Okay I had actually told her that no matter what she thought she had to oh and ah…. too much time, effort and burn cream had gone into making this!
This weekend, as I prepared to post about my latest quilt, I discovered my trusty digital SLR had stopped focusing. That is why some of my recent quilt photos have been soft.
My Canon has been around the world with me – probably several times over. I have taken thousands of photos with it and now I must say goodbye. I am sad, and a little disappointed.. I have had the camera about 7 years but I still have a Minolta film camera that I have been using for about 20 years with no issues. They just do not make them like they used to.
For the next couple of weeks I will be posting with my point and shoot camera and photos from my i-phone. This should be interesting.
I have had a wonderful time getting back into colour this week.
This is actually a quilt I started a couple of years ago. I had put it away in a cupboard and forgot about it, until now. In the spirit of challenging myself I decided to finish it.
It started with a pile of fabric and a paper piecing pattern I made myself.
I have not done a paper pieced quilt in a long time, and it was a nice reminder for me how messy and fiddly they are. These days I could have easily done this quilt without a foundation pattern, but back when I started making this, I was not confident enough to do anything without a pattern.
Whatever way I got there, I like this quilt.
As I start this process of documenting my new quilting adventures I started thinking about where it all began. It started with a car accident and a film – “How to make an American Quilt”. While I was convalescing in Australia I thought I would try to make a quilt. My first attempts were interesting…. I was teaching myself and there were a lot of mistakes.
With each quilt I learnt something new, like measuring is important and there is a reason you start your quilting in the center of the quilt. I also found an outlet for my quilting attempts – my sister was a oncology nurse at the local Children’s hospital. It was a match made in heaven. Of the hundreds of quilts I have made over the years for Project Linus in Australia, England and now the US I only have a handful of pictures.
This is the only quilt that I have kept so far. I made it 15 years ago, as I was just learning to quilt. I had not yet learned about the value of tones or that stitching in the ditch does not add much to the quilt. I made mistakes and learned from them. This quilt is a good illustration for my two goals with this blog:
1. To be honest about the results of the challenges I set myself. To show the things that do not work along with those that do.
2. To actually photograph and document my quilts.
Let the adventure begin!
WOMBAT QUILTS 