International Quilting Day in Barnsley

I've had a brilliant day visiting my friend Janet of A Quilter's Journal and her embroidery group in Barnsley. There was so much going on it made my head spin! The photo above shows some of the blocks made for the Block Lotto. Three winners went away with 35 or 36 of these blocks - enough to make a quilt!

Other activities included:

 Ugly fat quarter swap

 A raffle with so many donated prizes nearly everyone won something!

 A silent auction of books and fabric packs

 Yummy cakes to go with tea and coffee

 A bring and buy stall.

 In the morning you could sew blocks for the lotto or applique a cupcake or easter bunny.


At lunchtime we enjoyed a show and tell:

 This amazing black white and red quilt is reversible!

In the afternoon was a choice of two mini workshops with Lynne of Linen Stitches:

Or with me to make a stitched postcard like these samples:

First everyone traced a picture and coloured it with wax crayons - yes, ordinary crayola crayons!

Then ironed the picture to set the colour, removed the freezer paper backing from the fabric, added thin wadding (Hobbs Thermore)  and stitched:

Some finished stitching and pressed on the Fast-2-Fuse stiffening. The final job will be to finish the edges by hand or machine. Here are all the lovely postcards made today with a few close-ups:

Aren't they pretty? Well done ladies - I had great fun working with you!

And best of all? The day raised £637.13 for Barnsley Hospice. Just brilliant!

Dyeing Again!

 Look at all these juicy colours! I had fun today with my friends from Tuesday Quilters as I shared how to dye these gorgeous fabrics. We used 3 colours of procion dye - lemon yellow, magenta and turquoise, to create a rainbow of 12 colours and then everyone experimented with colour mixing to create even more. Like these:

 Lyn loves experimenting and tried dropping contrasting dyes into her cups:

I can't wait to see how these turn out!

Everyone was very busy and trying to persuade them to stop for lunch was very difficult!

 Some of you may recognise the lady on the left - she is QuiltSue, the infamous blogger from Quilt Times! She does like to pose for the camera:

 See what I mean?!! Now Sue likes everything arranged in neat and orderly fashion so she found certain aspects of the day very difficult. When I suggested scrunching or pleating fabric and spooning on random colours she was horrified.  'But I don't do random' she wailed! But she did succeed. Here she is trying very hard at random:

Janet definitely did random! I love the pink and golden yellow combination here:

Mandy  had a go at creating tree like patterns with pleated fabric with great success. Some of her fabric looked just like tulips:

 In the afternoon we tried something different - dyeing silk scarves in the microwave. First soak your scarf in diluted vinegar, gently wring, then scrunch and add steam fixed silk paint. Here's Janet adding paint:

Pop into a covered pot in the microwave for 3 minutes, rinse and iron dry:

 Tah Dah! If you'd like to have a go visit 'Silkcraft' for the paints and pongee scarves we used.

 We had some beautiful colour combinations:

 Ooh who's that posing on the right? You've guessed - it's QuiltSue again! She asked me to have my photo taken - 'I don't do photos' I wailed. But I did have a photo - here I am on the right. :

What a great day!

My House Workshop

Yesterday I taught a workshop for the local branch of the Quilters Guild and had a really great day. The photo above show most of the ladies with their house quilts and what a lovely band of quilters they are! We had fun designing our pictures, fusing fabric and practising machine quilting. As you can see everyone's designs are very different. Some are based on a real house and some are fantasy!

I started by showing some of my quilts and the starting point for this project:

and here are a few of the students quilts in progress:

I love the rectangular tree in this.

The picture extends into the border - a great idea.

Lovely fabrics and a fabulous tree.

A bird perched in the tree - wow!

I didn't manage to take photos of all the quilts so the next couple are cropped from the group photo and are a bit fuzzy. Sorry about that - Although you can't really see the lovely fabric choices I wanted to show how creative these are:

Not only a beautiful house but a line of washing too!

Two little bird houses and birds in a tree!

     
 Haven't they done well?! Everyone loved the freestyle, no rules approach so all in all a very creative and enjoyable day. Many thanks to Jean for organising the workshop and also to Pippa and Glenda for the help and tea making!