Well my Quilty Friends as this hot weather continues here in Wales my stitching has almost ground to a halt.
It's just too hot to be indoors sewing. So it's hand stitching in the garden for me.
Mind you even that's not easy with Daisy (my new puppy) wanting to help all the time.
Once the weather cools down the and normal sewing resumes, the next part on my log cabin is the binding.
Meanwhile,
I'm going to show you a little piece I'm currently working on.
As a backdrop to this story. Me and a few of my quilty friends have recently joined the
Contemporary Section of the Quilters Guild of the British Isles.
I've been a
'Guild' member for years, but this May decided to join the Contemporary Section.
Well, we all went to a Guild Area Day last month and the speaker was
Gillian Travis. She is also a member of the Contemporary section. And she was showing amongst other things, some of the pieces she had made for the Contemporary challenge this year,
Journal Quilts.
We would have like to join in, with the Journal Quilts challenge, but as we joined in May we were too late to join in this challenge.
So between us we devised a quilty plan.
We would have our own little contemporary challenge. We choose memories of each month, so our first month would be Memories of June which we would each have to bring along and show at our monthly
Swansea Quilters meeting.
Sew, this is mine, a work in progress at the moment. But it has to be finished for Saturday so I'd better get a move on.
I have chosen a picture of Daisy take just a few days after we had her.
I took lots of photos that day and as she raced around the house and garden,
most of my pictures were of a blur of black, a black tail or even some with no Daisy in at all.
This was one of my better ones - she's almost all in it - it's just her head disappeared as I took the photo.
Anyways, I had the photo printed out. Then I took a piece of thinish calico, laid it on the top of the photo
the simply traced the outlines of the photo onto the calico.
Next - very brave of me
I got out some of the fabric paints I'd bought over the last few years.
You know,
The kind of quilty thing you buy intending to try straight away
Which then sits in a draw for the foreseeable future
mainly due to your being too scared/not having the confidence to try whatever it is out.
Sew
Feeling enthused and fearless after Gillian Travis talk - 'just do it' she said.
'Use these little quilts to try out different ideas', she said
'Don't procrastinate', she said
SEW
I got out my paints, sat out the garden and painted the photo
And you can see the result in the picture above, above the actual picture.
And I'm very pleased with it for a first attempt.
Now even I can see that the wall is a bit wonky
That's where I didn't follow the lines and added some of my own
Leason learnt there.
This picture has some machine stitching on it.
You can probably make out the stands of cotton that need to be cut off
These are from where I've 'jumped' from one section of stitching to another.
Next I plan to start hand stitching Daisy in.
It's no masterpiece - but I'm quite thrilled with my first attempt
I particularly like the cartoon feel to it - it wasn't something I was aiming for but I like it.
Well that's me done for today,
remember you can click on the 'pink links' to find out more.
Speak to you all again soon,
Yours in Stitches, Joy
