A Great Saturday

I spent a very exciting Saturday at the meeting of Eastern Branch of the Irish Patchwork Society. Bought some bits and pieces form the visiting shop, Fabric Matters, including my beloved YLI variegated threads.

I also couldn't resist a layer cake of beautiful "Shibori" collection by Moda. Wendy had a sample quilt on display made of this collection's charm pack.

I'm planning a quilt for my brother, so this collection of imitation shibori prints in shades of indigo seemed a great choice.

There was a great talk by Ruth Bourke of Charly and Ben's Crafty Corner about modern quilting.

And then, in the afternoon, Ruth held a workshop for us on the Ticker Tape technique, which was very interesting and inspiring. You can see Ruth's quilt of her dog Wilbur made in this technique in her blog here.

As it was just a half-day workshop, we could only start the process, but everybody enjoyed playing with scraps and I'm looking forward to seeing (at least some) finished quilts at the next month's meeting. I made my own pattern of a dragon and had a good start on it. After some more work at home, this is where I am now:

Admittedly she looks more like a dinosaur at the moment, but there are still wings and spines to come. Anyway, you can see she's a girl and I hope she's going to be a good girl. The process is fast and fun and hope to have her finished before I get overwhelmed with my college tasks again.

Linking up to Sunday Stash at Molli Sparkles
Main Crush Monday at Cooking Up Quilts

Prized Sunday Stash

It's a very special addition to my stash that I want to share about today - my quilt "Firebird" won the first place in the appliqué category of the Bloggers' Quilt Festival and I got a Fat Quarter Shop certificate which I immediately put to good use. On Friday my parcel arrived (took just a week from the US to Ireland, which is very nice).

Two ten-inch squares packs - Stonehenge Gradations and Bali Crackers in green. Just look at that:

Does it make anybody go green with envy? ;)))

It's impossible to show all the beautiful batiks, they are all different (all 40 of them) and all just gorgeous! I usually am short on greens for my art projects, now I think this issue has been addressed.

There is another gorgeous prize that my fabric pumpkin won (randomly) from the Handmade Halloween link-up hosted by Bernie at Needle and Foot, and it was a pattern by Lorna of Sew Fresh Quilts. My girls chose the Forest Friends pattern and I couldn't but take a break from my current project to try it out. I made two blocks yesterday and they turned out very winterly with the snowy background and snowflakes on the deer's nose.

Aren't they super cute? I haven't yet decided what I'll do with them but they seem very suitable for winter/Christmas decor.

I'm linking up to Sunday Stash at Molli Sparkles
Main Crush Monday at Cooking Up Quilts.

Quilters, Prizes and Sunday Stash

I was very excited to attend the general meeting of the Irish Patchwork Society in Kilkenny on Saturday, my head is still buzzing with all the impressions)))

The greatest treat of the day was perhaps meeting in person some wonderful quilters whose work I  admire and whose blogs I follow: Tomomi Mc Elwee of Slaney HandCraft, Ruth Bourke of Charly and Ben's Crafty Corner and Ethelda Ellis of Ethelda's Quilting Journal (she admitted she doesn't have time to update the blog regularly, but you can google the images of her works - absolutely mind-boggling!). I met lots of other people on the day as well and everybody was really nice and and friendly and the atmosphere was great.

The room was decorated with beautiful quilts by the members of the IPS South Midland Branch:

A huge highlight for me was of course the Viewer's Choice prize for my quilt in the IPS National Exhibition "Evolution" and a trophy for excellence (I don't remember the exact wording) for the same quilt. I was just blown away, as you can see below:

Paula Rafferty (IPS International Rep), the Trophy, me, and the Committee - thanks to Ruth for taking the picture!

Everybody's favorite part of the morning was the raffle with great prizes and voting for the challenge, which was a mini quilt on the theme "Witches and Castles". Choosing from all the lovely pieces was a challenge in itself:

The winner is the quilty witch with a sewing machine - very cute! Mine is in the lower right corner and you can read about it here.

After that came a really nice dinner, which was as much about talking as about eating and a visit to the shops, which is where the Sunday Stash comes in:

Reds and Greens are mostly for a Christmas project, and Yellows and Blacks for a little sunshine-in-the-dead-of-winter project I'm not telling you about yet ;))

The afternoon talk was given by a great textile artist from Anglsey - Dorothy Russel. The topic was "The butterfly has two wings", which related to tradition and innovation in her creative work and what she said and showed us was extremely interesting and very inspirational. I didn't take any photos of her quilts, as you can find much better quality shots on her website - do go over there and have a look, they are stunning (though I can testify that viewed in real life they are even more stunning). On Sunday Dorothy was giving a workshop on the "New York beauty" block, but I wasn't there.

After the meeting was over I still had some time before my bus home to run around Kilkenny, which is a lovely town with a huge imposing castle and some wonderfully crooked streets with colorful shopfronts:

I'm linking this post to Sunday Stash at Molli Sparkles and Main Crush Monday at Cooking Up Quilts.

IPS National Exhibition 2016 "Evolution"

Another trip to Limerick in one month, another quilt show at the beautiful gallery space of the Limerick School of Art and Design (read about the first one here). This time my husband went with me on a romantic bus ride as the kids were looked after by their aunt and uncle)).

My quilt "Fallen by the Wayside" was there, so an obligatory "artist with quilt" picture was duly taken:

I have written about it and included some close-ups in this post. My birdies were well received and even made it onto the catalogue cover:

I struggled with my camera settings, so not all the photos of the quilts I liked were good quality, but here are at least some of them:

"In the Beginning" by Mary Maguire and "Woods" by Tomomi McElvee

"Fish Evolution" by Irene MacWilliam

"Same but Different" by Ruth Bourke

"Celebrating the Big Bang" by Rita Whelan

"Kerry Dance" by Marie Hooper

"Starburst" by Louise Mullane

The gallery also housed an exhibition of mini quilts on the theme "Distance" by artists from Ireland, Austria and Latvia, which we also enjoyed. Unfortunately, there was no catalogue and I didn't include the quilt and artist's names with some of the photos.

We then went to Limerick Quilt Center to do some fabric shopping (did I mention it was my birthday? no present like fabric shopping)))

You can tell I'm getting ready for Halloween.

We strolled a bit around the city center, saw a sewing and knitting supplies shop with my name on it, had some coffee with very nice cakes and went back home.

Linking up to Fabric Frenzy Friday at Fort Worth Fabric Studio and Can I Get a Whip Whoop? at Confessions of a Fabric Addict

СохранитьСохранить