I entered two quilts into the Queensland Quilt show and my daughter entered one too. I didn't win but my daughter won for secondary student category with her own designed quilt...
And I got an email from the owner of a big craft store here in OZ and she wanted to put one of my quilts on her blog!! Have a look here. It helped me feel better about no sales on my etsy store :) and not placing at the show. I love this art quilt and I am real happy with the quality of my machine work on this one.
I have made a pieced quilt for the first time in years!!:) and I loved it and it isn't perfect but I am proud of how well I did :). Now I am doing the free motion and loving it. I would loooove a long arm still, especially when it takes me weeks and weeks to do the quilt when I know it would take a few days on a long arm. But that's life :).
Have a look...
I love the difference between the plain quilt and then the machine quilted part. You can see how much impact the machine quilting has and how it makes the quilt look so much better.
Went to the craft fair and got a few things, it was so fun to shop for thread instead of just viewing it on the internet :) I wanted to see if I could find something new (to me) and see if it would work. And I did :) I went to one stall and found this...
It is a sewslip mat and it is tacky on the underside so it sticks to the board and the top side is all slippery. It is fantastic... except that it is already curling at the edges and when that tacky underside hits the quilt it sticks and I am stuck!! It is real annoying. I have tried blue tack but that doesn't work too well. I don't want to sticky tape it down as when you go to sew normally it won't move. So I need to remove the mat at some point :).
This is the annoying curl where it should be flat.
And this
Now the ring is made by Sharon Schamber and is amazing!! I no longer have to pull the quilt through the machine, I can just use this metal ring to manoeuvre the quilt around. It is fantastic and I am glad I paid $30 for it. The only thing I would have liked is for it to be a larger circle, so that you don't have to stop so often to move the circle and then have that stop start point in the quilt. Otherwise, it is great.
Houston quilt festival was just on and I love trawling the internet reading everyone's posts about the show and the quilts. I will go one day and spend a fortune :) and it will be so fun. I love seeing the photos of some of the quilts and just staring at them trying to work out how they did them!! That is cool. This was one that got me...
Hurricane by Jancke De Vries Bodinga
And this one, love this one... Margaret Solomon-Gunn
It won judges choice.
I think all the quilts entered are amazing, and they all look so much better in person. All the machine work that has gone into the above quilt just can't be seen properly in this photo. I need to go :)
I am having huge struggles with my machine!! the thread is breaking and it is skipping stitches. I have spent hours cleaning and changing needles and checking tension and threading on the machine. Now I have found a checklist and am going through that. I didn't pay very much for it, so it isn't worth servicing. I think a new sewing machine for christmas might be a great present :). Anyone got any great ideas on how to fix these problems ?:).
Just tried some coconut and mango ice cream.... soooooooo good!! my fav flavour at the moment :)
Jane
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