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FROM THE SHEARING SHED

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My mother is leaving, she has terminal cancer.  The saddest part is you suddenly realise that your connection to your distant childhood past is going with her.  Who will you talk to about stories from so long ago.  The night she gathered up the autumn oak leaves from the road in the car headlights, the air bitter and cold.  They magically became a fancy dress piece titled "Autumn" for my school presentation evening.  She has forgotten it now, I tried to tell her the other day it is one of my favourite childhood memories.  I have been working with rusting fabrics and making wall quilts.  My childhood was spent in the country around Armidale and I used to spend hours in my grandfather's wool shed, I can still see the sunlight on the floor there.  The rusted quilts are all created with my memory of shed walls and rusting tractors and tin rooves.  So today I am putting this piece up in honour of my mum.  She may have forgotten a lot now...
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UFO CRAZY QUILT

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I had started this quilt some time back. When I started this blog in fact, because a part of it appeared further down the page in my first writings here. It had then hit the UFO stash, which seems to grow biggger by the year. At the rate I am travelling the cats are going to have to leave home to make room for the quilts instead of just sleeping on them as they do. Today I 'found' the quilt,and started embellishing it again. Twenty years on a potter's wheel in my previous creative life have left me with hands that refuse to sew the kind of embroidery that I see other crazy quilters achieving. All those colonial knots send my hands stiff when I wake up the next morning. So being a lover of machines I realised I would have to use them as cleverly as I could to make my quilts heavy with stitch and glow like the inside of an Aladdin's Cave. So I fancy stitch with them, create machine embroidery with them and enrich my fabric as best I can. Block one appea...
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YET ANOTHER DIRECTION

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Just when you think everything is in place life comes along and bowls you over again.  A back injury and a hip bursa injury lagged on for six months.  The pain drove me crazy and was depressing.  I finally went for back xrays and the picture was not pretty.  Twenty five years spent as a potter over a wheel had wrought a lot of damage on the base of my spine.  It confirmed for me that it was not going to go away and this is to be my new normal.  Getting older really sucks! That is me in the snow in the photo.  I was four years old, a bright future ahead.  I would grow, marry several times, have three children and a career in the arts.  All I felt in that photo back then was how cold it was standing in the snow outside Guyra that day, look at the feet!  And the hands, they are bare.  What was my mother thinking! I have bowed to the inevitable and sold several of my machines.  I cannot treadle them any more.  Some wonde...
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