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...
A pastel of a Eastern Yellow Robin. Slightly odd angle for photograph, however it is already framed and was hard to take the shot with the glass and not get a reflection. Painting taken from photographic image kindly supplied by Lesley Kiker from Victoia. Lesley does wonderful bird photos. This was my first ever bird pastel, done a few months back. I like my birds to be a painting not done like a photographic copy so soft pastels are perfect for painterly effects.
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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