Updates!

My but I am a bad girl blogger!  Where does time go; it's already April and 6 weeks since my last blog post! 

I have finished a few smaller projects which I'd like to show.  First is a baby quilt for my nephew and his wife.  Unlike most parents-to-be these days, they have not wanted to know the sex of their second baby and while I quite like the idea of not knowing - after all we were not afforded this knowledge when we had our children - it makes it easier for colour choices for the quilter!  So now I have the task of finding yellows and greens from my stash of "stash packs".  Hmm a bit uninteresting and unfortunately I was very limited with my choices.  I made half square triangles with the 5 inch charms and a plain white fabric and this is what I came up with.

I quilted it with my favourite "Jester's Hat" pattern and little ducks in the border with their French Knots eyes! 

Jester's Hats quilting

Ducks in the border

Thanks for taking a peak.  More tomorrow....

Happy quilting,

FMQ - August

We were really spoiled this month!  Wendy Sheppard aka Ivory Spring, was our tutor and I had been looking forward to this month from January!  Wendy does magnificent work.   She is originally from south east Asia but now lives in the US.  She graduated from university with a degree in Chemical Engineering and worked as a researcher in the world's largest ultra-low wind velocity tunnel in the world.  She has been quilting for about 7 years and her passion is free-motion quilting!!  She is now teaching quilting and her work has appeared in various magazines.

I have followed Wendy's blog, "Ivory Spring" for some time now and have regularly used her fmq designs which she so generously shares, with wonderful sketches showing exactly how to do the stitches.

Her tutorial for us was "Jester's Hats".  This was quite a tricky design to begin with but after the usual drawing and practicing on a quilt sandwich, the penny suddenly dropped and I was able to get into the swing of things!  Here is my finished challenge block.

Jester's Hats

I used a beautiful gold "Colorful" embroidery thread in my regular 80/12 needle with "I'm not sure what" in the bobbin!   This was a fun design to do and I will definitely be using it again in a quilt.  

Here is a close-up of the stitching-

And the usual drawing and practice pieces.

Thank you Wendy for sharing your wonderful ideas in the tutorial and also on your blog.  I look forward to your e-mails every day!