A trip to Auckland

Last week I had to go to Auckland for work.  It's a one hour flight from Wellington, so it's a nice getaway.  My parents live in Auckland, and my older son is also up there, studying at university.

Mum and I share our love of sewing and quilting, so we visited a few quilt shops while I was there.  We both want to make the Sue Spargo needle case on the cover of the latest Inspirations magazine, so we each bought wool felt and ribbons.  Mum's pile is on the left, and mine is on the right (incase you couldn't guess).

I found the perfect backing fabric for my Peacock at Sunset tapestry so I was happy about that.  It just happens to be Kaffe Fassett of course. I'm going to take it to Nancy's Stitch Studio to be stretched and turned into a cushion/pillow.  They do a great job and it will be much better than I could do myself.

Mum showed me her latest EPP creation.  It's one of the variations of the Mischief Quilt designed by Karen Tripp.  You can find the pattern, templates and paper pieces on Karen's website DIY Addict website here.

Mum is also working on the butterfly quilt by Elizabeth Hartman.  It's called Lepidoptera and mum finds that amusing because she used to work in the zoology department of Otago University and knew the Greek/Latin names of many animals and creatures. I've supplied a lot of the bright fabrics for the butterflies because mum's stash is mainly florals.

Now I'm home and back to hand quilting my Possum Magic quilt.  This quilt was made by a group of friends in a round robin.  You can read more about it here.

I want to enter it into our national symposium which is in October, but entries close on 13 June so I need to work on it every day.

The class placements for Symposium were announced this week and I got into all of my first choices so I'm very happy about that.  I'll be taking classes with Jen Kingwell, Chris Jurd and Deborah Louie.
There's so many other things I want to finish before then though!

Capital Quilters 12 x 12 Exhibition

I'm currently working on three mini quilts for our guild's upcoming 12 x 12 exhibition. It's not until 31 July - 13 August, but we need to hand our quilts in by 24 June.  I can't show you my quilts yet, but I certainly will post photos from the exhibition on my blog.

I've only previously made one 12 x 12 quilt, and that was for Aotearoa Quilters Yellow challenge.

When I look at it now I think it was very basic, but I guess we all have to start somewhere.

Here's two others that were in the same exhibition and they are fantastic:

I'm trying to be more adventurous with these new minis, and pack a lot into each one.  I was really inspired by these minis in the Aotearoa Quilters Green challenge in 2015:

Here are some of my favourites from this challenge (I don't have the maker's names sorry):

Our organising committee have come up with 12 different categories we can enter for the Capital Quilters 12 x 12 exhibition.  They are:

1. Pink
2. Flora & Fauna
3. Reduce, Reuse, Recycle
4. Round the World
5. Kiwiana
6. Through the Lens
7. Celebrations
8. Buildings
9. Friendship
10.Bedazzle
11.Childhood
12.Safety

Those categories give lots of scope for everyone to come up with something.  Some of us are just dreaming up an idea and then trying to find which category it fits in to. I can't wait to see all the different interpretations of the categories.