Possum Magic. The End.

Many moons ago I joined a round robin (four years ago to be exact).  We called ourselves "Possum Magic", and we were all based in Australia or New Zealand. 

My finished Possum Magic quilt

I finished my own quilt a year ago, but I've never shown it on my blog because I wasn't sure what to say about the experience of being in a round robin.  I'm too honest to just gloss over everything and tell you all it was a blast, and we're all best friends now, because that's not true!

My initial centre block that I made and served as inspiration

Working with strangers is hard.  Trying to do your very best on someone else's quilt isn't easy.  Determining reactions on social media and via emails isn't the same as talking to someone in person.

Suffice to say that things were fine for the first year or so.  Then people's circumstances started to change, and as we got towards the end of the round robin, relationships between some of the members started to sour.  Now those initial happy memories have been erased by what happened at the end.

The good news is that we each got our own quilt back, and most of us have have finished them.

I chose to hand quilt mine with Aurifil 12wt and 28wt.  I do love the texture the hand quilting has added to the quilt.

Would I join another round robin? No, not at the moment.  I might in 10 years time, but I'd prefer to do it with people I already know, rather than strangers.

You can view each of the Possum Magic quilts in the link at the top of the page, and see how they grew as each of us added another round to each quilt.

Finishing takes so long....

Do you find that? You start new quilts with great gusto, and think they won't take long to make, but somehow when you get to the finishing stages you get distracted by new ideas, and the pile of unfinished quilts gets bigger and bigger.

I've accepted that April and May just have to be my finishing months this year.  This year I've entered three different shows!! Yes, from never having entered a show to entering three in one year.  It's just the way it's worked out.

1. Capital Quilters 12 x 12 Exhibiton

We're having a 12 x 12 exhibition at Capital Quilters from 2-12 August this year, and I handed in my three entries on Saturday.  I can't show you them yet because the quilts are being judged and I have to keep my entries secret until then.

If you live in Wellington, or even further afield like Levin or Palmerston North, do come for a look.  It's fee entry and from the few I saw on Saturday there's going to be some great minis on display.  We already had over 30 entries on Saturday and the main hand in day isn't for another month yet.

2. Sydney Quilt Show - Quilt NSW

I'm a member of Quilt NSW in Australia (New South Wales).  It's a huge guild that welcomes overseas members too.  Their annual show will be held at the Sydney Convention Centre from June 22-25 and two of my quilts will be in the show! My la passacaglia and Oh! Christmas Tree will both on display.

I'm very excited because I'm going over to Sydney for the show and it will be the biggest quilt show I've ever been to.  I've made lots of online friends who live in Sydney, and it will be nice to meet them face to face.  I hear the stalls at the show are great too, so I better put my credit card on hold until then. I'll be there on Thursday and Friday if you're looking for me.

3.  Quilt Symposium Christchurch

Our national symposium is in October and entries close on 13 June.  I've been working furiously on two quilts for most of this year.  One is a secret and I won't post any photos until the exhibition in October, but the other is my Possum Magic quilt which everyone has seen throughout it's three year life.  There's one category for quilts totally made by one person (which I'm entering) and then another category for quilts made by more than one person.  Possum Magic will be in the second category because it's a group effort.  You can read more about the round robin I was in here.

My centre block that I made

I'm still hand quilting the final sections of the quilt, but I really hope to have it ready for photographing this coming weekend.  I'm using Aurifil 12wt and 28wt on this quilt.  I use the 12wt for all the visible decorative quilting, and 28wt for when I'm quilting in the ditch. The red spools are 12wt and the grey ones are 28wt.

I'm not aiming for prizes, but just having my quilts hanging in the show would be great.  It's a juried show, so not every quilt gets accepted.

I always use a hoop when I'm hand quilting.

So that's what I've been up to lately.  I'm really looking forward to starting something new once all these deadlines have passed.

An interview....with me!

A few weeks ago Charlotte Scott asked if she could interview me for her pod cast series.

Charlotte is a New Zealand quilter and textile artist who lives on a boat and runs an art gallery! She has a blog called The Slightly Mad Quilt Lady.  Charlotte had seen photos of my la passacaglia quilt, and thought the story behind it would be interesting to document.

Here are some links to the interview.
Charlotte's blog post with the interview
or
a link to Podbean where all Charlotte's interviews are stored.

Don't worry if you've never listened to a pod cast before, I was quite new to this too.  It will work on your computer, iPad, tablet, or phone. We had a lot to talk about so it goes for 52 minutes!!  But it's like listening to the radio - you can do other things while you listen. You can also pause it and come back to it later.

Of course we talked about more than just la passacaglia - here's some of the things we covered. There's tabs across the top of the this page with more information on most of these quilts:

my first quilt made in 2005

My Flower Garden wall hanging

My gingerbread village - cross stitch

my Possum Magic round robin quilt

my sashiko quilt

my la passacaglia - still to be quilted

 I hope you enjoy listening to the interview.

My Possum Magic quilt returns home

On Thursday I received my own Possum Magic quilt back. More than a year after sending away my little green star block, I received a beautiful quilt back from my fellow Possum, Alice.

Here's the centre block I send off back in June 2014:

And here's what I received back this week:

Isn't that fantastic?  Seven lovely ladies, who I didn't even know a year ago, have each added a border that perfectly captures my tastes and colours.  I'm so pleased with how it turned out - the colours, the patterns, the individual fabrics - it's all wonderful.

Lime green is particularly hard to photograph, so here's a close up of some of the vibrancy in this quilt (and the highly accurate precise piecing fellow Possums have done):

I really do hope that the other members of the group are equally pleased with their quilts when they get them back.  I think it became easier to think up borders as we got to know the group members better, but some people think it got harder once they knew more about the person and their likes and dislikes.

My quilt is 84" square, so it fits perfectly on a queen sized bed.

I've started thinking about the quilting and backing already.  The predictable choice would be to use Kaffe Fassett Paperweight in purple, but I've already used that another quilt, so may just be radical and use a green version of Paperweight instead. I have a tiny piece of it in Algae and it looks good against the quilt top.  I intend to hand quilt this quilt with a variety of my usual Perle 8s, but I may also use some of my Dazzle threads from Wonderfil which have a sparkle in them.  I want to bring out the stars and triangles in the borders.

Here's some photos of how my quilt developed.  Each person just did whatever they thought was best for the quilt at that time.  We could give general preferences, but mainly they took inspiration from what other people had done before them.

First border by Sharon of Mother Dragon's Musings

Our Possum Magic round robin started after we found each other through the New Bloggers group back in 2014.  Over 100 people from all over the world joined that online group, but we got ourselves organised and setup a round robin for those of us in Australia and New Zealand.

Second border by Jo of Riddle and Whimsey

 Jo had been in a round robin before, so she drafted some rules, and we all set to work making our own centre blocks.

Third border by Serena of Sew Giving

We had about six weeks to add our borders to each quilt before it was time to send them on to the next person on the list.  The dates were all agreed at the start.

Fourth border by Carla of Granny Maud's Girl

The quilts traveled around in a circle, and the idea was that we would blog about the borders as we completed them.  Unfortunately times have changed, and we all spend more time on Instagram than we do blogging now, but we still got to see updates of how our quilts were progressing.

Fifth border by Jane of Where Jane Creates

We have developed close connections with our fellow Possums while working on these quilts.  Carla, Serena and Jo are in in Perth so they have met up to exchange quilts and brain storm ideas for borders.

Sixth border by Rebecca of One Wee Bird

Rebecca, Alice and I are all in New Zealand. I've become friends with Alice because she lives in Wellington. I haven't met Rebecca yet, but she has a great Kiwi sense of humor, and I'd really like to meet her one day.

Alice's final border

 I'm so pleased I took a risk and joined this round robin. I really didn't know what I was in for, but I've met some great people, and stretched my sewing boundaries.  Plus, I've now got a beautiful quilt top in all my favourite colours. Thank you team!!

You can see the other Possum Magic quilts on the tab at the top of this page.

Possum Magic - Sharon's quilt

Our Possum Magic round robin is coming to an end and the quilts are being returned to their original owners. You can see progress photos of them all on the Possum Magic tab at the top of this page.

Sharon's quilt on my spare bed

The final quilt that I worked on was Sharon's. Each of the quilts was different to the others, but some how this one seemed even more different.  For a start there was a lot of white in it, which is very different to what I'm used to. It was also filled with many tiny pieces of fabric. I'm not one for taking the easy way out, but I've also never used that many tiny pieces in a quilt.

Tiny hexagons added by Jane 

Alice and I decided to share the last border because the quilt was getting quite large.  Sharon had made her original centre back in June 2014, and then 5 other people had already added their borders before the quilt got to us. We just had to put on a final border.  This is what it looked like when we received it from Rebecca (One Wee Bird).

We added a crazy mosaic type border which complemented the rest of the quilt nicely.  There was plenty of white in our border, but some colour too.

The quilt is now back in northern Queensland, Australia with Sharon, and she's thinking about hand quilting it one day when the temperatures get cooler - she could be waiting some time!

I'll be writing more Possum Magic posts over the next few days.

Possum Magic - Riddle and Whimsy's quilt

Last month I had the pleasure of working on Jo's quilt. She blogs at Riddle and Whimsy.

I think Jo made the most adventurous centre block out of all of us.  She just made an arrow, and the really brave thing was, that it wasn't set in a square, it was a rectangle!

I've just realised that no one has added a traditional 4 sided border to Jo's quilt. Everyone has just added to either one or two sides of her quilt.  When I received it from Alice it looked like this:

Alice had just added the teepees and triangles down the left hand side of the quilt.  When we met for the quilt handover, Alice suggested that I might want to add something down the right hand side. That would turn it more into a square, and centre the arrows and the target more.

I thought that was a good idea, but as you can see from the above photo, Jo's quilt had got a bit wonky as it traveled around the group.  Carla, another member of Possum Magic, wrote a blog post about wonky round robin quilts just a few weeks ago.  You can read it here.  In Carla's case she had Rebecca's quilt and it had a bubble in the middle, that Carla described as a bra B cup.  When I looked at Jo's quilt above I thought it looked like a corset - wider at the top and bottom and nipped in at the waist (maybe I've been watching too much Poldark).  Anyway, we both likened the quilts to ladies underwear.

The fact that the quilt has got out of kilter is no one person's fault.  All these diagonal cuts mean that the fabrics can stretch quite a bit.  Often the deadlines are looming when people have been attaching their borders, so they've just quickly sewn on the borders and posted it off.  Fortunately I had the quilt early and had some time available to work on it.  I knew my own border was going to be quite simple, so I thought I should try to straighten it up.

I thought of all the work that Carla and Serena had put into fixing Rebecca's quilt, and thought I couldn't just sew my border on and expect Carla and Serena to fix Jo's quilt too.  So I was very brave and unpicked three of the borders, removed some of the excess fabric, and sewed it all back together.  Once it was sitting flat and was all squared up, I sewed my own border on.

I deliberately left quite wide margins around the diamonds - nothing worse then cutting the points off. It will be easy for Jo to take my long border off and move the diamonds closer to the centre if she wishes.

I used some of Jo's favourite Anna Maria Horner and Tula Pink fabrics in my borders.  Once again I purchased the low volume background because you know I don't have any in my house.

Here's how it looks now.  This quilt is going straight back to Perth. Carla, Serena and Jo will collectively finish it off for Jo.  It's almost square which means that they could continue the small half square triangles right around if they wish. I think that would look good.

I've got one final Possum Magic quilt left to work on and it's Sharon's.  It's amazing - so colourful and so much detail. I'll show it to you soon.

Last thing - To Bella Quilts - I'd love to email you back but you show up as a 'no reply blogger'.  I've tried to track you down but really can't find how to contact you.  Can you email me directly at wendysquiltsandmore at gmail dot com please? I'd love to be able to reply to your kind comments. Thank you.

Possum Magic round up

Nearly 12 months ago I met some lovely Australian and New Zealand bloggers through a new bloggers group, hosted by Beth at Plum and June blog.  Over 100 bloggers from all over the world joined that new bloggers group, and we all benefited from advice about how to make our blogs better.  There was a lot of talk about round robins in the group, and a fair bit of resistance from those in North America to post to those of us "down under".  So, some of us in Australia and New Zealand got together online, and formed our very own round robin group called Possum Magic.  A few months later a USA / Canada group started up called Round Trip Quilts, and their round robin is progressing too.

One of our members, Jo from Riddle and Whimsy, had been in a round robin before, so she put forward some guidelines and we modified them to meet our needs.   We each made a centre block using whatever design we liked. We then sent that block off to the next person on the list on the agreed date.  The quilts are now travelling round in a circle and we will each receive our own quilt back at the end in July 2015.

You can see more photos and read the back stories of each step on the Possum Magic tab, just under my header, but here's some recent photos of each of the quilts:

Alice's quilt - Blossom quilts

Carla's quilt - Granny Maud's Girl

Jane's quilt - Where Jane Creates

Jo's quilt - Riddle and Whimsy

Rebecca's quilt - One Wee Bird

Serena's quilt - Sew Giving

My quilt - Wendy's Quilts and More

Sharon's quilt - Motherdragon's Musings

Aren't they all fabulous?  There's still one or two more borders to be added to most of these so they aren't finished yet.  I'll keep you posted on progress.

It's funny as I scroll through these photos. I can see my input into each of them, except this very last one which I'm due to receive next week.  They bring back great memories, and make me think of the friendships that have developed during the course of this round robin.