3 years later...

Wow! It appears to be about three years since I last worked on this quilt!!

And it's quite close to being finished.  So today I chose my leaves for the second panel and glue basted them down so I can hand applique them when the mood strikes. 

I did enjoy making the wool felt applique flowers.   

I'm hoping to get this top finished before Christmas and then I can add it to the hand quilting pile because I already have ideas of how I want to quilt it.  And as I mentioned a few weeks ago, our guild is having an exhibition in May 2024 and I want to have some new quilts to enter into that.  

The pattern is Don't Leaf Me by Wendy Williams and I bought my pattern from Material Obsession in Sydney, Australia. 

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Licorice Allsorts update

This week I started hand quilting my Licorice Allsorts quilt.  

I get my quilts basted on a long arm machine and when this one came back I was a bit concerned because it was more bunched up that usual, but I'm releasing the basting stitches as I quilt it and it's smoothing out nicely.

I'm using Aurifil 28wt and quilting in the ditch to start with.  I'll see what else it needs as it progresses.  

The guild I belong to, Capital Quilters in Wellington, New Zealand will be holding an exhibition in May 2024 and I need to get a wriggle on if I'm going to have new and exciting quilts to enter.  

Capital Quilters 2024 Exhibition—“A Symphony of Stitches”— Saturday 11 May and Sunday 12 May 2024 at the Lower Hutt Events Centre - where the Quilt Symposium 2022 exhibition was.

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Licorice Allsorts top is finished

Yes, my Licorice Allsorts top is finished.  I'm really pleased with it.  I took my time and really tried to make all the blocks perfect. As a result of that, the rows went together quite easily.  

I love how the black linen pops up throughout the quilt.  At first I thought that the black linen was going to be too dark against the light chambray Tilda fabrics, but when it's all together it works really well.  The bright green solids help with the colour balance too.  

I want to hand quilt this quilt myself, and I usually choose wool batting for hand quilting, but I was worried that the wool fibres would come up through the loosly woven black linen.  So I was prepared to use a different batting this time if I had to.  But fortunately my local quilt shop had a spare 2 metre piece of black wool batting!! So now they are basting it for me on their long arm quilting machine (you can read more about that process here). 

I need to hurry up and finish 10 other things on my quilting table so I'll be free to start hand quilting this beauty when it comes back all nicely basted.  

Reminder: this pattern is designed by Wendy Williams from Australia, and I purchased it as a block of the month through Material Obsession in Sydney, Australia. 

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Licorice Allsorts update

I've finished all the hand embroidered blocks for my Licorice Allsorts quilt, so now it's time to start machine piecing the other blocks.  

There's actually one more embroidered block in my cupboard, but how do you fit 10 photos in to a grid!

Here's the first machine pieced block that sits in the centre of the quilt:

It's only 6" finished which is smaller than I imagined.  But I do love these colour combos and am looking forward to making more blocks next week.  

Here's what the finished quilt will look like:

Licorice Allsorts was designed by Wendy Williams and I bought it as a Block of the Month from Material Obsession in Sydney.  I'm so glad I did because I love it.  

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Licorice Allsorts

Material Obsession in Sydney, Australia sent out the last package for the Wendy Williams Licorice Allsorts Block of the Month last week.  

 

So naturally I decided it was time that I actually started stitching this quilt before the next round of Block of the Months get released in July.  

Don't get me wrong - I love this quilt, and I'm very keen to make it, but I just had too many other things on the go at once.  Even I have a limit of how many things I can juggle at the same time. 

I love that this quilt combines hand embroidery with quilting.  Each month there was a motif to embroider, and some blocks to piece on the machine.  It's taken me 3 evenings to embroider the first month's motifs, so I imagine I can do the hand embroidery quite quickly, but some of the machine piecing looks a bit tricky, and I will have to be very careful with the cutting out.  I may even make some test blocks!!

I decided that I needed a new project bag to store my blocks for this quilt in, so I whipped this one up using a very interesting fat quarter I bought at Stitch Witches in Dunedin. 

It's got Soft and Stable in it so it will keep my blocks nice and flat.  Each time I make a bag I try to use a different quilting design, so this time I did a variation of a equilateral triangle design in Jacquie Gering's book, Walk 2.0.  

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Tea Party part 5

I made a lot of progress on my Tea Party quilt this week. 

And I'm loving how it's looking.  I was slightly worried when I put the first border on and the red crosses were a bit concentrated in the bottom half (see below). But I kept going and the next border has balanced out the colour placements.  The next round of blocks will disperse the colours even further, so I'm confident that it's all going to be OK.  

The next round is the 16 feature blocks - I've finished 8 of the blocks already, but I still have to do the wool felt applique on the 8 blocks with tea and coffee cups.  

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Tea Party part 4

 I did it! I started the centre block.

It's quite hard to hand applique on a piece this big, so I'll be pleased when I'm finished this block.  Then I can machine sew on two borders that I've already got ready, and then suddenly I'll be able to see real progress.  

Here's what I'm aiming for.  There's still so much left to do!

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Tea Party part 3

I've been quietly working away on my Tea Party quilt in the background.  

I've now finished all 8 of the plainer blocks that will alternate with the tea and coffee cups.  

Next up is the centre block which I might start this week.  Strangely enough, I'm worried that I might stuff it up! I really want this quilt to be beautiful - I guess that's why it's taken me years to start it.  I think I'll just prepare some flowers and leave them on my "design floor" for a few days before I start stitching them on. 

I was the guest speaker at Rose City Quilters in Palmerston North on Monday night.  It was a fabulous meeting, because not only did I get to share my quilts with the guild, but I also got to present the certificates and prizes from their exhibition at the weekend.  

I'd gone to Palmerston North the previous Monday with Clare Smith and we had judged the Rose City Quilters Exhibition.  It was great to see all the quilts up close, and it was quite difficult to determine the winners in some categories.  Congratulations to everyone who won an award. 

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Coffee in a Kaffe cup

This week I've been working on my Tea Party quilt.  How I wish I had coffee cups like this at my house!

and shiny tea cups like this too.

I think they work well with my tea pot.

I've still got to applique flowers on to all of these blocks, but I'm happy that I've finally decided on my cups and tea pot.  Although I do like the softer colours used in the pattern, I like the darker cups and tea pot even more. 

I've added the finishing touches to some of the other blocks too.  There are 8 of these plainer blocks, and I've finished 3 of them.  

It's true, I do love fiddling about with fabric and threads.  Cutting and sewing these circles on made me happy this week. 

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Tea Party quilt - part 2

Shirley from Zipzog blog in the Netherlands got in touch after my post last week, and told me that she had made the Tea Party quilt with some friends.  Here's Shirley's finished quilt.  It's gorgeous!

by Shirley of Zipzop blog

You've inspired me to keep going Shirley!

I've finally chosen my fabric for the tea pot.  I feel that the tea pot sets the tone for the rest of the quilt, so it needed to be right.  I've chosen the flowery fabric at the bottom in the photo below. 

There are 16 large blocks around the outside, and I've pieced six of them so far.   I've decided to machine piece all the blocks before I start adding the decorative wool felt applique.  

Most of these fabrics are the ones supplied in the Block of the Month packs, but I have decided to change the outer borders on some of the blocks.  This green above is from my own stash, and I'm going to make more substitutions in coming blocks.  I don't want too much orange in my quilt.  

So that's where I'm at.  We've had a slight easing of lockdown restrictions where I live in Wellington, but the only real difference is that we can have takeaway food now - coffees, fish and chips, McDonalds etc, and order more things online. Office workers are still all working from home. 

Now it's time for the Peacock Party.  What have you been up to this week? Feel free to link up a recent blog post below. 

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