Auckland Festival of Quilts - Aotearoa Quilters' Yellow challenge

Aotearoa Quilters' Yellow Challenge mini quilts were also on show at the Auckland Festival of Quilts.  "Aotearoa" is the Maori word for New Zealand.  It means land of the long white cloud.

Some of you may remember that I was so impressed by the Green Challenge last year, I vowed to enter a mini quilt this year, regardless of what the colour was. Well, I was true to my word, and made a yellow mini quilt.

my mini is top right in this photo

I decided to modify a la passacaglia rosette to make the sun against a blue sky. I hand quilted radiating lines out from the sun.

It's nice to think I had a mini in the exhibition.  The skill and artistry that went into some of them was amazing.  Here's some of my favourites - I don't know the makers sorry:

by Anne Lunn of Kerikeri

by Mathea Daunheimer

And here's another look at mine.

 I wonder what next year's colour will be!

Auckland Festival of Quilts 2016 - the quilts

Yesterday I showed you my shopping from the quilt festival, and today I'm going to show some of the quilts that caught my eye.  At the end of this post I'll include a link to my friend Julie's blog because she took different photos from me.

This was my favourite large quilt. It's called "Good Vibrations' and was made by Ansa Breytenbach. she was inspired by the Beach boy's song - Good Vibrations.

 

My favourite small quilt was "Chirpy" by Rosemary Rush. She was inspired by Jane Sassaman and I love Jane's designs.
 

I love Sue Spargo's designs too, so naturally loved "Jungle Walk" by Annie White, based on Sue Spargo's Folktales pattern. The hand stitching on Annie's quilt is just perfect.

Cheryl Houston from All things Patchwork shop made this very effective geometric design. I love the simplicity of just using blue and white.

I liked this quilt by Anu Hills.  The blocks were made for a fat quarter challenge back in 2009.  The quilt contains many memories.

I loved this "Plus size" quilt by Robyn Croft. It's her own design, and she quilted it on her domestic machine.

There were many other quilts that I liked too, but I encourage you to pop over to Julie's blog and look at the quilts she loved at this show.

Here's how Auckland looked at 7am today.  It's about 20C today = 68F.  A lovely day.

That's a Cabbage Tree on the left - cordyline australis

Auckland Festival of Quilts 2016 - the shopping.

Today I went to a the Auckland Festival of Quilts with my good friend Anne, and my mum.  We had a great time looking at the quilts, meeting people and shopping!

This post is just about the shopping.  I'll write more about the quilts later when I've chosen some favourites to show you.

The shopping.  Firstly I stopped at All Things Patchwork because Cheryl always has a huge range of Kaffe Fassett, Anna Maria Horner and Tula Pink.  The best news was that Cheryl had bought some 5" square charm packs of Tula Pink's Tabby Road back from Houston where it was launched last week, so Anne and I each bought a pack of those. I also bought a few fat quarters of Kaffe Fassett spots because they are always useful (two tone fabrics lying down).

Then I went to the Ribbon Rose stand because I knew they would have Sue Spargo eleganza perle 8, so I bought 3 spools of that.

I had visited Cottage Flair when I was in Rotorua back in March, and knew they loved Wendy Williams and Jen Kingwell's designs.  I bought some little scrap packs there which are full of fun snippets that I can incorporate into scrappy quilts.They are standing at the back of the photo and include the multi-coloured spots of unknown origin.

I also bought Bigger Perfect Circles by Karen Kay Buckley because I use my regular perfect circles a lot.

So that was my shopping at the Auckland Festival of Quilts.   I'm linking up with Molli Sparkles for his Sunday Stash #200. Party time!

Tula Pink la passacaglia rosette

This week I finished my Tula Pink la passacaglia mini quilt.

I made the centre of this rosette when I was making my quilt, but the colours weren't just right for my quilt.  I felt this rosette stood out too much, so I just kept it "for another day".

 That day finally arrived and I felt inspired to finish it off and turn it into a mini quilt.

I try out lots of possibilities before I stitch

It took just under 3 weeks to add the outer rounds, applique it onto a dark background and hand quilt this little mini.  It's ended up 20" across, and will look quite nice on my wall I think.

I can't claim to have invented this idea - it's one that I saw months ago in the facebook group.  Alewives Fabrics is a shop in USA and the owner there had made this version which I've always loved.

So as you can see, there's plenty of ways to use up those left over rosettes.

These lovely fabrics are from Tula Pink's Fox Fields collection.
Finished size - 20" diameter.

Halloween Haunted House

Last year I made a very cute Gingerbread Haunted House.  It's part of the Gingerbread Village designed by Thea Dueck of Victoria Sampler in Canada.

I'm not going to repeat everything I wrote last year, but will just provide this link to my detailed post all about the Haunted House,

and this link to a whole page dedicated to my Gingerbread Village and links back to all the posts I've written on it.

I will write more about it in the lead up to Christmas, and especially the Gingerbread Quilt Shop which I haven't blogged about yet.

I'm currently working on the Gingerbread Needlework Shop, but I'm not sure if I can finish it before Christmas 2016 or not. The amount of stitching involved can be deceptive!

Modern Hexies Rainbow

Last week I finished my Modern Hexies Rainbow.

This table runner / wall hanging is made using a technique made popular by Nicole Daksiewicz of Modern Handcraft. You can find her tutorial here.

I decided to made a rainbow wall hanging because I loved the thought of the bright hexies against the grey Heath fabric from Alexander Henry.  I had some Heath left over from my Wheel of Fortune mini quilt.

I recycled the 1" hexie papers I used to make Honeycomb Spin. They are called 1" hexies because each side is 1" long (that's how paper pieces are measured).

And for my final thrifty step, I dug through my scraps and cut a hexie from each of the RPYGBIV fabrics I came across. So this quilt is made entirely from things I already had at home.

Getting the hexies evenly spaced is the trickiest part of this design.  I had already made a mini quilt just to try out this technique (see below), and I knew the hexies had to be straight so the quilting lines could run through them nicely. I like to use my long ruler to keep the rows evenly spaced.

The hexies are all glued down with Roxanne's glue, and then machine quilted, so they are quite secure.

I decided to quilt with a variegated Auriful thread I had on hand.  I thought that white thread would highlight any crooked lines in the quilting, and dark colours might just disappear into the grey.  So I decided to compromise and use a variegated thread.
 

I marked lines with my hera marker, but they were difficult to see on the grey Heath fabric, so I resorted to using a chalk pencil too.

When it came to the binding I was really stuck.  Did I want black and white to let the hexies shine? Or did I want a bright colour? And if so, which colour? Mulitcolour just looked crazy.

So I went to my local quilt shop, Nancy's Stitch Studio, and the owner Mary Self suggested black and white with pops of colour.  I loved that idea, but was worried that a pop of colour might end up on the corner bend and be very bulky.  Mary said that sometimes she just makes up the binding as she is sewing it onto the quilt! What a rebel!! Why hadn't I thought of that?  Anyway, that's what I did.  I started with a little bit of quilt maths, but then made it up as I went along.  Thank you Mary!

Unfortunatley the grey background is very hard to photograph.  It looks dark in some photos and light in others.  Trust me - it's really nice in real life.

Finished size 40" x 20"

How exciting is this! I'm the winner!!!

Thank you everyone who voted for my quilts in the Bloggers' Quilt Festival.  Not only did both of my entries win their categories, but I also won Viewers' Choice with my la passacaglia quilt!!

I'm slightly stunned, but very thrilled too.  Thank you to you all for your support and votes, and all the lovely comments left on my blog.

I was hoping that la passacaglia would do well, but I certainly didn't expect to win the Small Quilts section with my Honeycomb Spin. I guess people liked it because it had different design techniques - the hexagons were glued on and then quilted in a spiral pattern. Credit must go to Anna Hicks of Nancy's Stitch Studio who taught me this pattern in a class.

Amy has a fair method of sharing the prizes around, so I will only receive the prize for Viewers' Choice. (I will show you the loot when it arrives.) The good thing about Amy's policy is that my online friend Maryse from Canada will receive the prize in the Hand Quilting category for her beautiful Anna Maria Horner Dresden Plate quilt - click here to see it. 

You can find links to all the winners here on Amy's blog. Again kind friends, thank you so much for voting for my quilts.