Past, present, future

The second challenge for my local guild, movie - The Great Escape, I finished a couple of weeks ago.  The last postings showed a work in progress.

This is the end of the real "Harry" tunnel (on the other side of the road) showing how it does not reach the cover of the trees.

We have been hearing the Kingfishers in the vicinity again and to our delight a pair have returned to nest in the weep holes of the retaining walls of our pool area. What alerted me to them was the on and off tapping on one of our windows only to discover that they can either see themselves in the window of my sewing room or there is some other fascination that makes them fly up to it and tap on the window pane.  

I managed to capture this one from the door entering the room and thru the window pane so not sharp but this is one of our lodgers

And this is the last one of the challenges, song - Rock around the Clock.

Painted, fused and in place to be stitched. You will notice the clock goes backwards!   This was not my intention. I was concentrating so hard and oops!  I left it as my other half gave me the idea of  'going back in time'  which I thought was nice and quirky.

a little bit of this and a little bit of that .....

I have been back into the dye buckets.

One of my local guilds has a Quilt Show coming up in June and we offer mini workshops and demos during the course of the day.  These two pieces are for a Sashiko workshop, hence the blue, and for book covers using the felt flower cut outs that I showed earlier, hence the green and blue fabric.

I have also managed to get to the machine to work on my second challenge, Movies - the Great Escape.  

As you can see ... this is work in progress.  The idea was to keep it quite simple but as usual I have got a bot carried away with my favourite technique - just cannot help it. 

The size is A4  and forms part of the previous challenge I showed earlier - Charlotte's Web which was the 'book' challenge.  The final piece will be 'Song'!

Journey to the hinterland

This weekend was a long weekend for most and we took the opportunity to travel and see family.  The journey took us thru the Free State flats and the Cosmos was in flower - what a site!

..the bees were having a field day. This one is covered in pollen.

There were long stretches of Cosmos running alongside the road, along river beads, alongside farm roads and also surrounding fields of mealies and these wonderful fields of sunflowers.

We did a quick detour before hand thru Ladysmith for business for the other half and at both entrances/exits to the town they have these wonderful large 'pots' and below metal cut outs, I think, of  Mandela.

Having fun on my machine !!

I am giving a demo/talk at one of our guilds on designing your own Celtic inspired piece.  In putting all the examples together I came across this one which I has fused onto the fabric but needed stitching & quilting.  

Lesson:  Do not hold onto these examples for long, at all, and particularly in there flimsy state (the design cut out but not ironed in place).  They do stretch and distort, hence this piece is not absolutely perfect but it does give an idea of playing with a number of colours.

The whole piece

a close up.

I used a thread which for the quilting which I had bought in the UK at the Festival of Quilts - no name.  it really gave me a hard time getting the tension right - which I never did but in the long run I quite liked the effect.  I also managed to finish the top with about 2 meters left.

WHAT THE RAINS HAVE BROUGHT

This time of year, after some lovely soaking rain, the bromeliads give a lovely showing.

Here they are just starting to push their brilliant red heads up ... some further than others.

The flowers are quite stunning .....

....... and a top view.

Ruffling through my workshop samples!

My priorities over the last couple of weeks have been on things other than sitting at the machine.  One of them has been putting together a talk on borders and bindings for our local guild and has meant a visit to the cupboard for my samples and quilts.

Feathered Star has been one of those workshops that I have taught in the past and each time I did so I ended up with a completed 'star' which was then turned into a complete quilt.  Here are three examples .... all quite different.

This has been a real trip down memory lane!

PLAYING AROUND

I subscribed to a challenge to create an A4 piece based on a movie and no guesses what I was given.  In the envelope were some very strange bits and bobs that had to be included in the work even though they had no relevance.

I then have been playing around with the  GO! baby I invested in (yes - I did) and the one set of patterns using felt and adding a little bit of fun to our local shopping bags and making a book cover.  This will all hopefully do well at our guilds next  Quilt Show and help with our fundraising.