Disney Pinnocchio Quilt

Ok I know its been a while, so I'll show you what I have up to. Here is a Disney panel I bought at a lovely Quilt shop called Queen Ann's Lace. They are based in Kissimmee, so be sure to look them up if you are going to Florida for a holiday. I added the dark blue stars between each panel and I will add a nice red border before quilting. 

Quilt Deal

Check out www.quiltdeal.com to sell anything  related to patchwork or sewing. I have added a small wall hanging, although I don't really expect to sell it, I thought it would be fun to try. I made two purchases from the site from two very nice american ladies. One was a bundle of fabric and the other a variety of lace.

The Orchard

Ok so it is four long weeks since my last blog. But May has been a really busy month. The Queen came to Ireland, Obama came to Ireland, Bin Laden got killed and I turned 50.

It also means that I have been working on something and here it is. My very first quilt to be sent to the Festival of Quilts. (I hope you are proud of me Teresa?). All that remains now is for me to fill out the registration form and post it when the forms arrive back. There is one downer to all of this, I will not get to see my own quilt hanging in Birmingham, so I hope those of you who are lucky to attend this year will stop by and have a look for me.

 These are the hand dyed fabrics from the workshop at the IPS.



 I bleached out the shapes and filled them in again with oil sticks. I used free motion quilting all over with some hand stitching for the leaves.

Same process for the pear. With lots of french knots



 and red sparkly  thread for the free motion quilting.

  Hand stitches creates the shading at the bottom of the Apple, and variegated thread used in the free motion quilting shows up really well.

And finally the pear with free motion circles gives more interest to the skin.

Workshop with Loretta O'Brien

 Here is Loretta holding a picture of the technique she is teaching us today at the IPS workshop.












We had to bring some photo's with us to choose from. Here you can see a my picture of the Mona Lisa. Using tracing paper to transfer our designs onto graph paper. We were able to enlarge our pieces or focus in on a smaller portion of the whole picture.











Here you can see I have marked out some pattern pieces, which will form the features of the face and create some shadows.                                        

Here is my almost finished piece. She is not an exact likeness but  I am pleased I managed to create a face. I also tried another technique and used stitch on a stone like cloth to see what other looks I could create. This technique requires a lot of concentration and getting the right fabrics is not an easy task. But I think with a little practice it would get easier. Loretta gives a good workshop and we had great fun.

Branching Out at the Galway Museum

Here is a short video of my opening speech at the Galway Museum, John Killeen our guest speaker opened the exhibition. 

The Heritage Quilt

Here is the article published in the Connaught Tribune to day relating to the handover of the Heritage Quilt to the Galway museum. The official opening of our exhibition will be held on Saturday 16th April at 3pm.

Friday Night Fix

Here is the first page of my altered book. I have been watching DMTV with Linda and Laura Kemshall. The Friday Night Fix is a series of six work along video tutorials on altered books. I started with one of my kids old school books. It had shinny pages and as you can see my attempts at achieving a nice starting base has not been very successful. Although I like the feel of this page after applying gesso and colour pastels I'm finding it hard to get a suitable theme. I had started out thinking about flowers.

 This page does nothing for me and could it get any worse, the answer is yes have a look at the next page.

 I tried to apply some texture, but I hate it. The following are some of the other pages in the book. As you can see they have some nice pictures of bees. But not enough through out the book, it changes subjects as you would expect a school book to do.

This is a book I started before the Friday night fix where I glued three pages together. I do like the effect of this page but its as stiff as board and very wrinkled. The moral of the story is to follow the instructions and get the right book to start in the first place. So I have not given up on this process yet, and have purchased a very nice little book on flower arranging written in French. It cost €1 and I bought it from a stall along the river Seine.