Leadlight Frog Quilt

This is my first attempt at a leadlight quilt. The green tree frog pattern was designed by Sandy Corry, and it featured in Australian Patchwork and Quilting Magazine (TBD). I had a lot of fun finding just the right batik prints for my quilt, for the frog, the branches, and the leaves. I am a mad frog lover, so this was one of those quilts I just *had* to make!

All pieces were cut out and ironed on to a calico backing piece, and then Instead of using black bias tape for the "leading" in the quilt, all the black lines were satin stitched with a black embroidery thread, before quilting. This was manageable only because the quilt is not too large. Going around some of the curves was... shall I say... "tricky"?! The cause of a lot of frustration and thread breakages, but please with the end result all the same. The quilting was minimal, just enough to baste the layers together.

SA GeoQuilt

So what is a "geoquilt"? Well, basically, this was a signature quilt I created from a geocache, with contributions from the South Australian geocaching community in South Australia.

And what is "geocaching"? In a nutshell, it is a modern treasure hunt, where teams use their GPS to find a hidden treasure. My family has a team - we are called "Green Gecko Gang". In the case of the SA Geoquilt project, the hidden treasure was a container hidden in a hollow tree, full of blank 6 inch quilt square patches in 4 colours. Finders had to take a square home with them, sign or embellish it with their team name in some way, and send it back to me in the mail. Once all the squares were returned (this took more than a year), I set about laying them out in the design shown in the picture, which happens to be the geocaching logo.

Patches were embellished in many ways - from pretty basic black texta team name, to elaborate cross stitches and embroideries, buttons and more. Everybody was very excited to see the end result. The support and encouragement of the geocaching community was amazing for this project, which is one reason why I wanted to create this blog in the first place.

Library Quilt

This is a quilt I recently made for a teacher at my local primary school who is undergoing treatment for cancer. It was a community effort, with each student at the school decorating a piece of fabric representing a book spine with the title of their favourite book. Each book (about 170 of them, from students and staff) was sewn onto a background to create a library bookshelf arrangement. After a lot of time and effort, the final product was over 2m high by about 1.7m wide. A very satisfying quilt to make from start to finish, and my biggest so far. Click on the picture to have a closer look.

My initial idea was to use "wood grain" type fabric to represent the shelving, but when I got to that part I felt it didn't suit the quilt. Using black instead makes the books stand out more and they do the talking. it still looks like a bookshelf. The books were appliqued on in an ad-hoc manner using satin stitch with matching bright embroidery threads, but they could just as easily have been foundation pieced (I expect that would have taken longer though!).

A Blog is Born

Well this is my first attempt at getting a blog up and going. There has been a lot of interest in a couple of my quilts in particular, so I thought this might be a good way of sharing them. Let's see how we go...