Japanese Quilt Blocks course in Bridlington

 
At the end of the second day of our three day block course at The Royal, Bridlington, where we have been making blocks selected from both 'Japanese Quilt Blocks to Mix and Match' and ' Japanese Taupe Quilt Blocks'.  There will be a lot more photos to follow in a day or two :-)  Some of these are photos snapped by Fiona during class, some are mine.

 

As usual, we have taken over the hotel's large dining room as a well appointed sewing space!

Fiona has made some gorgeous blocks, with a modern twist -

 

I think I've sorted out the blocks for my next sampler quilt.  Rather than trying to combine all the applique kamon crests, I've taken out the ones on the grey plaid backgrounds to make another version of the table runner, and will add one block remade from a workshop sample.

More updates with more photos after the final session tomorrow - it's time for dinner now.

Autumn Quilt Festival Malvern

Just a reminder I'll be at the Autumn Quilt Festival at the Three Counties Showground from Friday to Sunday.  Anyone else going? For all the info, click here.

Workshop or possibly talk booking vacancy, 25th September 2013

I'm looking for a talk or workshop booking for Wednesday 25th September 2013, to go back to back with a workshop visit to the Isle of Man (26th - 30th September), so it needs to be somewhere between Perth and Heysham (near Morecambe) - anywhere off the M74/M6 would be ideal.  This is so I can share out the mileage between groups.  I can do a daytime workshop or talk, or an evening talk (so long as it isn't too far from Heysham).  Please contact me via my website if you are interested.

Quiltfest 2013 flyer design

 

We had some suggestions re the Quiltfest flyer design today, via the Quiltfest website, so I thought it might be useful for you to know why the flyers look like they do :-)  Two points were made -

1) The back ground is far too busy to make it easy to read the writing even though it is faded in the middle.

2) Mixing the english and welsh language together on both sides is not a good idea, it makes it too difficult to find the right bit to read. It would be much better to have welsh on one side of your flyer and english on the other.

 

 

Here's my reply - 

 

We need to have the flyers in Welsh and English for several reasons.  Our main venue, the Royal International Pavilion, is run by Denbighshire County Council and they have a bilingual policy.  If we are to have any chance of the council promoting our event, we have to have bilingual flyers.  Another reason is that if we want to have our flyers in places like the local Tourist Information office, it needs to be bilingual, or it won't get displayed (the size of the Tourist Information brochure holders also dictates the A5 format).  Additionally of course, quite a few of our visitors are Welsh speakers and this year one of the groups we are featuring, Cwilt Cymru, is a Welsh group.

 

There is a lot of information we need to fit onto these flyers, so for the 2012 flyer and the 2013 one we have gone with a bilingual layout, which is pretty standard for presenting the two languages together.  Having the bilingual layout, rather than Welsh on one side and English on the other, means there is less repetition in the combined text.  If we had one side for each language, things like the names of the exhibitors and the traders on Trading Day would have to be repeated, and there would be so much text we would either have to miss off important information or have much smaller font sizes.  There is much more information to be included on the flyers than there used to be, as we now have two galleries included in Quiltfest, which have different opening hours and different change over dates for their exhibitions as well - all info that has to be fitted in somehow.

 

The 2012 flyer was done in a similar style to next year's, with the text floated over the background image of one of the exhibits, and we were lucky to have a professional graphic designer donate the design work free of charge (Ferret's other half Tet).  He also designed the header logo for us.  Each year we have tried to select a quilt that would make a striking image - hopefully something that would attract non-quilters as well.  The 2012 flyer had a white border around each part of the text, but my graphics programme wouldn't allow me to do the same effect with this year's flyer, so the central fade out was the best we could do.  Without floating the text over the image, we could only have exceptionally small quilt images on the flyer - about the size of a large postage stamp.

 

Here's last years flyer as a reminder of the design - 

 

 

 

 

Of course, every year's flyer is different so we will see what we can do next year to improve the design and layout!

North Somerset Quilters' Super Strips workshop

Today's workshop was Super Strips with North Somerset Quilters at Nailsea near Bristol.  Here's some of the patchwork they started.  We had a somewhat unexpected power cut at lunchtime, which meant we didn't get quite as far as usual, but everyone is well on their way - we could at least get some of the corner triangle strips cut out and ready :-) while we waited for the power to come back on.

There seemed to be several themes to the fabrics this time - really bold batiks -

 

Blocks of colour with lovely shading effects -

 

 

'Shabby chic' Moda Jelly Rolls were popular -

 

There were two Christmas fabric versions, the first one witha 2 1/2in strip roll and the one below that with 1 1/2in strips.  The first has quite a lot of metallic gold prints that aren't Christmas themed mixed in, but it works very well together - a good way to eke out Christmas fabrics in a project too, if you were cutting your own pieces from yardage.

 

This scrap strip version also uses 1 1/2in strips.  A big assortment of scraps definitely works best with the narrower strip width, like my original version of Super Strips.

 

This very stylish black, white & red combination is going to look great finished - very modern and fresh.

  

The workshop was combined with 'My Japanese Quilt Inspirations' talk last night.  Thanks for a fun day, and I look foward to seeing photos of the finished patchworks - and showing them off here of course!

More moving

I haven't been blogging quite as often recently because, in between doing talks & workshops & events like trading at Region 13's Quilters' Guild Regional Day last Saturday, I've been moving more of my things up to Scotland.  For the last three weeks, we have had a transit van, so the bigger pieces of furniture, like my antique wardrobe (where I store a lot of my quilts) and my sewing room table, could be moved up to Kettins.  I feel like I'm having to become an expert in logistics, making sure the correct quilts etc. are in the right place for the various workshops I'm teaching, so most of my Japanese quilts are back in Wales at the moment. 

I haven't been including the 'Taisho Variations' quilt (above) in my talks for a while, as it was hiding under some other pieces in my workroom ;-), but I'll be taking it out this Friday and, of course, I'll be including it when I do my three day residential course in Bridlington at the end of the month.  It isn't a sampler quilt, because some of the blocks are duplicates - some blocks are more economical made in pairs, like the kimono blocks.  The sophisticated colours and patterns of Taisho (1912 - 1926) era kimono and obi were an inspiration for this, but all the fabrics are modern patchwork fabrics, so no antique kimono were cut up to make it!  The sashing is only on two sides of each block and reintroduces some of the bolder colours used in them.

 

 


Speaking of sampler quilts, at the Guild Regional Day on Saturday, I found the perfect fabric for sashing a sampler quilt using the paler applique blocks from 'Japanese Taupe Quilt Blocks' - thanks to Dot Sherlock's Quilter's Needs once again for coming up with just the right thing! It is an ombre print in shades of light dusty pink through to a very greyed out rose pink.  Originally, I planned to set the blocks square, something like the arrangements above.

 

 

Now I think I would prefer to make two smaller quilts, separating the blocks that have an obvious direction (like those shown above) from those which can be turned through 45-degrees (below).  One quilt would have the blocks set square, the other on point, perhaps with a big stitch quilted motif based on one of the appliques in each 'plain' square.

Broughton Gifford boromono workshop

On Saturday, I taught the Japanese Art Quilt Boromono workshop at Broughton Gifford Piecemakers near Bath.  In this workshop we make our own version of the vintage Japanese rag patchworks that have become so collectible as 'accidental abstract art'.  Unfortunately I forgot the battery charger for the camera, so I didn't get photos of individual quilts, but Diane's husband took a group photo at the end and the quilters have promised me photos of their finished pieces, so hopefully I'll have more pics for a follow up blogpost soon.  Click the panorama above to see the photo in more detail. The many different fabric selections included recycled shirts, hand printed/dyed, indigo and rust dyed, antique and modern Japanese indigos, taupes and plains, so each piece was very unique.

Diane sent me this photo with sashiko quilting added to her patchwork, which incorporates some small pieces of antique Japanese fabric, including one with a raw edge patch from it's previous life (the dark square just off centre). She wrote, 'Thanks for your interest in my pieces of old fabrics.  I found another hole in one of them - hence the other small triangle stitched on in red.  I felt a connection with the person who tacked the other patch on.'

 

Annie made a very subtle boromono using textured woven Japanese taupe patchwork fabric, including both sides of several fabrics, with stripes and directional fabrics running both vertically and horizontally.  The light border makes the central patchwork seem to float on the background.

 

On the previous Thursday, I visited the South West Embroiderers' Guild and we had a relaxing day with an Introduction to Shonai Sashiko workshop in Plymouth.  Again, I didn't manage to get any photos, so I'm hoping they will send me some! :-)