Bloggers’ Quilt Festival ~ Daisy a Day

I’m a little late to the party, as usual, but I just couldn’t resist joining in the fun of Amy’s Bloggers’ Quilt Festival again. Twice a year she hosts this mammoth event attracting some of the finest show-and-tell you’ll see in the entire quilting blogosphere.

After my debut last year I’m back again, this time sharing my all-time favourite quilt (so far!), Daisy a Day. I’m entering it in the Bed Quilt category.

The moment I saw this design by Sandra Dart in Australian Patchwork & Quilting Vol 19 No 7 I knew I had to make it. Hers was called Waiting for Russell, but I named mine Daisy a Day because to me it looked like a carpet of daisies.  It’s also traditionally been known as Tea Leaves, Lafayette Orange Peel and Lover’s Knot.

There’s something about those petal shapes and the round, secondary patterns that’s just a delight to look at, and the idea of a pieced version of this classic Orange Peel shape rather than the popular applique version really appealed to me.

For my background I used a white-on-white spot, and then I hit my humungous scrap bag for some of the brightest, happiest fabrics I could find for the “petals” – Kaffe Fassett brights, jazzy stripes, dots, florals, even geometrics. In they went!

I used a 12 inch Tea Leaves template by Ardco, which I bought here. The rough, grippy underside made cutting the shapes easy on my sandpaper board.

It took me just 18 months to make the quilt top and I loved every minute of this journey. It lifted the spirits to look at these pretties every day!

The decision to hand- rather than machine-quilt was an easy one. I wanted my quilt to have a soft texture with the quilting visible, so I quilted in the white spaces 1/4 inch inside the seams.

With so many pieces to quilt I was worried I could easily miss one (or ten!) so I pinned every white space with a safety pin, counting them as I went. Then it was simply a matter of pulling out the pins as I went and, so that I could see my progress, I marked off the pins on a card as I went.

Amazingly it only took me 5 weeks to hand quilt this queen sized bed quilt.

 

With such a riot of colour in the petals I could have used just about any shade for the binding, but as usual bright pink called to me the loudest!

Stats:
88 in x 96 in (approx)
Daisy petals - Kaffe Fassett brights, along with other bright, modern scraps.
Background fabric - White tone-on-tone spot from the Polka Party III range by Holly Holderman for Lakehouse Drygoods
Warm & White Cotton batting.
Pieced and quilted by me by hand using Aurifil 40 weight thread in white (2024).

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Now off you go and enjoy all the other quilts in this fun Bloggers’ Quilt Festival for Spring 2013. The Bed Quilt category is here but there are plenty of other categories too.

Pick your favourites because next week you’ll be able to cast your vote for the best quilt in each category as well as Viewers’ Choice. And you can win for just leaving a comment on Amy’s blog.

Go on. You can do it while you drink your cuppa, and you won’t get sore feet looking at the exhibits .

Di

You don’t see this very often

It’s unusual not to see tables piled high with finished quilts at our St Mark’s Quilters monthly workshops, but last Saturday we had just one finish, Gillian’s colourful kindy quilt made from a fun space themed panel.

 

But never fear, there was activity aplenty as Blankets of Love (for RPA Newborn Care) and kindy quilts (for the KU Marcia Burgess Autism Specific Kindy at Liverpool) were planned and cut…

Pieced

 

 

 

 

 

Quilted

 

Bound

 

and admired.

 

 

Perdita made this magnificent Double Irish Chain quilt for her daughter and, at our insistence, brought it along for “Show and Tell”.

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Finally, two more things you don’t see very often…

Someone (Cath) so fanatical about the colour purple that she has matching  iphone and ipad covers, and a thread bin, scarf, spectacles and rolling luggage all colour co-ordinated.

And a rare shot, taken by Cath, of me working on my latest quilt for The Marcia.

Di

May Photo a Day Digest 1

(April) Day 30 – Glasses

(May) Day 1 – I bought this.

Day 2 – Morning ritual

Chester wakes up hungry, so absolutely nothing happens until he’s had his breakfast. It takes him about 20 seconds!

Day 3 – This is really good!

Regular readers will know I’m facing the prospect of moving to a new home later this year (once we find one) where I’ll need to ask permission to keep Chester.

It’s out of the question for me to sneak in my daughter Sarah’s two cats that I’ve been minding as well, so they needed to be re-homed (the younger cat) or put to sleep (the older one). After much agonising over finding new homes for Satchmo and Poodie things turned out unexpectedly well.

Satchmo, the younger cat, has found a comfortable new home with an elderly lady who loves and spoils him, and Poodie, the elderly one, was rescued from euthanasia by our vet. Poodie is now living out her remaining days as the vet clinic’s “charity cat”, enjoying pats and cuddles from all the staff and clients.

I’m loving the fact that after many years of sharing my bed with a warm, furry body sniggled up to me – and shedding hair all over the bedding – I can finally sleep under one of my special quilts, the heart quilt made for me by the English Quilt girls last year. This is really good!

 

Day 4 – In my cup – it’s me!

Day 5 – Paper

Our Marriage Certificate

Today I enjoyed happy memories and was thankful to God for 40 years of marriage to a tender, complex, devoted, irritating, beautiful, honourable, obsessive, handsome, wise, strong-willed, compassionate and loving man. Today would have been our 41st anniversary. I miss him every day and will love him always.

Day 6 – Broken

Broken car parts glinting in the sun on the side of the road.

Di

Among my souvenirs {The Italian Job}

Continuing the stories behind some of my favourite quilts before I pack them up for the move.

In the lead up to our trip to Italy in 2007 I had a light bulb moment.

I decided to bring back what would be, to me, the ultimate souvenir: a quilt. I’d make it myself, and it would hold all our precious memories and reminders of our adventures.

This is how I went about it.

First of all I designed the layout on graph paper. It would consist of 12 inch blocks arranged in a seemingly random pattern on a 4 x 4 grid. I raided my stash for fabrics in variations of red, green and gold choosing patterns that reminded me of Baroque music or rich, Italianate architectural styles.  Gold stamping was perfect for creating that Renaissance feel too.

I was particularly excited to find this green acanthus leaf fabric in the photo below, looking just like flowery decorative moldings.  Here and there I designed pairs of ‘tiles’, squares on point, to suggest, in a simplified way, the mosaic floor tiles I knew I’d find in Italian churches.

Each block included one piece of plain cream homespun among the fancy fabrics, and my plan was to embroider these with small sketches of sights that took my fancy as we travelled around.

Once I had the layout arranged to my satisfaction (see below) I took a photo for future reference.

Finally I gathered together the pieces for each block and popped them into 16 plastic ziplock bags which I labelled by row and column (1A, 1B, 1C etc).

Sixteen small plastic bags of fabric pieces weighed very little, and with a bunch of DMC embroidery threads in a varied palette of greens and khaki shades and my sketchbook tucked into my bag I was ready to capture the essence of Italy and turn it into a quilt!

First stop Rome where we first saw these bees at the Palazzo Barberini. This is the shield of Pope Urban VIII, the member of the Barberini family who had Bernini build the Palazzo, and I was fascinated to see more bees on monuments to this powerful family all over Rome. We were told they symbolised industriousness, but I’ve read other theories one of which says they were a visual play on words associated with the first part of the name (barb = bee sting). Bees also apparently have significance as religious symbols.

This pretty little finial was in the grounds of the Vatican.

I just love this little guy carrying an Egyptian obelisk on his back! Created by the sculptor Bernini in 1667, this baby elephant’s a little gem hidden away in the peaceful Piazza Minerva just minutes from the tourist crowds milling at the Pantheon. The day I went looking for him I found myself quite alone in the piazza, delighted to be able to take my time sketching and appreciating the beautifully balanced lines of one of the sweetest little monuments I’ve seen.

By contrast, right beside the Spanish Steps where, it seems, the youth of the world joyously meet, I was taken by this shell shape, carved above the front door of the Keats Shelley Memorial House where John Keats breathed his last.

On to Sicily where we visited the town of Monreale and its magnificent Cathedral where marble columns in the cloisters are decorated with foliage, animals and Biblical scenes.

In Palermo the charming combination of Norman and Arabic architecture caught my eye.

Just a short bus ride from Palermo, in the seaside resort of Mondello, this mermaid fountain dominates the town square. I knew she needed to go in my souvenir quilt, as a reminder of my day at the seaside.

The cathedral in Cefalu boasts this magnificent golden mosaic.

If it’s colour you want you can always count on glorious Tuscany! I’d been trying to get to San Gimignano for twenty years and once there you might say I ate it up . Italian ceramics are so exuberant and vibrant, but the only way this huge pitcher was coming home with me was on my quilt.

Assisi was another of those places I’d had on my “bucket list” for ages. Here’s the Church of St Francis.

This is our friend Angela’s Tuscan villa, perched high on a hillside near Manciano surrounded by groves of olive trees. It was our base for a week where we relaxed in the sunshine, read, drank Italian wine, and I caught up with my little embroideries for the quilt. Ah, the serenity……

We also enjoyed some mighty fine meals. One of our favourite gastronimic experiences was wild boar (cinghiale) which we ate casseroled, roasted, skewered, cured, and minced on crostini. This fellow above was stuffed and mounted on a board.

By the time I walked in the front door back home I had most of my embroideries completed and just needed to sew the squares together.

I loved the creative process for this quilt which was, quite literally, a fantastic journey. I’ve had it hanging in our sitting room for the past six years where I see it every day, but writing this post and looking back on all my blog entries for that holiday has brought me even more pleasure than I imagined.

I’m blessed to have such happy memories in my quilt.

 Di