Warwick retreat

A lovely weekend spent at Glenrose Patchwork in Warwick – lots of sewing finished and lots of ideas for finishing others. 

We didn’t spend much time in the garden, but I ventured out into the cold to get a few pictures:

Lots of roses, and an obliging bee:

I managed to complete the top for my dresden plates, and after overcoming some technical issues managed to pin it all together ready for quilting.  I’ll get started on the quilting this week. 

These triangles were a bit of problem for me – I had wanted to make hexagons out of the triangles, but due to my lack of mathematical knowledge (not realising that the height of an equilateral triangle is not the same as the length of the side) I only managed to get 5 matching triangles from a width of fabric.  So they were all put away in disgust while I tried to work out an alternative finish. 

I don’t have one of these design walls at home, but it made working out the layout so easy for this.  I think I’ll have to rig something up so I can do this at home too. 

I didn’t manage to sew this together, so I’m going to work from photos to reconstruct it

Cirque du Cercles

Almost finished, just the label and hanging sleeve to be completed and this quilt will be ready to enter the RNA show this year. 

The circles were all attached using free motion quilting, and to continue the circle theme I used a pebbly quilting pattern to add texture to the plain background fabric.  It has also shrunk the overall quilt size by about 3-4 inches over the width of the quilt, but I wanted the appliqued circles to look puffy so it has worked really well.  I also gave myself a good case of tennis elbow with this quilt – first with the days of cutting out a bajillion circles, and then with the tight pebble background quilting.

Next in line is this:

A few years ago I cut out all these dresden plate wedges, made a sample block and didn’t like the result – some of the fabrics I chose had a white background and they didn’t look good on the pale background I had picked out.  So I packed it all away and forgot about them until recently.  I unpicked and restitched, and I’m happier with this version.  I have 9 of these blocks finished, and another 30 small blocks for the border done.  I’m hoping to have this finished for the RNA show as well – I think I have about 6 weeks before entries are due so it should be do-able.