Welcome to my stop on
Plum and June's Let's Get Acquainted Blog Hop for 2014. Before I start chatting away, a huge thanks to Beth for all she's done to organise the blog hop. It's been a huge amount of work and we all appreciate it!
Beth suggested we show off a few of our favourite quilts, which is hard when you've been quilting as long as I have. Fortunately I'm not as prolific as some quiltmakers, and don't have hundreds of quilts under my belt. Some of these have been featured elsewhere on my blog, others haven't.
I made this baby quilt last year for my niece, who's about to turn one. It's my own design and I love the contrast between the pinks and greys.
This is one of my son's quilts, made around 2011. He picked the colour scheme and design himself, using the border and sashing fabric for inspiration.
I love paper piecing and this wall hanging was pieced for my daughter - a huge Hunger Games fan. The piecing was quite tricky, but the simple colour scheme certainly helped.
This is my daughter's latest quilt, a faux Drunkards Path. I hand quilted this in perle cotton, which took forever and then some. I'm not sure that I should be proud or embarrassed that I had 100 different fabrics to use for the top in my stash....
My Polaroid Rainbows started as a polaroid block swap and ended up as an I Spy quilt that graces my younger daughter's wall. This is a super bright and cheerful quilt.
Continuing the rainbow theme is my recently finished Rainbow in the Clouds. This is one of my first forays into improv piecing and was heaps of fun. I'm not sure why I still have so many scraps though.
Now you've seen some of my quilts, here's a little about me.
I'm a mum of three awesome kids, and wife to a very patient husband who supports my quilting habit. We've got two dogs (his) and two cats (mine). I'm a crazy cat lady in the making, except hubby won't let me get any more cats. My boys are very good at supervising everything quilty.
I live on the east coast of Australia, in a beach resort town half way between Sydney and Brisbane - there are worse places in the world you can live! I grew up in Sydney but we relocated to hubby's hometown when the kids were born to bring them up in a smaller town.
I've been quilting for the best part of 20 years (gosh that makes me sound OLD!!). My grandmother was an expert seamstress, my mother always sewed clothing, so it 's definitely in my genes. My interest in quilting came during high school, my best friend's mum is a quilter and she was a huge influence and great mentor when I was a beginner quilter.
I am completely self-taught, and always learning new things. I totally believe you're never too old or experienced to extend your quilting skills. These days I identify most with the modern quilting movement, though not everything I do is super modern.
I have a healthy addiction to fabric, a million ideas in my head and on scraps of paper and a huge pile of unfinished projects. I like to completely finish my projects myself, but I have a bad case of Quilters ADHD and often lose interest. But my mantra is to Quilt With No Guilt, so I'll get to them all eventually. I discovered English Paper Piecing this year and hand sewing is my therapy - I am amazed at how relaxing it is!
My day job is an assistant in a preschool, which is as tiring as it sounds. But my training was in journalism and I worked in magazines before children. I basically gave that up with the city life when the kids were born, though I kept my hand in doing freelance writing for craft and decorating magazines.
In exciting news, I've just embarked on a brand new quilting related venture with some dear quilty friends. I'm putting my journalism background to good use and I'm now the editor of Australia's very first modern-quilting magazine -
Make Modern. Good news is we're publishing in the digital format so we'll be easily available worldwide. I am so excited about this new chapter of my life, even if it might encroach on my sewing time.
My
blogging tip has been said before, but it's so true - be true to yourself. Develop your own voice, share what you love, don't stress if you're not churning out projects every other week. It's your own little bit of cyber space so make it your OWN. If people love it, they'll hang around, if they don't then it's their loss anyway.
My
quilting tip is to look at your sewing machine and see if you can use it without the foot pedal. I only discovered this was a feature on my Brother machine earlier this year and I decided to try it out for Free Motion Quilting. Revolutionary. Seriously, not having to worry about what my foot is doing and coordinating the speed of my hands and my feet makes FMQing so much easier and has improved the consistency of my stitches too. I don't think it would help much with regular piecing, but for FMQ, I urge you to give it a go. If your machine has separate plugs for the power supply and foot pedal, pull out the foot pedal one and see if one of the buttons lights up as a stop/go button, then have a play around with it.
My
Favourite Things:
My dream vacation spot is the USA. I want to visit all of it, but Nashville and a night at the Opry is on my bucket list. One day....
My favourite genre of fiction is romance. I don't get to read as much as I'd like, but when I do I like a light hearted read that's like comfort food. I also read a fair bit of non-fiction.
My favourite TV shows are Nashville (see dream vacation spot), and the Big Bang Theory. Those are the only two shows I watch, but my husband makes up for it by watching plenty.
To finish, I have a tricky question for you - what does modern quilting mean to you? I love modern quilting and I'm proud to call myself a modern quilter... but gosh it's hard to define. If you're interested, I've talked about it over at the Make Modern blog
here.
Thanks so much for stopping in and visiting me over here at Where Jane Creates, it'd be great if you can share the love and visit the other hoppers for today:
