Bloggers' Quilt Festival: Swarm by Sel

Welcome, most of you presumably from the Bloggers' Quilt Festival hosted by Amy's Creative Side.

This is the story of a bunch of buzzy bees bumbling around in my brain, and how sometimes ideas come together in unexpected id-tugging ways...

Swarm (by Sel) took me two full years to actually complete from piecing to binding, but I think it was kind of worth it.



Name: Swarm
Size: 75" x 88"
Design: original by Sel

The fault lies entirely in hexagons. I rather love hexagons, but they're kind of a pain in quilting - all those y-seams! However, I have designed multiple quilts based off hexagons (including a rather fun and complicated 'colourwash' kind of quilt) and am always on the lookout for cool hexy patterns. But I really liked Elizabeth Hartman's "Honey" quilt, featured on the cover of her book 'Modern Patchwork'. A friend of mine, Penny Poppleton made a spectacular version of it back in 2012, and while I liked the design, I didn't want just the honeycomb, but also the bees...

There were designs. Triangular grid paper, pencils, and design after design after...hey, I like that idea...

And then RJR fabrics announced the Cotton + Steel collection, with the 'blenders' and the 'low-vols' and I went "OOOOOH!" Bought most of the basics range and started cutting and sewing.

Most of the long story is at this post I made in December last year, however the addendum is...that it got accepted into QuiltCon!! I blame my friend, Bec, from SydModSQuad for encouraging me to submit it.

And it got photographed by the C+S official Instaccount! *boggles* *wibbles* *squees*

Then I sent it to Houston.

Uh. But not the Quilt Show. If I'd thought about it, I'd have submitted it to the 2016 Houston Quilt Show first, but instead, I opted to gift it to some friends in Houston who've let me stay in their spare 'oom nearly every time I've visited the US. Ah well. I did get to see it in use when I went to visit them in July, though!


It's one of my favourite quilts, to be honest, and I do regret giving it away just a little. Guess I'll just have to make another one... Streamline the process... Write that pattern...


Submitted in the Original Design section of the Blogger's Quilt Festival!

Bloggers Quilt Festival: The Promises Of Spring

For the BLoggers Quilt Festival - 2016 Fall Edition, I'm submitting The Promises Of Spring - a quilt with a relatively long tale in my quilting history.

The original block was developed by Madame Parfait (whose site has since lapsed) in 2011, and was brought to my attention by a friend who wanted a pattern for it. So I developed one using strip-piecing, and called it 'The Snowflake Block'.


I did them in the rainbow colouring as per the original, and then didn't know what to do with them. So I made cushion covers, as you do.


The pattern was pretty popular, but I also found it bloody inconvenient and didn't think it was a particularly fantastic way to do it, as I discovered while trying to piece together another six of them!



Don't look too closely at those seams...


So what do you do with a handful of blocks that you don't want to make more of, but which you don't otherwise have any purpose for? Why, make a quilt with a lot of whitespace in it!


Um, yeah, that's a lot of whitespace. A LOT OF WHITESPACE. But I did quilt it all! ALL OF IT.

It just turned out to be a year late for the quilt show I'd intended it to be entered in, largely because I did my calf muscle in a week before I planned to book the longarm at the local quilt shop. So it got delayed a year - Sydney Quilt Show 2016! I called it 'The Promises Of Spring' and entered it with the blurb: "Every winter's flake carries the promise of summer within it."


The 'regions' of the quilting are ocean deeps, rippling beaches, forest and fern, winter winds, and the sun/flower, and it took me two days to complete.


In the aftermath of the show, though, a friend expressed an interest in purchasing the quilt for what it was worth, but when I named the price, she wasn't able to pay that much. Note: I valued the quilt at somewhat less what it had cost me in time and materials to make, plus 10% profit. Frankly, the hours I put in were probably two or three times that, given that I was piecing the snowflakes diamond by diamond. But that was the cost I named, although I admitted I was willing to accept a lower price.

While the friend was thinking it over, another friend was browsing through my feed and decided she liked it and would pay the price in question - and actually asked if it wasn't a bit low. She does costumes herself, so she knows both the cost of crafting something like this, and tendency of makers to undervalue themselves. I was more than happy to sell at the named price, and she received it a couple of weeks ago and is delighted.


Quilt Measurements: 180cm x 200cm
Special Techniques used: Y-seams, negative space quilting.
Quilted By: Sel @ Mad Quilter's Disease (a.k.a. me!)
Have you gone to check out the link-up at Amy's Creative Side?

2016 Q3 Finish-Along: #5 - Curtains!

This post is for the 2016 Finish-along Q3.

My original post is here and the Curtains are Item #5 on the list.

So, it's been a while since I actually posted anything here. Sorry about that - I went on holiday and then work came back with a vengeance and... So many things going on! It's been a busy winter for me...and we're heading into spring.

However, let's talk domestic for a moment.

We moved into the house in late 2014, and one of the things I wished to do was make curtains for my room and the lounge/dining rooms. It is now 2016, and I've done most of the curtains in most of the rooms. Emphasis on 'most of':

My bedroom curtains:

The workroom curtains (technically it's *my* workroom since all my sister has is a filing cabinet in the corner, and she uses the dining room as her workspace):


The dining room curtains, which I finished just before I left to go on my 2016 Round-the-World trip:

And a shot by night from the inside:

And just this week I completed the living room side curtains with the Concerto quilt pattern by Alyssa of Pile O'Fabric:


And laying out on the floor before finishing with the cat.

When I get the rings for hanging in the windows, I'll take another photo and put it up here: stay tuned!

Now there's just the front window curtains to do - and those are the BIGGIES...