Quiltfest 2025

I'm actually participating in QuiltFest 2025, run by Amy's Creative Side. Trying to keep on top of all the entries, to talk about new things, to describe the changes going on in my quilting process and life. But a lot of it is looking back at stuff I've done in the past, trying to retrace the thoughts I started with back in the day.

Also, realising just how messy and disorganised my quilting 'studio' is compared to all the Pinterest-perfect studios that are in the hashtag!

There's nothing quite as humbling as the realisation that you aren't working in a light-filled attic that's cleaned to within an inch of its life, with the fabrics colour-coded, or maybe designer-coded, neatly arrayed on comic book boards.

But also, this is real life, real quilting. I'm not even trying to be Stepford - metaphorically speaking - just trying to get stuff done. Which means...mess. And disorganisation. And different styles of fabric. Sorting that makes sense for a brief period of time and then doesn't make sense at all. Unfinished objects that sit around for AGES in various boxes and bags and states of unfinishedness. Fabric that I fully intend to sell but can't get anyone to buy...

It's a lot.

I haven't really done much more on the 2nd of the two quilt tops I'm making. Sewn some of the blocks together, but that's about it.

Oh well, it's still progress, however slow.

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?

Bloggers Quilt Festival: the Interweave Mini

I made Interwoven for the #igrainbowmini swap, off a pattern from a Susan Schneider book. The HSTs were made out of the off-cuts of the Kona charm swap organised by Pile O'Fabric back in 2013, and only measured 1.75" square...before I trimmed them down to 1.5".

And this is why I'm not a fan of HSTs. Even when they look really really spectacular, there's a bajillion trimmings.


And then I had to arrange the teeny-tiny HSTs into the pattern, which is really just a 4x4 block in a specific layout, which then gets rotated through 90 degrees to form the pattern.


It's pretty clever, right?


Of course, then I have to go and add borders.


Straight line quilting, following the pattern was all I could manage. Alas, I took the HandiQuilter Blessington Academy course the weekend after I quilted this, otherwise it would have been freemotion quilting and much more impressive.

Still I suppose the design holds up pretty well!

Title: Interweave (Mini)
Size: ~18" square

Submitted in the ROYGBIV category of the Bloggers Quilt Festival over at Amy's Creative Side.

Blogger's Quilt Festival: "The Eternity Quilt" and "The New York Cat Mat"

My two quilts for the Blogger's Quilt Festival are the Eternity Quilt and the New York Cat Mat.

Eternity Quilt

I made this for a creative project my church service was putting together. It was ridiculously complex, and only after I finished it did I realise there was a much much MUCH easier way to put it together! *facepalm*

However, it was also my first wholly self-quilted quilt using the quilting machine at my LQS (The Avanti HQ at Hobbysew Top Ryde). And, of course, it had to be a complicated design. The quilting I had planned for this baby was not only not rectangular, it featured negative space, and the need for some very fine stippling to bring out the negative space. Never let it be said I'm not up for a challenge!

a super-sized picture version

The Eternity Quilt
Quilt Measurements: 94" x 94"
Special Techniques used: Quilting around negative space.
Quilted By: Sel @ Mad Quilter's Disease (a.k.a. me!)

I'm quite pleased with it, even if it's not technically perfect. It's going in the Sydney Quilt Show 2013 - my first quilt show!

The New York Cat Mat

The name of this one is both true and slightly humourous, since it was intended as a 'mini quilt' but the cats have ended up colonising it.

It was made during the New York Beauty Quilt Along by Sew Sweetness back in February last year. I started in jewel-toned batiks, but then found I didn't like the colours quite as much as I thought I would. So I only ended up making 6 blocks - two of them the basic "Block 0".

I quilted it with Penny Poppleton's machine ("Thor", a Bernina 400) and it turned out rather better than I expected. I wanted to practise some of the FMQ techniques in Angela Walter's famous book "Free-Motion Quilting" on a home machine, and although it was a little small and fiddly to undertake, Thor never failed me!

I left the 'spikes' unquilted, but closely quilted just about everything else in the quarter-circle sections, including the centre dots which were close-quilted spirals, and then did a mini version of my standard 'fiery curls' FMQ pattern (also visible on the Eternity Quilt).

The New York Cat Mat
Quilt Measurements: 11" x 28"
Special Techniques used: Paper-piecing, free-motion quilting.
Quilted By: Sel @ Mad Quilter's Disease (a.k.a. me!)

Blogger's Quilt Festival: Floating Wildflowers

Presenting
Floating Wildflowers!

Size:
60" x 70"
Quilted by:
Jo Nicholls of Thirroul Custom Quilting
Categories:
Favorite Bed Quilt
Favorite Professionally Quilted Quilt

Back when I first started 'quilting for real', circa 2009, my colour and fabric tastes were very different. The quilt shops I'd previously used were more traditional, and so most of what I saw were traditional-style quilts.

I have no idea how I discovered online fabric shopping, or the online blogosphere, but when I did, I found these wonderful 'pre-cut packs' full of a sample of a whole range of fabric! Naturally, there was nothing to do but go on a shopping spree and within a week I'd bought 3 moda pre-cut packs - a fat quarter set, a jelly roll, and a charm pack of each of Harmony, Kansas Winter, and Wildflower Serenade II.

Quite a lot of fabric, and very traditional colours and patterns for the fabrics; it would be tricky to integrate them into the more modern style of quilt I was making these days.

Then a friend of mine announced her engagement to her boyfriend - a country friend turned city girl, who fell in love with a guy who was actually interviewed to go on the reality TV show "The Farmer Wants A Wife" (they decided against him in the end). A mix of the traditional and the modern! Perfect!

I did some laying out to see how it would look:

And a lot of calculations to make sure I had enough fabric to work with, cutting up the layer cakes and fat quarters to ensure I had enough blocks!

Then it was cutting and piecing and sewing...and some unexpected edge-matching!

One thing I like about these kinds of quilts is that it's so very simple to make: just one block made in repeat over and over and all sewn together for a simple yet effective look! I'm all about the simple!

I liked the way this design made the coloured blocks 'float' above the cream/beige background fabric, a dance of blocks across the quilt top:

JAZZ HANDS!

With borders:

And a cat (she's about 6mths at this point, 12 months now):

I sent it to be quilted with Jo Nicholls of Thirroul Custom Quilting - computerised patterns, always classy, always beautifully done! I love using her for my finished quilts, even though I do hope to learn how to FMQ with my own machine.

And finally a binding of dark blue to finish it off!

One thing this quilt highlighted for me is the blurry line between 'traditional' and 'modern' quilting. The colours and patterns of this quilt read 'traditional' to me, but the look of it overall is very 'modern'. I think it's 'modernness' is helped along by the way the squares 'float' in a rather abstract manner due to the cream-beige 'background'.

I suppose purists would argue that 'modern' quilting should be done with modern colours and modern quilt patterns - my Eternity Quilt, for example, would firmly hit the 'modern quilt' mark in colour choice, fabric choice, and design.

And yet most block piecing is based upon a traditional set of blocks - HSTs, flying geese, log cabins - simple and used since someone first thought to take a couple of scraps and sew the edges together to make a bigger piece that was both functional and visually delightful.

So is it modern, or is it traditional? I guess it depends which way you're looking at the quilt - like one of those pictures - now it's a cup, now it's a pair of faces!

Either way, I'm very happy with the result, and my friend was delighted with her wedding present. Which she got four months later on her birthday because her husband managed to lop of the tip of his thumb on his wedding day! It was certainly a memorable day. :)

I wasn't going to enter the Blogger's Quilt Festival this year. I was hoping to have quilted my Scrap Attack so I had something more dramatic. Maybe that will be for next Quilt Festival. Or maybe I'll save the Eternity Quilt for that one. :)

Thanks so much to Amy at Amy's Creative Side for running the Blogger's Quilt Festival again!

Bloggers' Quilt Festival 2011: The Mod Rail Fence

Hi there to the people dropping by from the Quilt Festival!

I've never done this before, so bear with me if it's not in the 'proper' style for this kind of post.

The Modern Rail Fence
(Yes, I'm terrible at names.)

I bought the fabric for the Modern Rail Fence quilt back in 2000 when I was just getting into quilting. They were bolt ends and dead cheap. At the time, I imagined making a double irish chain with it, only to later discover that there wasn't enough fabric for the queen-sized quilt I wanted.

So it went into the stash.



It went into the stash for ten years.

I pulled it out on occasion, admired it, contemplated it, but never knew what to do with it, until the day I realised that a traditional block, such as the simple Rail Fence could be put together with a modern twist.

Three fabrics, a lot of strip-cutting and piecing, and several layouts later, one finished quilt top!


Six months later and it's back from the quilters!


I really like this design, even though I wasn't convinced the effect was what I wanted to achieve at first. But I think it worked pretty well, and would be a great quilt to do again - either with three solids, or possibly with rainbow-coloured strips.

It was a great learning experience for me in terms of flexibility with design. Before this quilt, I'd been fairly rigid in my choices of colours and patterns for quilts. When I made the Mod Rail Fence, it encouraged me to step outside the box a little: use the same design, but switch up the colours and pattern. Rather than doing the 'triple rails' of the traditional rail fence, why not attempt something a little beyond my comfort zone?



Anyway, thank you to Amy for hosting the Bloggers' Quilt Festival (that apostrophe means it belongs to all of us, right? "The quilt festival of all bloggers" not "the quilt festival of the blogger.") and thanks for dropping by! Go look at some of the other quilters' works!