An Apple for the Teacher

I taught three distinctly different types of pupil this week. One day I was a relief art teacher for 9-12 year olds, on another I taught part 3 of the Silent Movie Star Quilt, focusing on borders and edges and finally I spent a morning with Nursery children and I learned how to play "Sharks & Fishes".

This did not leave much time for quilting but I started on a terrific customer quilt featuring printed photos set into pale coloured batiks. The planning of three-quarter circles and lines took me ages and it has to be completed by Thursday at the latest as it is being taken abroad as a gift so I will be busy with that AND teaching in schools for the next few days.

I took my Featherweight machine into the house and pieced the Christmassy apple core blocks in between nagging about homework and ferrying children to extra-curricular activities. I am really pleased at how the "curvemaster" foot helped me to ease these tricky curved shapes together without using pins. The idea is to make each of my children a Christmas quilt well before next December using as much fabric from my existing stash as possible and a token piece of festive print every now and then. I think I will use a large tumbler block with some blue and green Asian prints and add in some small pieces of Christmas fabrics. I am now coveting the accuquilt 9" hexagon cutting die that is currently only available in the USA. The third quilt will feature Amy Butler, Valori Wells and some others that are not obviously Christmassy but have an overall festive effect.

I hope to finish the quilting of a Norse carving onto a piece of hideous copper lurex. I traced the design onto the cotton backing fabric so that I could see what I was doing. The quilt is technically being worked on the frame "upside down" – there will be lots of threads to trim later, possibly some paint to add and perhaps some embroidery stitches to hide any iffy bits. I hope to try silver tissue-lame again using this method and Mo has given me an offcut of pewter coloured satin. These metallic projects seem to have become an accidental mini series!