Japanese and Dutch

       

This week's customer quilt featured striking Japanese fabric with and reminded me of paper screens in teahouses so it seemed obvious to have a go at sashiko style quilting. I found a pattern for a maze ball and decided that the border had to be pumpkin seeds which can also look very oriental. The formal quilting looked really good when it was done and my customer phoned me when she received her quilt in the post to say how delighted she was. I also quilted two pillow shams to match an earlier version of another magic spirals quilt so I have now caught up with all of my customer quilts! Although I do know of several quilts that are under construction so I don't suppose it will be long before some more come along. 

I worked on my Dutch quilt and make good use of the new pop-up design wall to ensure that all 30 of the fabrics got distributed fairly evenly. I ordered some Philip Jacobs "tulipmania" fabric from Doughty's for the back and carefully matched up the large pattern repeat. I looked at several reference books then ignored them all as I couldn't understand what they were getting at and successfully completed my ever mitred borders. I was impressed that they looked so neat but made no attempt to match up the chintz patterns in the corners, using the excuse that I did not have enough fabric to faff around. It is all ready to quilt and I am hoping to use the Quilt Path computer system to quilt canal houses and tulips onto the quilt top. Theo from Art & Stitch kindly sent the digital file for me to use on my quilt from Amsterdam.

The Norway Cruise with Sew Many Places and P&Q Magazine is fast approaching so I have now cut out wadding squares and gold lamé strips for the Northern Lights cushions and sorted out an assortment of zips and bright embroidery threads. Crazy Catt Quilt Shop in Kingsbridge, Devon is providing me with all of the hand-dyed strips in kit form and while I was thinking about dyeing I may have had a new idea about how to display the Celtic Totem Henge…

I sent most of a day fiddling around getting the Totem skins bound. The first one was a bit iffy in places but the third one was really good. I suppose I could take off the offending binding and start again but that would be crazy so I will just have to hope the judge is too busy admiring everything else to notice that the wavy leather edge does not completely fill the binding in some of the tight turns. I have officially entered the Totems into FOQ 2014 but may need to revise the overall size that I specified. I am working up the courage to manufacture the foam columns this week but may have to persuade Freya to stop revising  for exams to help me hold them in place while the spray glue works;)