Monday Monday

Thought I would start the week with sharing some sites that are making me happy
Remember these? Created by me from a pattern by Annette Emms. She has a new Pixie boot pattern available in her Etsy Store - fairy shoes also still available.

Judy Coates Perez created some delightful stitched houses some years ago. Recently other artists have created 3-dimensional stitched houses in their own style and brought them together for an artist village project. There is a blog tour during May of the artists' indiviual houses. All links from this post by Judy.

Linda Kemshall has a new blog

Thanks to Katherine who shared this stunning post of hand imagery with me. The whole blog is amazing actually - a new discovery for me : Sweetpea Path

Have you seen Chad Alice Hagen's Feltbooks on Flickr - lovely

Belated May calendar for desktop here

And I LOVE the books that Nellie Wortman makes and shares on her blog : some her pages gathered here

Have a creative week

Celtic Cutwork Class

Our speaker for our annual Show & Tell event this year was Yvonne Brown - a talented Textile Artist from the UK. She does absolutely beautiful work and I was very lucky to be able to attend a class with her on Monday. These are a couple of her samples of her cutwork technique She was a great tutor, willing to share many samples and her other techniques and how we could apply what we learned to different projects.
We were given a kit which had a background piece of her handmade tissue fabric, traceable vilene, kunin felt and a selection of sheers that will melt when heated. First task was to choose our design, which we then traced onto the vilene. We also had to rub our black tissue background with treasure gold to enhance the lovely textures. We stitched our design through our layers of background, felt and sheers with metallic thread showing on the surface here. We then used a fine-tipped soldering iron to melt away the sheers around our design. It seemed a scarey thing to do, but was actually quite fun and looks great. We also used the side of the soldering iron to melt some areas on top of the design to add interest to the surface.I am ordering my own soldering tool for a birthday present :-) These are some of the pieces made in the workshop And this is mine almost finished in the day - it just needs a bit of hand-stitching and maybe some small beads and then I can decide how to mount or frame it. A fantastic day with a generous teacher, and a new technique that I can see being applied to many future and varied projects.

Tote and Gloat

Our annual club show and tell event on Saturday was, as usual, a fabulous day for everyone : an inspiring array of quilts, great challenges to look at, a wonderful speaker, and fun shopping. I have lots to share about the day so will devote this post to some of the quilts on display. Fabulous number of challenges entered this year - click on the categories to go to the Rose City Quilters blog posts showing the entries and section winners : First Time, Beginner and Intermediate - Advanced and Professional - Anthing goes - open category but quilt related. Awesome variety of work.
We were also very lucky to have the New Zealand 2011 Hoffman challenge on show - click here for general information about the challenge. This was the fabric they had to use: I took photos of a few on display, without thinking about who had won, but turns out I liked all the winners. Best of show and Viewer's choice was "Ride with Me" by Joanne Mitchell, Geraldine. Best Traditional with a Twist was "A Pot of Fireworks" by Tracey Marshall, Temuka. Best Contemporary was "Masquerade" by Cindy Watkins, Tasman. I also loved "The Gift" by Mary K. Ohara Matheson, DunedinLots of inspiration there, and that was before we got to the speaker and the shopping!