Happy Sad!

It was a happy sad week last week and I'm only starting to come around to myself again this week now.  We had the awfulness of sending Wilbur to sleep and then I left straight away, for the Festival of Quilts in Birmingham, with friends from the Irish Patchwork Society.

A tired looking me posing in front of The Rainbow Rose I designed for the MQI group QAL and quilted by the amazing Tomomi McElwee @ Slaney Handcraft.  We submitted it as a 2 person quilt and it was chosen to represent Ireland in the European Quilt Association gallery called Diversity.

Not having a goods nights sleep since the Thursday before, I was not really in the form for a road trip but I wasn't going to let anyone down and stay home feeling sorry for myself.  Gordon had the week off and stayed around the house spending time with Maggie and Charly, so I didn't have to worry about the two furballs and them missing Wilbur. I knew they'd be distracted by having one of their humans around all the time.   The trip was worth it and I would have enjoyed it better if it had been any other week.  I took over 200 photos and bought some interesting bits and pieces and will share them with you in the next post!

For now, I thought I'd show you some of the process of blocking this quilt and the amazing quilting that Tomomi did for it.  There was quite a bit of preparation involved getting this quilt ready for exhibition.  First I had to wash it, as the blue water erasable marker didn't come out of all the white with just spritzing.  I wasn't going to put this gorgeous thing into the washing machine with out cleaning the machine first, so 2 bottles of Dettol washine machine cleaner and 2 rinse cycles later, I cleaned out the rubber seal on the door and found coins, hair pins, SD and usb sticks!  Then I took a deep breath and popped it into a cold wash with 6-7 colour catchers.

With all the strong colour in this I had a suspicion the red would run but it didn't.  The only thing the colour catcher picked up was the green from the extra wide backing fabric.  That surprised me as I was not expecting that to run at all!  Still the quilt itself was perfect so onto the blocking step!

As we don't have carpets in our house (only on the hall stairs!), I needed something to be able to pin the quilt to, to stretch it out while wet.  I bought 4 packs of these kids playmats from Argos, moved all the furniture and set to smoothing the quilt out and pining every 2 inches or so, all around the quilt, with sturdy glass head pins.  I used a ruler to measure out from one of the seams all the way around with the same measurement to make sure I got the star square and pinned in place.

It took over 2 days to dry and the green blues section was a bit puffy, so I got the steam iron out and hovered over those sections using steam to make them lie flat and a few extra pins, to get the seam straight on.  I think it worked quite well. It certainly made the trimming process that bit easier having a flat straight quilt!

The only thing that was a bother was this room could not be used for the 2 1/2 days.  No dogs allowed and this is normally where they play and spend time with us in the evenings.  They were not impressed and wanted in!  Gordon also had to skip the TV as this is where the telly is.  He happily made do with 4 library books!

Hedgehog!

Being an animal lover Tomomi added in lots of Irish wildlife to the quilting and I love her to bits for it.  I told her to give it the Tomomi treatment with no help at all for quilting ideas and she certainly did that in spades and came up with so many beautiful motifs.  The quilting makes this quilt and is the reason it got chosen for Birmingham.  You have to look at the back to see the quilting properly and here are some of the animals found in the quilt.

Dolphin

Squirrel

Rabbit

Fox

And my favourite!  A Basset Hound that I thinks is the spitting image of our puppy Maggie.

It was hard at times last week being away.  There were times I wanted to just go home and times when I was completely distracted immersed in sewing talk and quilty inspiration.  A happy sad week!
 

Losing Wilbur was incredibly sad but happy that we had him for as long as did.  He was tons of fun and gave us many laugh out loud moments and many more quiet contented moments.  I found this photo of our holiday last year with us all walking the beach.  It makes me sad that we are all moving on without Wilbur but we are not leaving him behind.  Like me following on at the rear taking photos and letting him take his time, I'm carrying the happy memories with me.  And now I have Maggie in quilt form too!  So, so happy I didn't try and quilt this one myself and let Tomomi do her thing instead. So Happy Sad, but more happy than sad!  Can't ask for more than that.

Linking up with the Friday finishes!

Just Threads Finished Quilt & FOQ

Remember these blocks from last May?

They are the Moda friendship blocks our Thurday group, Just Threads, made as a group project.  There are over 30 blocks in this series and are available on Sylvias Stitches if you want to download them.  We each made blocks using Spring as the theme for fabric selection and chose a navy solid fabric to sash them which worked really well to pull the various blocks together.

We are hoping to raffle it next year for Irish Quilting week but this year we got it made just in time for the Festival of Quilts in Birmingham.  I didn't get to go to the FOQ but got to see the finished quilt on Paula's blog and Suzanne, who attended, kindly took some photos for me.

Suzanne also sent me a photo of Ireland's EQA exhibit, Winter Garden.  Thanks Suzanne!  My mini is the top right called Windy Winter Morning, aka Robin on a branch (I showed a close up of it last week).  I'm right beside Isobel's, Paula's daughter, who made the gorgeous Snowflake on a window. Meg and Claire from Just threads are also included.  Meg's is second left on the top with some frosty trees and Claire's is second right on the bottom row, a lovely snowy house scene!

This was my first attempt at thread painting.  Well first isn't exactly correct.  It took me 4 attempts to get it looking close to right!

During our last Irish Patchwork Society meeting Kate O'Donoghue made a really lovely landscape scene using a zig zag stitch and she urged me to give it a go so I googled  some Robin images for inspiration and looked up thread painting on YouTube.  I ended up using the following to make my mini :

• feed dogs down & free motion foot on machine
• top tension reduced from 4 to 2 (advice was to use 0 for metallic threads)
• 2 threads in the same needle e.g. 2 shades of red/orange for the redbreast
• lightweight embroidery thread in the bobbin 
• zigzag stitch set at 2.0 and used moving the fabric horizontally to create straight stitches rather than the usual method of vertical to make zigzag stitches.  This meant stopping and turning quite a bit to keep moving the piece horizontally
• 2 layers of stitch and tear under the top fabric stretched in an embroidery hoop (much easier to move the piece around too using the hoop)
• thread painted first then spray basted the 3 layers together (as opposed to first attempt above!)
• quilted a small loopy stipple pattern all around the Robin and branch to give the effect of a cold, windy, winter morning
• faced the quilt (as opposed to binding) using this tutorial by The Silly BooDilly

In addition to all the settings above and the practice pieces, I learned to just take a breath and give it a try.  Once I had Robin #4 looking somewhat like I imagined I was nervous to do the loopy quilting - there is always that "I'm going to mess this up" voice talking away in the background.  I drowned it out with the "Be brave, breathe and just do it" talk I gave myself!

Nike would be proud their marketing campaign worked on me!  It wasn't that hard in the end though a little practice was required and I would definitely do this again!

Linking up to the Friday finishes:
 Crazy Mom Quilts and