Joyce’s Quilting Quandary

I have been assisting at the Royal South Street Competitions as a volunteer. The competitions are held in the wonderful Her Majesty’s Theatre in Lydiard Street. The competition starts in July  and runs through to the 25th October with competitions in singing, dancing, individual musical instruments, bands, orchestras , debating, calisthenics and all things in between!  Thousands of young people, plus some who are not so young, compete for prizes up to $40,000 ( Herald-Sun Aria )!  In order for this competition to function, hundreds of volunteers are needed.  A small section will need about 12 volunteers to run it, a large section, up to 3o, and there are usually three sessions per day! Thanks to years of practise, things usually run like clockwork! I am helping as a writer for the adjudicators for the first time this year. Vivienne has been my team leader and mentor!  I certainly have to get my spelling brain into gear.   The block consists of a scan of the South Street emblem onto fabric, and an enlargement the crown onto organza for the royal red corner!  I used some machine embroidery and quilting to enhance the design. The grey quilting thread is a variagated  Guttermann’s 100% rayon embroidery thread. Beautiful to use! Can I get some more?  Interesting question!!!!

My dear friend, Dorothy and I try to walk every Tuesday! We don’t always succeed but we always try!  We sometimes walk around our neighbourhood or other places. On a friend’s recommendation, we decided that we would walk the Yarrowee Trail. The Yarrowee River ( river? perhaps stream? ) which runs through Ballarat and was the source of much gold bearing gravel.  A  great  deal of work has been done along the river to change it from a glorified drain, back to a natural, beautiful stream complete with natural vegetation and animals. A walking trail has been developed along the stream  which can ben accessed from various points along it. Dorothy and I are in the process of doing the various sections. We are enjoying it immensly. We have seen a great deal of wild-life, including two wallabies which frightened the life out of Dorothy. I used a dark patterned fabric for the background. I appliqued the river on top and then did a line of satin stitch along the edge to represent the track. Yarrowee is a wonderful aboriginal name. I machine embroidered this with grey thead. I used the difficult font for the “36″  . My satin stitch  is still not 100%, but is worse when I use this font! I ued two figure shapes for my “red corner” . The quilting followed the shapes.

Another Olympic theme this week. The red swirls were used on the torch and the caldron in the Bird’s Nest Stadium.  The swirls reminded me of the cloud and wind symbols used in Chinese art.  I used a grey backgound fabric with tiny black swirly circles. I used satin stitch for the swirls and did them with red variagated thread.  In the corner I added some tiny red circles inside the swirls ( Ruth, Laurel’s quilt friend from New Zealand, did lots of the tiny quilting circles) .  The lines of satin stitch I qulited around to give some added depth and impact.

The Olympics in Beijing opened this week, so there is plenty of coverage to watch. Wonderful images, wonderful colour and symbols. The lettering on the logo is wonderful, very clear, very Asian. I used my favourite background fabric, then machine appliqued the lettering from the official symbol and then added the organza rings to represent the Olympic rings. I added the grid down the side in red to represent the controls put on by the Chinese goverment . I thought the sight of the marathon runners inside two sets of barricades with soldiers lining the inside barricade was very telling. 34 for Week 34. It was also interesting to have Azusa staying with us because that gave us insights into the Japanese sports and athletes. She was very pleased when the Japanese breaststroker won two medals.

I had a couple of days emergency teaching this week, so I have based the block around two elements of that, firstly the variety of names of t  he students – which seem to be getting stranger and more unusual – and secondly the names of some of the teachers with whom I had worked. The emergency teaching gives me some pocket money and the chance to catch up with these friends with whom I had worked with for a long time. I used a black fabric with swirls for the background and then used machine embroidery in a variety of grey threads for the girls names and a red variagated thread for  teachers’ names.  I used red organza for the corner. I used a clear monofilamnet yarn for the quilting. This works well despite looking like very thin fishing line on the reel. As is quite common when I am lettering, the spelling went a little strange!!

We have a delightful Japanese teacher, Azusa staying with us. She is a teacher at Obayashi Sacred Heart School, which is the Japanese school with whom Loreto has a sister school arrangement . The arrangement started 10 years ago and Azusa was a Year 10 student in the first group of students to come to come to Australia. She is now a teacher at the school.  It is busy with her here, but it is great to take her around. I asked her to write her names in characters. It is much simpler than Momi’s! I chose a grey background as a bit of a change. I stitched the letters with black thread. Bllack bias tape would have worked well as well. I outlined the letters with a row of deep red stitching to bring them out a little more.  Did a red “32″ in the red corner. I stared quilting in a darker grey but that was too much, so started again in a lighter grey, which worked much better.

Collected our Japanese teacher, Azusa who will stay with us for three weeks, Michael and Natalie safely home from Japan and we went to see the Victorian Opera production of Madame Butterfly, so a very Japanese week!  I used a fan as my theme because of the beautiful fans used in the opera production. I used a bone background fabric and a black swirly fabric for the fan. I added a butterfly onto the fan. I appliqued the fan with satin stitch which was most approriate for the ribs.  I used a gold metallic thread for the machine embroidered butterfly. It was an appropriate choice, but temperemental! I think that I needed the correct  needle, perhaps a metallic needle. The quilting emphasised the fan shape.

Michael and Natalie are on their trip to Japan, which they have been looking forward to and planning for many months.  Arnie and I are sharing the minding of Fergus and Ewan with Sandra and Guido, Natalie’s parents. We have the first six days and then we hand them over! I decided to use a map of Japan, with the cities which they are visiting , Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto and Nagoya marked in red. I used my  favourite background fabric and added a machine embroidered map. The two spots outside the corner square represent Michael and Natalie,  the two 1/2 dots in the corner are Fergus and Ewan, the two dots are Arnie and I. I used a very pale varigated embroidery thread for the quilting, which worked well. 3o for Week 30!