Joyce’s Quilting Quandary

Week 44! Where do those weeks go! This week I have been sewing. My son asked me to make a dress for one of his friends, Jacqui,  who has joined the Divas choir. She was a little perplexed when she discovered  that their dresses were all made of the same purple fabric so they had to organise the making of them. So, it was Joyce to the rescue. In honour of my sewing I decided to include some tools in my block. If I am sewing , then I really want my tools to work well.  It is very frustrating to have a pair of scissors which don’t cut precisely and easily.  In honour of good scissors they feature in the block. I have also included  the purple thread in honor of Jacqui’s dress and the red in the corner is the pin-cushion. I used my favourite fabric for the foreground,  a Nancy Wolff design for Robert Kaufman ” FUN!damentals” . I find that it has a great tonal value for this quilt, not too dark, not too light, just right! The scissors, needle and thread and the pins are free machine embroidered in black. The numbers are done in the same way with the addition of some diagonal stitching in a grey variegated thread. The quilting is done in cream and light grey variegated thread.

My cup cake this week! My birthday!  The birthday celebrations included lunch with friends, Michael, Natalie, Fergus and Ewan came for tea, lunch with Dorothy, phone calls from Catherine, Geraldine and my brothers. On Tuesday 28th ( this would have been my mother’s 100th birthday ) Arnie and I went to Melbourne for a few days. We stayed in our usual place in South Melbourne. I went to the Sun Aria final on the Tuesday night, always a lovely night! On Wednesday we met Michael for lunch, did some shopping in the city and at Ikea, went to the local hotel, The Rising Star for dinner, went to the dentist on Thursday and then went to a concert by Aled Jones and then drove home to Ballarat. I love my cup cake design! This time I pleated black silk for the base and then used strips of cream needle lace for the top. The foreground were the red silks which Catherine used for her wedding dress, the dupion and the Chinese dragon silk.  The background was a black shiny finish polyester. I then machine embroidered my name on red.

This week I attended the 70th birthdays of two friends who I worked with at Loreto College. Getrud celebrated her birthday at The Boatshed Restaurant with ten of her female friends. Some of these were from Loreto College, some from her classes at U3A which include French and the recorder.  There were some familiar faces. It always takes a while to work out where you know people  I found that one woman grew up around the corner from us in Nepean Highway! Alison celebrated her birthday at the SebastopolBowling club with a large group of her family and friends from teaching and the Uniting church. Bothevents were lovely occasions.  I used a strip of fabric covered with faces to depict the various groups of friends. This fabric was fairly bright so I put a layer of tulle over the fabric to tone it down. I used two darker fabrics on either side wirh the red corner.  Over this I satin stitched a large 70 in shell fabric.  I then machine embroidered Gertrud and Alison’s names and 42 in a variagated thread.