Joyce’s Quilting Quandary

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.