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.