Gateway of Solace

This is the first quilt I made when I came to live in Ireland in December 2010. I worked six week stints in Portlaoise twice before and was very familiar with The Rock of Dunamase in County Laois, Ireland. The Church of Ireland, Ballycarroll, can be viewed through the ruins of the Norman castle built originally by Dairmuid MacMurragh, King of Leinster. It was part of his daughter, Aoife's dowry when she married Strongbow. I spent many hours on this limestone outcrop enjoying the surrounding landscape and taking pictures. Also tinking of my family, far away.

I would specifically like to thank Marilyn Pretorius. Without her beautiful hand painted fabrics, this  quilt would not be possible.

Two Giants

This depicts two of the African giants. The Boabab tree and the African Buffalo.

My Brother-in-Law, Danie Erasmus, loves buffalo and I promised his wife, Joan, to make him a quilt. I aimed to finish it in time for his 60th birthday but was only able to present it to them on Joan's birthday. But this quilt is a second quilt with the same design that my husband requested. I used the realistic appliqué method with lots of thread sketching and quilting and was quite pleased with his mean look that spells danger. My husband and his brother both love buffalo because the cows are exceptional mothers to the calves. I love the massive baobab trees in the South African bushveld.

I used black netting to create a silhoette effect in the background.

Hands across the border exhibition : Dublin July 2013

What a big surprise to find detail of my quilt: Fabulous Flax... Lovely Linen been used for the poster of the joint exhibition of the Irish Patchwork Society and the Northern Ireland Patchwork Guild.

Fabulous Flax....Lovely Linen

This quilt portrays the labour intensive process to produce luxurious linen from the very versatile (and healthy) flax plant.

The flax plant is fabulous in a lot of ways, providing fabric as well as healthy food and products like rope, carpets and chip board. 

 I tried to capture not only the small beautifully detailed flax flowers but also the blue fields.

Cross-sections of stems with cores and surrounding fibres provided the round quilting designs used in the fore ground.

The Irish Linen Board awarded 18th century flax growers with four spinning wheels for every acre of flax grown, in an attempt to boost the linen trade by encouraging more flax to be sown. 

The background was machine-pieced using squares and rectangles of mainly Batik fabric. Batik was also used for the machine appliquéd flax flowers and linen for the border.  Free-motion quilting was done on my domestic sewing machine using the same thread in the bobbin to give a line drawing on the wrong side of the quilt.

My journey with the flax plant was a wonderful experience. It enhanced my love for linen but also raised my respect for the hardworking people behind the scenes turning it into a quality product of desire and beauty.

 The Jacaranda Guild in Pretoria (Tswane) had an interesting challenge: to create a quilt using only squares and rectangles.

My quilt, Forest, received the blue ribbon. What a wonderful day!

Quilter of the year 2011

I was chosen as quilter of the year by Jacaranda Quilter's Guild in Pretoria South Africa. What an honour.

 

My sanity

This quilt is a miniature, called 'My sanity'. This is a view from my sewing room, The Drakensberg, my cat, Esmond and of course my Bernina.