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.

Irish Tranquility

 Another confetti quilt of an Irish wood - permission given by my very talented friend, the photographer Bernadette Gibbs to use one of her wonderful pictures taken in Co. Antrim.

Continental Blue

Jacaranda Quilting Guild, in Pretoria, South Africa had a 'row by row' challenge and I attempted to make a sampler, using a different technique in each row but still creating a landscape. My Dutch friend, Delia's row of miniature houses was an inspiration. This quilt was done just before I started working in Ireland for the first time and strangely predicted how my life would take another direction, heading back to Europe, where my ancestors left centuries ago.