Well another month has disappeared and not as I had hoped! I envisaged spending lots of time walking in lovely sunny alpine pastures admiring the flowers only it has been wet and the high areas still have too much snow… I have been working though and not all of it on textiles unfortunately but at least I have been earning.

I spent a lot of time this month working on a group project; 6 of us who did our City and Guilds together have just finished our second round robin quilt, the quilt is handed on between us for each person to continue the work ‘blind’. It is a really good exercise and one which is also extremely nerve-wracking. Once that was done I got in with my niece’s wedding quilt, the 540 pieces are now all stitched together and quilting began last night.

After working on my Fifteen by Fifteen piece on the subject of circles I did a second and there is a third waiting in the side-lines. I have been encouraged on several fronts to try and work smaller and in a series to try and create a more homogenous body of work. The circles idea came from a photo I took in India which had a back-drop of brick circles.

The centre piece also had circles on it and I tried to recreate the idea of two different layers, the back ground I have already shown but here is the finished piece.

I then went of to play further by making a larger print of the circles and printed the two together making the foreground a little transparent.

watch this space for further developments.

I also completed a piece for a local group we had a handkerchief from China with a flowery motif on it which we had to incorporate in to our work, I traced the motif to reproduce it to form a tree. The trunk was  made using flour paste and Chinese ink before I painted the background. The fence is some decorative ribbon cut in strips and painted with acrylic paint. I played around by quilting the piece quite tightly to create movement, to get the effect that I wanted I actually worked at 90° to what one might expect, so the sky is actually quilted vertically .

The journal quilt for June again used ideas from India, this time I used a photograph of wrought iron railings that I took in Pushkar.

I redrew the design to make it straighter then cut out the pattern using a flowery sari silk scrap behind and tried to create the shadow by using a freezer paper stencil.

I have so many ideas I want to try out but now I am concentrating on preparing my classes for Birmingham, Maastricht and Vendée Quilt so that I have no last minute panics! The weather is now more seasonal and I want to get out and enjoy the countryside and of course there is the wedding quilt to quilt….

This is one of the classes that I a teaching at Vendée Quilt…