Aotearoa quilters flight challenge

 

I'm In Rotorua where Aotearoa Quilters exhibition , The Great New Zealand Quilt Show is on at the events Centre until tomorrow.

My quilt was accepted as one of 20 quilts in the Flight Challenge exhibition. I thought I would I might talk about how this quilt was made and how accidents change how a quilt ends up.

The green fabric was hand painted and screen printed by me many years ago. This was the last bit left and it wasn't really big enough so is pieced together from scraps. The join is under the point of the tablecloth. The tablecloth was in my airing cupboard so I either found it at an op shop or it's a family heirloom ( oops!)

I took a photo of a willow pattern plate I own, the willow pattern design is hundreds of years old so I felt it would be long out of copyright and therefore ok to use. I reversed the image and had it transferred onto the centre of the tablecloth but didn't get the plate at the right angle so had to cut it out and reapplique it into the middle. Unfortunately that meant that the hole in the centre was bigger than the plate being appliquéd so the doily under the plate hides the gap.

I machine quilted the top before adding the sparrows. I used a feather quilting stencil to mark the pattern for the plate shapes, I'd never tried to follow a drawn pattern using machine quilting before. Usually I just machine quilt freestyle.

I threw bits of lamington ( a New Zealand style of coconut and jelly covered sponge cake) and bread on the driveway and took loads of photos of sparrows using a telephoto lens by hiding in my garage with the roller door nearly closed. It's really hard to take photos of sparrows- they move so fast and having 2 cats probably makes them jittery.

I used the photos to draw sparrows and then made them In fabric and machine embroidered on top before attaching them

To the quilt.

Finally I added watch parts to the sparrows to give them a Steam Punk look. I was challenged to use the watch parts by Debby Williams. I'm

Looking forwarded to seeing what she does with her set.

Anyway that's the story of the steampunk sparrows quilt.