Sunday, August 31, 2008

Things of blue

On Monday I picked up my quilt from the Caroline Conlan of History in the Making. Unfortunately she doesn't have a website, but if you want her to do any work for you I can give you her number.

The quilt looks beautiful, as you can see. Caroline custom quilted it, and it look spectacular. The actual star part of the quilting was a bit of a challenge, the design we had chosen for the quilt had bits that we thought would work for all parts of the quilt, but the star bits are parallelograms, not the diamonds that were needed for the pattern to work. I think that the design Caroline came up with for this portion worked really well.
Broken Star quilt
Here is a close up of the centre of the quilt. My Mum is in love with feathers, so she kept showing me pictures of similar quilts she found that had feathers on them. Two quilting designs I don't like are feathers and stipples, so I don't think I will ever use them. I am sure feathers would look fine for this quilt, but I reckon this looks better, it is more original.
broken star quilt
Don't you just love the design in the lighter part of the quilt? It helps the fabric to stand out. I knew nothing about luminosity when I chose the fabrics for this quilt, but I managed to create a good effect anyway.

Broken star quilt
It was hard to get a pic showing the quilting on the background fabric, but it is basically three quarters of the section in the light fabric. The border quilting looks a bit like swirls and hearts.
Broken Star quilt

At the moment the quilt is still sitting on my sofa, waiting for me to cut out the binding, as well as remove the excess wadding and backing fabric from the quilt itself. The only problem with having to do that, is that I won't be able to admire it on the sofa while I am working on it.
Thanks again to Mum who offered to pay for a quilt of mine to be quilted when I bought my house, I am pleased I chose this one - if I had to pay for it to be custom quilted it would probably be sitting in a box for another 5 years.

The other scrumptious blue thing that has come into my home in the last couple of weeks is this gorgeous baby alpaca dyed by Donyale. I was inspired by QMs Clapotis that her Mum made for her, and wanted to make a similar but larger version.
gift wrapped Habu Alpaca
The photos don't do justice to the colour, but it is a really nice bluey-grey. I also bought some stitch markers, because they just looked so pretty on the website, but they look even better in real life. The lighting in the bathroom shows off the colour much better than the lounge, but these are the only pics I have.
Habu Stainless Steel Alpaca
Speaking of bathrooms, better go do some cleaning before I go out for coffee.

6 comments:

Michelle said...

The quilt looks spectacular! Caroline did such a great job. I agree with you - I'm not big on feathers either. The design you chose was lovely.

Have fun with the baby alpaca!

Anonymous said...

The quilt is beautiful!

I'm a big fan of the baby alpaca, it looks so soft and warm, and the colour's lovely. Might have to mosey on over to Donayle's store and pick up something for myself.

Bells said...

fabulous quilt! I admire that skill so much.

And Donni's stuff is beautiful. Good choice!

Ann said...

The quilt is fantastic & I really admire people like you who can sew as I can't. I have posted the pattern for the toe-up Olympian socks on my blog. Thanks for visiting my blog.

aykayem said...

I love that quilting design!
... I also love that blue/green paisly/whatever fabric you used in the quilt ...

Jo said...

Wow, I love the quilt and the alpaca wool, very pretty.