Embroidered Fish - My Oldest UFO

Hi everyone.
Hope you have all had a good week.
I've been busy working away on quilts for my display.  I've given myself until December to get everything ready.  15 pieces is quite a lot, especially when you sit down and make a list.  I am being really picky with what I put in.
This week I decided to finally do something with this lot...

I hand embroidered these tropical fish 25 years ago!!!  Originally they were part of one large panel and for some reason that I can't remember, I cut it up into 3 pieces, perhaps I thought they had a better chance of getting finished if they were smaller.   It didn't happen.
I'd been thinking for a while to incorporate them into a wall hanging and at the quilt show, I got a beautiful piece of hand dyed fabric for the backing.
Here are some close ups of the fish:

I'm fusing bondaweb to the back of the fish, then cutting them out close to the stitching.
It's a bit nerve wracking doing that part, I need to leave enough to stitch to the backing.

I have all the fish done now and my underwater scene is set.  Got to get on with stitching it today.

Apologies for not doing the post on the Scottish Quilt show, I will try to get round to it.  In the meantime if you'd like to see the winner of the themed category (Kay Bell) and the best in show , then head over to Kay's blog, The Borderline Quilter.

Enjoy your weekend and thanks for visiting.

Rhianon. :)

Scottish Quilt Championships 2013

It's the Scottish Quilt Championships this weekend over in Edinburgh.

I'm super excited to tell you that my Enchanted Garden quilt took 1st place for machine quilting and also a judges merit.

My Vikings wall hanging and the Tropical wall hanging each got a judges merit.

Had a brilliant day, meeting friends, shopping and enjoying the quilts on display.
I'm going back on Sunday and hope to get lots of photos of the quilts to show you in my next post.  It was a good show this year and I thoroughly enjoyed it..

Rhianon :)

Grandmothers Fan quilt - Finished!

Hello everyone

This week I got the fan quilt finished. So here are some pics

 It is single bed sized and this it on my daughter's bed

I decided not to scallop the edges and instead just rounded off the the corners.  I used a turquoise batik for the binding.

                                                  This is it laid out on my bed.

For the rest of the week I've been working on the hummingbirds wall hanging.  It's nearly done but more about that in my next post.
Enjoy your weekend.
Rhianon.

A Practice Quilt - on the Frame

Hi everyone.
This week I finally got to play on my frame.  This is a top I pieced ages ago using Suzanne McNeill's 10 minute block.

As I am still a novice on the frame, I used a 4oz poly wadding, don't want to use up all my good Hobbs.  I'm still getting used to the feel of the machine and actually think my frame needs to be raised a bit.  My back was aching after a while and I felt I was stooping to see what I was doing.

 I found these clam shells quite easy to do and think they look ok.  I don't have a stitch regulator  and I really want one as I think it would definitely help with control.  Sometimes you need to sew fast and sometimes not so fast.  At the moment it is just start and stop - I find it very distracting having to take my eyes off the sewing to turn the dial to speed up or slow down.  This is resulting in some wonky stitches. Not good.

 So this is my very first quilt worked on my frame.  Already I have learned a lot.  Like the importance of stitch ditching - something I didn't really bother with when quilting on the table top.  I need to get a ruler - my next question is : will the base of my machine be wide enough to rest the ruler on ?   I know longarm machines have a plate attachment available but I can't find anything for my Janome 1600p.
The ruler is not that expensive so I think I will go ahead and try anyway..

                                   A bit of messy thread build up in the spine of these feathers.

                                                          These ones are a bit neater.

                    You can see the need to stitch in the ditch to define the squares in this photo.

                                                                         Back.

 Another problem I encountered was not leaving enough backing to give the machine room to quilt right up to the edges.  Lesson learned. Some side leaders would have solved that problem.

Just adding the binding to this now and looking forward to my next quilt.  Today I am quilting my hummingbird wall hanging - so it should be a good day!
Enjoy your weekend!
Rhianon :)