Out of Africa quilt

I thought that I would showcase one of my older quilts, "Out of Africa" which I started circa 2000 and finished in 2007. At the moment I cannot think why it took so long to finish the quilt but probably work, a long illness and moving house a couple of times had something to do with it!

I have long had a love affair with African animals, especially lions (I'm a Leo) and elephants. As my stepdaughter Anne-Marie, loves tigers I decided to make a quilt for her which is virtually identical to my Out of Afica quilt except that hers has photos of tigers in all of the windows, where I have all sorts of different animals in the windows in my quilt. Note to self: ask Anne-Marie to take a photo of the tiger quilt that I made for her.

When I was making my Out of Africa quilt I had a large selection of fabrics to choose from (some of my friends say that I have enough fabric to open up a quilt shop but then, they are not quilters and do not realise that one can never have enough fabric ... vbg ... )! I wanted my windows to include different animals but looking at the quilt now I missed out on adding in a lion - something which I must rectify. Maybe I could applique a lion on the bottom right hand corner looking up at the rest of the animals ...

I do so love prints that remind me of Africa so I had a great time playing with fabric and fussy-cutting the elephant, giraffe and other animals. One thing I learned from another quilter years ago was to make my quilt backs related to my quilt fronts so have a look at my quilt label and the backing fabric below. Don't you just love the backing fabric?

I have decided to enter my Out of Africa quilt in the weekly quilt contest at this website: http://quiltinggallery.com/2011/05/23/weekly-quilt-contest-wildlife/ . Do go and have a look at the quilts entered in this competition. I love looking at other people's work and deciding whose quilt I am going to vote for and then I go and have some fun surfing some blogs designed by the entrants in the competition.

Challenging Ourselves challenge quilt

I am way overdue with starting this challenge quilt but ... life is like that sometimes! Now that I have gotten to the stage of sewing the binding on my Birdsville quilt I can allow myself to work on this challenge.

My aim is to make a scrappy quilt using the colours for Challenge No. 5 which were orange, blue and purple. Guess who set the colours for this challenge? Moi! I love happy colours and my favourite colours just happen to be purple, orange and blue.

I have long been interested in all things Celtic and so I decided that I wanted to include Celtic sympbols in this quilt, which is to be an armchair quilt (which I irreverently am calling a "bum" quilt because that is what it is for ... to sit my tush on)! So I have been having lots of fun checking out websites featuring Celtic symbols and have just discovered that there is a Celtic astrology which I did not know about.

I have been busy cutting out fabrics and it is exciting to be cutting into my "holy" fabrics - you know those precious fabrics that you collect for a special project... Well, this quilt is going to be a special project and I am happily going down memory lane as I cut into these fabrics, remembering where I bought them (several from my travels to New Zealand) and what other quilts I have used the fabrics in, already.

Here are some photos of my holy fabrics and the strips cut up ready to sew.