Spoilt Dog Quilts: January 2013

This post is way way overdue. I blame all the business of November - Remembrance Day and poppy selling for our local Returned Services League (RSL) then the madness of December and Christmas parties galore.

Here finally is my very first Aussie Hero Quilt, made for a sailor on the HMAS ANZAC. I can't reveal his name, for obvious reasons, but I do hope that he enjoyed the quilt I made for him, below. The Aussie Hero Quilt Friends make quilts and laundry bags to send to our wonderful troops overseas as well as to Wounded Warriors. With my husband a Vietnam Veteran, I just had to make a quilt. Now that I have my first Aussie Hero quilt "under my belt" I am no long an AH "virgin". I had been hoping to make another quilt by the end of this month but fate has intervened. I'm now planning on making some blocks to be sent south to be made up in to more Aussie Hero quilts, rather than attempting another one by myself, at least for the next month or two. Here's the Aussie Hero quilt blog address if anyone wants to pop over and have a look: http://aussieheroquilts.blogspot.com.au/ .

The pieced blocks are actually orphan blocks from a quilt that I made for my dear mother-in-law Iris. She loved the Australian food fabric in the centre of the log cabin blocks and so I made a quilt for her many years ago. I had intended to make an apron or some such thing with the leftover blocks but when was tidying my sewing room (something that doesn't often happen, sad to say) I came across these leftover blocks and thought that "my" allotted sailor would appreciate the blocks even more than I would like an apron made with them.

Thank-you so much to Christine and Madame Samm for hosting this blog hop at http://www.quiltmonstercloset.com/2013/01/dare-to-dresden-schedule.html and at http://www.sewwequilt.com/. As soon as I heard about, I was “in like Flynn”! Here is my quilt, aptly titled “I really really don’t like Dresdens!”. Of course, there is a story behind that! Oh and that’s my gorgeous husband poking out from behind the quilt in the photo below. The quilt was made in 1998 or 1999. Back then I didn’t even know to date my quilts.

I had been quilting for about 6 years before I took a sampler class series of classes. When I took my very first quilt class, it was 1992 and I did a log cabin class when I was on school holidays down in Brisbane (our capital city, about 1 000km east of the small country town where my DH (dear husband) and I were living. Living in remote Outback country towns as we were then, there weren’t any stores other than a small general store, never mind a fabric store (the closest fabric store was something like 1 200 km away (745 miles) so I had no access to classes whatsoever. I learned more about patchwork and quilting then by what I call osmosis – meaning that I read all the patchwork magazines that I could subscribe to and by teaching myself. There was no Internet back then, not in small isolated country towns at least.

My husband and I moved east closer to the coast and then we were finally close enough to where I could access patchwork classes whilst still living in small rural country towns albeit not so isolated as Wyandra and Birdsville (on the edge of the Simpson Desert). Having not really learned the very basics of patchwork and quilting, I decided to go along to a Sampler quilt series of classes.

One block that I really didn’t like, to the point of hating it, was the Dresden Plate block. I have no idea why I disliked it so strongly but I tried every excuse “in the book” to get out of going to that particular lesson. Being a teacher, I kept telling myself that wasn’t the attitude to have but I still didn’t want to go. What made me finally give in was DH – he really liked this block, so of course I went along. I really didn’t have much choice to make that block for my sampler quilt as this quilt became our (belated) wedding quilt. The sampler quilt echoed the colours of my wedding bouquet which were purple, yellow and white.

Once I made this block though, I fell in love with the Dresden Plate block and so, a couple of months after making my Wedding Quilt I made the quilt above.

As for our Wedding Quilt, I have included a photo of it below. By the time I made the sampler quilt, we had been married for 7 years but I had not long before that heard about wedding quilts.

My favourite colour is purple - who would have guessed? As a teenager I had a crush on Donny Osmond and his favourite colour was purple. I also am reknowned for my love of bright colours hence the vivacity of the colours in this quilt and many of my other quilts. Luckily for me, DH also loves purple and bright colours.

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Friday, January 25, 2013

No longer an Aussie Hero quilt "virgin"

Thursday, January 24, 2013

Dare to Dresden blg hop

Australian Women's Blog Directoy