Wednesday, July 16, 2014

Let's Get Acquainted

Welcome to my stop on Plum and June's Let's Get Acquainted Blog Hop for 2014. Before I start chatting away, a huge thanks to Beth for all she's done to organise the blog hop. It's been a huge amount of work and we all appreciate it!


Beth suggested we show off a few of our favourite quilts, which is hard when you've been quilting as long as I have. Fortunately I'm not as prolific as some quiltmakers, and don't have hundreds of quilts under my belt. Some of these have been featured elsewhere on my blog, others haven't.


I made this baby quilt last year for my niece, who's about to turn one. It's my own design and I love the contrast between the pinks and greys. 


This is one of my son's quilts, made around 2011. He picked the colour scheme and design himself, using the border and sashing fabric for inspiration. 



I love paper piecing and this wall hanging was pieced for my daughter - a huge Hunger Games fan. The piecing was quite tricky, but the simple colour scheme certainly helped. 


This is my daughter's latest quilt, a faux Drunkards Path. I hand quilted this in perle cotton, which took forever and then some. I'm not sure that I should be proud or embarrassed that I had 100 different fabrics to use for the top in my stash....


My Polaroid Rainbows started as a polaroid block swap and ended up as an I Spy quilt that graces my younger daughter's wall. This is a super bright and cheerful quilt. 


Continuing the rainbow theme is my recently finished Rainbow in the Clouds. This is one of my first forays into improv piecing and was heaps of fun. I'm not sure why I still have so many scraps though. 

Now you've seen some of my quilts, here's a little about me.


 I'm a mum of three awesome kids, and wife to a very patient husband who supports my quilting habit. We've got two dogs (his) and two cats (mine). I'm a crazy cat lady in the making, except hubby won't let me get any more cats. My boys are very good at supervising everything quilty.


I live on the east coast of Australia, in a beach resort town half way between Sydney and Brisbane - there are worse places in the world you can live! I grew up in Sydney but we relocated to hubby's hometown when the kids were born to bring them up in a smaller town.

I've been quilting for the best part of 20 years (gosh that makes me sound OLD!!). My grandmother was an expert seamstress, my mother always sewed clothing, so it 's definitely in my genes. My interest in quilting came during high school, my best friend's mum is a quilter and she was a huge influence and great mentor when I was a beginner quilter.

I am completely self-taught, and always learning new things. I totally believe you're never too old or experienced to extend your quilting skills. These days I identify most with the modern quilting movement, though not everything I do is super modern.

I have a healthy addiction to fabric, a million ideas in my head and on scraps of paper and a huge pile of unfinished projects. I like to completely finish my projects myself, but I have a bad case of Quilters ADHD and often lose interest. But my mantra is to Quilt With No Guilt, so I'll get to them all eventually. I discovered English Paper Piecing this year and hand sewing is my therapy - I am amazed at how relaxing it is!

My day job is an assistant in a preschool, which is as tiring as it sounds. But my training was in journalism and I worked in magazines before children. I basically gave that up with the city life when the kids were born, though I kept my hand in doing freelance writing for craft and decorating magazines.

In exciting news, I've just embarked on a brand new quilting related venture with some dear quilty friends. I'm putting my journalism background to good use and I'm now the editor of Australia's very first modern-quilting magazine - Make Modern. Good news is we're publishing in the digital format so we'll be easily available worldwide. I am so excited about this new chapter of my life, even if it might encroach on my sewing time.


My blogging tip has been said before, but it's so true - be true to yourself. Develop your own voice, share what you love, don't stress if you're not churning out projects every other week. It's your own little bit of cyber space so make it your OWN. If people love it, they'll hang around, if they don't then it's their loss anyway.

My quilting tip is to look at your sewing machine and see if you can use it without the foot pedal. I only discovered this was a feature on my Brother machine earlier this year and I decided to try it out for Free Motion Quilting. Revolutionary. Seriously, not having to worry about what my foot is doing and coordinating the speed of my hands and my feet makes FMQing so much easier and has improved the consistency of my stitches too. I don't think it would help much with regular piecing, but for FMQ, I urge you to give it a go. If your machine has separate plugs for the power supply and foot pedal, pull out the foot pedal one and see if one of the buttons lights up as a stop/go button, then have a play around with it.

My Favourite Things:
My dream vacation spot is the USA. I want to visit all of it, but Nashville and a night at the Opry is on my bucket list. One day....
My favourite genre of fiction is romance. I don't get to read as much as I'd like, but when I do I like a light hearted read that's like comfort food. I also read a fair bit of non-fiction.
My favourite TV shows are Nashville (see dream vacation spot), and the Big Bang Theory. Those are the only two shows I watch, but my husband makes up for it by watching plenty.

To finish, I have a tricky question for you - what does modern quilting mean to you? I love modern quilting and I'm proud to call myself a modern quilter... but gosh it's hard to define. If you're interested, I've talked about it over at the Make Modern blog here.


Thanks so much for stopping in and visiting me over here at Where Jane Creates, it'd be great if you can share the love and visit the other hoppers for today:


Monday, July 14, 2014

Free Project on Make Modern Blog


Fancy a little rainbow colour wheel fabulousness in your life? We've got a free project for making your own embroidery hoop colour wheel over on the Make Modern magazine blog right now. You can also pop back a post and find out what modern quilting means to me.

Enjoy!



Wednesday, July 9, 2014

Possum Magic Round One

As you may know, I'm involved in Plum and June's fabulous Let's Get Acquainted Blog Hop (I'll be posting next week for the final round of the hop).

Today is the third round, and I encourage you to go and visit all the amazing bloggers who will be wowing us with their quilts and quilting stories today. The full linky list is at the bottom of this post.

I'm most excited that my fellow Possum Magic girls Jo and Wendy will be posting today. While everything to come out of this blog hop has been fantastic, I am most excited to have met my new Possum Magic friends through it.

We've all finished our first round of Possum Magic, and Alice wrote a great post featuring all our centre blocks. Go check out our awesomeness, I'll wait...

I received Carla's amazing leaf block in the mail the other week and the pressure was ON to add to it. I had a plan A before I actually saw the block... and thankfully that worked because there was no plan B.


I loved the greens and low volumes Carla used in the centre block, so I decided to stick with that colour scheme for now. I wanted to give the impression of something fading out, like a leaf dying, so I actually stitched five borders to get that effect.

The first border used a scrap Carla had provided from the original block - we decided we'd add scraps with each round to bring some cohesiveness to the entire quilt top. I used this green to bring the block up to 16 inches, and I also used some of the dot fabrics Carla included in my mix of low volumes.


For borders two through five, I decreased the amount of green in each border until I got to an all low-volume border.

I think it looks effective... gosh I hope she likes it!!



Don't forget to pop round and say hi to my Let's Get Acquainted buddies!

Janet @ Simply Pieced
Kristyn @ Melon Patch Quilts
Rachel @ Quiltineering
Shauna @ Shauna's World
Pam @ Sewing Wilde
Lin @ Lin's Quilts
Cheryl @ Texas Quilting Gal 
Jenn @ Sew Crafty Jenn
Heather @ QA Creations 


Thursday, July 3, 2014

Make Modern - AKA Why it's been so quiet around here....

I'd love to tell you that this blog has been a bit quiet of late because I've been busily finishing quilt after quilt, but nobody would believe that anyway.

The real reason is even more exciting than that.

I've been working double shifts with a couple of my quilting besties, Kristy and Lara on a VERY EXCITING NEW business venture (yes, I'm shouting).


I am so thrilled to introduce my new baby, Make Modern, a brand new digital quilting magazine for modern quilters.  We're going to be publishing every two months, and we're accepting submissions from quilters all over the world.


Our big focus is on community, because that's what we believe the modern quilting world is all about. We want to hear from our readers, we want to showcase lots of amazing quilters and bloggers and makers and designers... not just the big names. We want to focus on the fun, guilt free aspect of quilting, because try as we might we can't take ourselves too seriously.

Each issue will be a mixture of projects, meeting amazing quilters and learning new skills, because you're never too old or experienced to grow and learn.

It's going to be busy, maybe a little crazy, there's so much to do, but it's so freaking awesome and I am so excited it's actually happening! After almost 20 years in and out of magazine publishing, including many years in the craft niche, I am really excited to be doing something that I am instrumental in putting together.

Right now, you can visit our website and you can also like us on Facebook  too.
Come and check us out, and Make Modern!