The Colours of Alba

My quilt The Colours of Alba returned this morning from the National Quilt Championships Sandown 2012 which took place last weekend. Even better was to discover two rozettes enclosed with it. One was because I had won the De Haviland Embroidery Award for Embellishment and the other because one of the judges Susan Briscoe had selected it as her Judge's Choice. By one of those wonderful coincidences she is who I bought the samurai fabric from (as mentioned in my previous post). She talks about her judging at Sandown in her blogpost here. 

This quilt and its companion piece(seen below at the very end of this post) were originally made as a project for a book about Scottish quilters which was to be published by the Loch Lomond Quilt Show. Sadly this project has now been shelved for a variety of reasons. I have the full instructions and will have to give some thought about what I'm going to do with these. As this was to have been a very Scottish project I let myself be inspired by the colours of the Scottish landscape for these pieces and combined those fabrics with black and white ones. The word Alba means both white in Latin but is also the Gaelic name of Scotland in ancient times. In The Colours of Alba I used commercial fabrics as this is better for projects that are going to be published. It enables those who want to make the quilt to buy their own supplies exactly like the fabrics I have used.

Here are some close-ups that show the lavish embellishments on top of the quilt. The circular patterned one (pictured above the leaves seen here) has also become my blip for today. The quilt  was finished in 2010 and time-scale wise I needed to enter it into at least one show before it became too old for me to do so. The book project dragged on for more than a year and a half so there was a distinct danger of that happening.

Fortunately I managed to get it into Sandown before time ran out. 

Above is the companion quilt Alba in Colour which uses my own hand-dyed fabrics (apart from the border that is a commercial batik) and formed part of my colour - quilts - collage exhibition last year.