A Golden Moment

Yesterday was a bit of a golden day as I was told late afternoon that my La Linea d'oro (or Golden Line) wall hanging had won the 1st Prize in the Small Wallhangings section of the Quilt UK 2016 show held in Malvern. The show will open today and is on till Sunday. That would have been great news in itself but it was also rewarded with the Award for Surface Texture and Embellishment as well as a Judges Choice. 

You can read more about this quilt here on a previous blog post so I'll just mention that this is a compilation of the 12 journal quilts I made in 2014 and each individual square is sized 8 x 8". 

Above is a detail of one of those squares. The fabrics for the wall hanging were all painted on the gelli plate. Thus far my gelli plate printed pieces have been very successful for me (one even winning a trip to New York!) so perhaps it's time to return to the gelli plate and do some more, specially as I enjoy making the fabrics very much.

First though it's time to work on the quilt you can just barely see in the background of the picture above. I'm machine quilting it at the moment and yesterday at the last meeting of the Tweeddale Textile Group in Peebles I came across just the right hand dyed machine quilting threads to do so (from Oliver Twist). It felt like the universe was on my side and that feeling continued today when a deer crossed my path during the dog walk. It was very calm, hopped over the fence and sauntered into the forest. Before it disappeared our eyes met for a brief and very special moment.

I sometimes wish I could bottle such beautiful times so that I could take a sniff of it when things aren't going quite as well!