Abstract Blocks

I don't often find myself speechless but it happened yesterday when I received a phone call from Grosvenor Shows telling me my Abstract Blocks quilt (seen above)  had won the Theme section of the Great Northern Quilt Show held in Harrogate this weekend, opening this morning. The news took me completely unawares as there was so much else going on yesterday and I was expecting the call to be from a lost courier.

Not only was it wonderful to hear in itself but it also involves winning a sewing machine! All very exciting.

The theme for this year's show was: Row by Row and as you can see the quilt very neatly fits in there. It started life as separate 6" blocks originally started as a online project organized by the Make Modern Australian magazine that asks us to make these self-designed modern blocks. I think I made about 3 for that but enjoyed making these little quiltlets so much that I decided to keep going.

All the blocks are designed by me and made in a modern way. The backgrounds are machine quilted and then the shapes are raw edge appliquéd onto it using Bondaweb. I added hand stitching and beading with size 11 seed beads as shown in these detailed pictures.

 Originally I planned to make 100 but forgot in my enthusiasm that the blocks would require empty space around them to show them off to their best and had I continued with that plan my quilt would have become massive and also very heavy indeed. So common sense eventually prevailed and the quilt uses 30 blocks in total. There are a few left-overs but that's okay. I think the best ones made it into the quilt. They were machine sewn onto a machine quilted background as you see at the top of this post. It's not the best picture ever as I remember it was taken on a very windy day this spring and I had been planning to re-picture it on a better day but somehow the opportunity never seemed to come along during this summer.

The quilt has done me proud anyway and I'm over the moon (probably several planets too!).