ATC 76/100 and Circle Collage Quilt

This quilt has now returned from the British Quilt and Stitch Show where it won 1st Prize in the Contemporary Quilt category. You can read more about the quilt here:
http://friedaquilter.blogspot.com/2025/05/circle-collage-quilt.html

 

Circle Collage Quilt

This quilt was inspired by the #the100dayproject2023 where I made an A5 paper collage every day. At the end I put them together to photograph them and it struck me they would work equally well in fabric. This is the result. Quilt is machine pieced, hand quilted, hand appliquéd and hand beaded and is 42 x 79,5 inches.

It has now returned from Quilts UK held last weekend in Malvern where it won 2nd prize in the Large Wallhangings section, 1st for Art Quilts and received a Judges Choice
 

Flowers of Darkness

 

This quilt returned home recently after being exhibited at the British Quilt and Stitch Village show during 25th - 27th of April in Uttoxeter.

In the competition it won 3rd prize in the Contemporary Quilt category.

Fabric Flowers

 Following my blip on the 25th November all my 81 fabric flowers are now ready and I’m applying them to the quilt. Only 74 more to go! A good job for dismal days.

Fabric Flowers

 

Fragments

My quilt Fragments won 3rd Prize in the Large Wall hangings category of the Great Yorkshire Quilt Show held in Doncaster from today till Sunday and organised by @grosvenorshows . Some of you will recognise it as one of my 100 day projects. Took a long time to decide how to put them together! And to actually do it! #grosvenorshows #the100dayproject2021 #stencilgirl_products

 

Flowers of Darkness

There was some good news earlier in the week about this quilt that is currently hanging at the National Quilt Championships in Sandown.

It won 1st prize for Hand Quilting, 1st Prize for Hand Appliqué and 1st Prize for Embellishment. 

It was made during the dark days of lockdown here in the UK and helped me getting through it all. It’s 44.1/2 inches square

Flowers in Bloom

I had one of those wonderful telephone calls last night that I’ll probably never forget. My quilt Flowers in Bloom as seen above is the Overall Champion of Quilts UK. It also won 1st Prize in the Small Wallhangings section, the Advanced/Professional Quilter Award and finally the Embellishment Award. It came as a total surprise and left me floating on air for the time being. Amazingly this is 25 years since I first won a Champion Quilt in Perth in 1998.

The show is on from today(Thursday) till Sunday at the Three Counties show ground in Malvern. Wish I could be there!

Collage 86/100

Follow your Spirit

Detail of the quilt that returned home today after being exhibited at The Great Northern Quilt Show in Harrogate where it won 2nd prize in the Small Wallhangings section (as I mentioned in an earlier blog) and I also found out that it was nominated as being the best Art Quilt in the show. So there were two rosettes enclosed rather than one!

Follow your Spirit

My small quilt Follow your Spirit won the 2nd price in the Small Wallhangings section of the Great Northern Quilt Show presently taking place in Harrogate. It’s an interpretation of one of my mixed media art journaling pages, printed out onto fabric and extensively hand embroidered and beaded. 

Flower Carpet

This quilt came back safely from the British Quilt and Stitch village show held last weekend in Uttoxeter with the 1st prize in the contemporary quilt section. I filled in the entry form at the end of 2019 and we all know what happened next! So it’s great the show finally took place and with such a joyful result!

Collage 76/100

Miniature Colourmix Quilt

Inspired by one of my own designs done back in 2005 I made another version called Driftless in Isolation during 100 days from April to July 2020 while we were in lockdown. Making the blocks gave me plenty of time to think of other variations on the same theme and one of these ideas was to make the blocks smaller i.e. instead of 4” finished size making them 2”. This is the result. The quilt is machine pieced and quilted (using a walking foot). The fabrics are all designed and mostly made by Karen Lewis Textiles. 

You can see the Driftless in Isolation here:

http://friedaquilter.blogspot.com/2020/07/driftless-in-isolation.html?m=1

Sheep and cows

Finally a finished quilt on show! I did however do the majority of the work on it last year as part of #100days100blocks2019 and did the machine quilting at the beginning of this year. It has been waiting to be photographed and today was the day. However there was quite a bit of sun about and official pics with the big camera were only possible intermittently. But I liked the effect of the shadows of the trees on the quilt and captured a quick picture with my phone.

100days100blocks2019

Those of you who also follow me on Instagram or Facebook (thanks!) will be aware that I have been participating in a sew along project. In fact I have done this twice before, in 2016 and 2017. All projects have been hashtagged #100days100blocks and then the numbers of the respective years. This year we used a book authored by the originator of the 100days100blocks project, Angie Wilson, otherwise known as @gnomeangel and on Facebook her group is called Home of the Gnome. The book is called Kinship 100 block fusion sampler and you can order it straight from her website. I'm hoping that maybe next year when she will run the project once again using the same book it might be more easily available here in the UK.
There is an equal mix of 8 x 8" and 4 x 8" finished size blocks and the book suggests various ways to put them together but you can just make your own arrangements too as I have done.

I'm trying to reduce my fabric stash so ordered myself to not buy new fabric but use what I had already and by chance my eye fell on my collection of hand dyed fabrics. These were not dyed by me (septic tank so not a good idea!) but bought over many years from a variety of sources.

From July to earlier this month we all posted one block every day either on Angie's Facebook Group or on Instagram with the hashtag #100days100blocks2019. There are prizes involved in successfully doing this but I simply played along for the fun of it.

You can see the completed quilt top above. It hasn't been quilted yet but by some fluke I have just machine quilted a background for a totally different piece and it suddenly struck me it would work very well for this one too. No intricate quilting is required as it would just be lost in that sea of colour. I'm ready to tack this monster (60 x 80") and get to work. Wish me luck!

Wanted to picture it first though and my trusty helper was able and willing using our summerhouse as a prop.

African Dreams 69.3/8" square

Above is the quilt I made in 2017. During that year we used a different book: Tula Pink's City Sampler; 100 modern quilt blocks. I first saw this book during our visit to New York where we attended the Brooklyn Quilters Show and one of the suppliers selling during that show was Gotham Quilts who had one of the quilts made with that book hanging on their stand. In 2017 I used African fabrics combined with black sashing. All blocks for this quilt are 8 x 8" finished size. The quilt was computer guided long arm quilted by Kay Bell.
The project also ran in 2018 but sadly too much else was going on that year and I didn't play.

Garden of Earthly Delight 80.4" square

The first year Angie did the project was 2016 with Tula Pink's book. I think if I'm honest I wanted to buy a fabric collection and the project was a good way to justify the expense. I used the Garden of Earthly Delights fabric range from FreeSpirit fabrics and added an additional round of fabric around each block. This quilt too was long arm quilted by Kay, and it did win the Prize for Computer Guided Long Arm Quilting at the Scottish Quilt Championships in September 2017.

Will I participate again next year? It looks likely as I'm already eyeing up fabric collections (naughty, naughty!) and also looking at my stash. Somehow I feel there might be a bit of fabric buying coming up once I decide on colourways or find a collection of fabrics I simply can't leave in the shops.

The blocks are very simply and Angie's instructions are excellent, quite explicit and aimed at pure beginning quilters so this would make a good project for them. But if you're experienced you'll find a lot to keep you occupied with fabric choices and fuzzy cutting (like I did in the Garden of Earthly Delight and African Dreams). You can choose to machine piece (this is what I did in all 3 cases) or you can use Marti Michell Perfect Patchwork Templates (also available from Angie but also here in the UK from various suppliers). The next round will start on the 1st July 2020. It seems like a long time away but no doubt it will be upon us before we know it!

Sign up for Angie's Newsletter and follow her on Instagram to find out more. These links are simply for your convenience. I don't use affiliate links on this blog so no money comes my way. I simply love the project and wanted to share!

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!).

Flower Carpet

The quilt show season is in full swing now and last weekend it was the Quilt UK one in Malvern, organized by Grosvenor Shows Ltd. There are less quilt shows here in the UK than there used to be and I am also making less quilts than in the past. Those two things are not connected in any way,  but for me it means a happy serendipity as I have enough work to enter the shows that are still ongoing.

As you can see Flower Carpet came back with two rozettes, one for the Surface Texture and Embellishment Prize and the other for a Judges Merit. If you are a regular reader here you will probably recognize this as a follow up quilt to Spring in the City about which I wrote a blog post some weeks ago. In fact, there is a bit of a series of flower quilts coming up as I'm working on another one at the moment.

This one is machine pieced (with black and white fabrics from my stash)and quilted. The flowers (all Alison Glass designed fabric) were stamped using Hero Arts stamps in 3 different sizes, raw edge appliquéd (using Bondaweb), hand embroidered and embellished with beads and sequins. Once finished it reminded me of Oriental carpets hence the name.

Here it is with its rozettes which I will now hang up on the wall. Most people that visit us,  think I'm some very accomplished horse rider but no, quilt shows also give out rozettes as prizes just like horse events do. Mine are mainly used to bolster my confidence during times when my inner critic plays up.

Spring in the City Rozette

I recently received some lovely news in that my quilt Spring in the City won second prize in the Comtemporary Quilt Category of the British Quilt and Stitch Village show held at the Uttoxeter Race Course. The quilt itself arrived back home safely today, accompanied by a blue rozette and certificate. That meant I could take the above picture of it.

This quilt is one of a series of work inspired by our trip to New York back in March/April 2016. Although the quilts in this series all look quite differently they started life in the many photographs I took during that trip. This flower one has now sparked a whole series of it's own featuring flowers as I fell quite in love with making them. So you can expect more. Needless to say they are amazingly time consuming as the flowers are all hand embroidered and embellished. I used Hero Arts stamps for them.

You can read more about this particular quilt (which went through a tedious revision during the making process!) in a previous blog post here. All the efforts have paid off handsomely in the end!

Still stitching!

Just made a start on a new textile hanging!

Colour Waves

My quilt Colour Waves recently returned from the Great Northern Quilt Show, held in Harrogate last weekend with, as you can see below, a red rozette, signifying a Judge's Merit. Always a wonderful surprise.

This quilt came about by pure accident. I was considering recycling my very old and large computer. It had not been used for many a moon (probably years) but still was the only gadget in the house that has Electric Quilt installed. I can't install it on my new laptop as that has no CD drive and my old lap top simply has no space. So I was thinking if I really wanted to hang on to the computer, just to keep Electric Quilt handy. I opened the beast and had a look at all my saved quilt designs.

Of late I have been back to designing with a squared notebook and pencil and it works well for me (as it did before computer design took over) because it gives me time to think while I draw away. However some things are just so much more simple with software like Electric Quilt and a quilt featuring oval shapes in a variety of sizes is definitely one of those.

In the sidebar you can see the Blue Waves quilt that started off my series of oval wave shaped quilts. I had thought I was finished with them after all this time but I suddenly got the impulse to make a more modern version using my treasured collection of Tula Pink fabrics.

And here it is! The quilt is hand and machine pieced (using computer designed templates), hand and machine quilted, hand embroidered and embellished with size 11 seed beads. It measures 44.5 x 76.25" or 113 x 178cm. I think this will now definitely be my very last version in this series of quilts and the computer itself is on the way out!

Spring in the City

Finally I can share this quilt with you as I have retrieved the rozette that came home with it after the quilt had been displayed at the National Quilt Championships in Sandown, back in June. Somehow the rozette got lost on my desk and turned up again when I stopped procrastinating and picked up my Tax Return form. It's sort of ironic as this quilt too has been the subject of much procrastination which is not at all typical for me.

I started making it not too long after our trip to New York in April 2016 and it was of course inspired by that city's skyscrapers and also by the fact that there was so much spring like greenery and blossom to be admired there set off against the grey and red stonework. The fabrics I used were all from the first fabric collection of Uppercase fabrics. The background is pieced and represents the buildings and then I made the flowers separately using the same fabrics and a collection of Hero Arts stamps. They are hand embroidered and embellished. The quilt itself is machine and hand quilted. I finished the quilt in February 2017 (those flowers took forever!) and I thought it was done.

Then one night not long after that I woke up in the middle of the night with the thought that the randomly appliquéd flowers were all wrong and that they should be in line with the buildings. Once you have a thought like that, it doesn't let go even though I thought myself mad. So there was nothing else for it but to remove all the flowers again and lay them out as I had imagined. I was right in that it looked much better but sadly I didn't have enough flowers to complete the layout. I needed at least 50 more (in the end there are more than 100 flowers on this quilt).

Could I make myself produce more flowers? Yes, I could but it took the best part of last year (which to be honest was mostly taken up with settling in a small, sad traumatized dog so making flowers was a perfect way to fill in the spare minutes).

Almost a year exactly after I thought I had finished Spring in the City, I finished it again, this time for good! And the effort has paid off as you can see by the presence of that rozette which represents the Prize for Embellishment at the show. You can see some of the details of that embellishment in the above pictures. Of course I will never know if that might have happened anyway in it's previous incarnation but I do know that I am much happier with it which in the end is all that matters.