Inspirations

 I am inspired by muted colours in the countryside. At Duxford in March I bought a Vendulka Batais pattern of alliums and have used Lecien taupe fabrics as the background. These seem like gold dust now and I cannot find them on the internet at all. 

I have also finished a quilt from Purrfect Patchwork which includes lovely cats. Not sure who of my cat-loving friends to give it to! Here it is,

Good news

General view 

 Good news. My old Rosemary Rabbit Quilts website is being remade by my niece’s partner, well versed in website design. All very exciting, but I now have the job of trawling through all my quilts and putting them into proper folders for him. Watch this space for that. I hope it will be up and running in a few weeks’ time. 

Meantime and very overdue is this blog. Last May Icknield Quilters held their Pearl Anniversary exhibition in Letchworth. Very well attended and lovely to be back in a local show again after all these months. We made some profit for two local charities, Feed Up Warm Up, for local homeless people, and the charity for bereaved children. Both splendid charities.

Here are some lovely quilts from our show!

Still here!

Az

My temperature quilt for 2021. I made 2 x 1 inch pieces indicating type of weather and max temperature for each day of each month. Great fun to do!

 I realise I haven’t posted anything since 2020. Covid brain set in many months ago obviously but so far no one in our family has actually had it. We are quadruple jabbed and thankful for it. 

What has happened over the two years is a lot of sewing, wonderful Zoom talks from people hundreds or thousands miles away, whom we could never have listened to face to face because of expense. The Quilters Guild were great in promoting this, and our local groups got together to pay for these more prominent and wonderful teachers. We listened to Paula Nadelstern, Alicia Merritt and others in awe of their delightful works of art.

Meantime, back on the ranch, I did a temperature quilt for 2021, and finished off some big and small UFOs. I also managed to go on some retreats after the initial lockdown, just fitted in neatly between following ones! I am due to go to Suffolk later in July to work for four days on more UFOs and new designs, and meet up with my favourite teacher, Lynne Edwards, for lunch too. I have been watching her videos regularly, which she started up during Covid as she couldn’t use her village hall. They have been inspirational as usual. Contact her if you want to join in!

Also in May this year our local group, Icknield quilters, held their pearl anniversary exhibition for our 30th year of meeting. It was a great day and much admired for the work in show. We managed to get Three Counties Radio to come and interview our Chair, Sue Rainbow, while on their Saturday Treasure Hunt. We were their first port of call so managed a big puff of advertising! Sadly no Anneka Rice appeared!

Here are some items finished:

Happy Sewing!

Nightmare continues

The Quilters Guild is still recommending that large meetings do not go ahead yet, so that means my two local groups are not gathering for some time yet. It is all very sad, but zooming has proved a real lifeline for many of us. All the QG Region 7 meetings have been cancelled but what happens to their retreat is unknown at the moment.

The UFOs are getting fewer, but more projects are coming down the line all the time!  I started with 6 UFOs this year, which went up to over 20 during lockdown, but is now down to a respectable 13 and many of those are small. Two groups of us have worked towards raffle quilts for later this or early next year. The Dresden Plate shown earlier is for Macmillan and the latest one, quilted by 12 of Mimram Quilters members, is for a charity nominated by the group at their exhibition, now going ahead we hope next year. Some of the quilters were novice at the hand quilting and I was really pleased with their results and hope to have converted some to doing more.

The grey Ohio Star quilt is a bed runner for a friend.

Carry on quilting

My groups are still whatsapping and quilting.

Many are making small UFOs which are delightful. Mine tend to be bigger like this Dresden Plate for a raffle for Macmillan coffee morning in September (will it be virtual coffee I wonder?) so I spend hours hand quilting them at the end. My niece obviously spent hours during lockdown, apart from home schooling, studying, cooking and cleaning and goodness knows what else, colouring in this wonderful heart which was printed in the papers for the NHS. I love it.

Well, what a nightmare except for quilters of course. A sad but timely excuse to get our heads down and quilt! We have started up quite a few different WhatsApp, Zoom, and email groups to keep ourselves sane by having chats, and we are lucky being in a village where we can still chat to neighbours over a garden hedge, lots of feet away from each other.
Our monthly patchwork groups are having virtual show and tells and we are setting challenges as we all have enough fabric anyway to last us years if necessary!
Something I have been working on.

 The middle of a lovely whole cloth quilt already marked up bought from a friend’s sale of a deceased patch worker. She raised over £1000 for children’s air ambulance. Well done Sue.

Don’t miss this exhibition

We have just visited the lovely exhibition at Milton Keynes Museum (in the silver building at the back, and free on Tuesdays). Lots of such interesting exhibits, beautifully mounted, particularly the associated exhibits on weaving with willow, silk, cotton, spinning wheels including Gandhi’s little home spinning wheel (where did they get that from, they are really difficult to find!). The textiles were wonderful. Both modern by local contemporary quilters and ancient from places such as India, Vietnam etc. Lovely ladies at hand to chat too.