"Seasons Of Sneezes" - A Place Getting Piece

My creative stitching group has been running a challenge "Changing of the Seasons". Two of the girls have done all the hard work in orgainizing it, and it was open to all members of the Embroiderer's Guild. Members of the group entered as well as other members of  the Guild, and entries came in from as far as Victoria and Queensland. Last Sunday was the day of presentations, and I was astounded to recieve a third placing.

My piece, "Seasons of Sneezes", is a depiction of my allergies that change as the seasons change. In winter my skin goes dry, no matter how much moisturiser I use. As the season changes to spring, my nose will start to run, my eyes will get itchy and I will be sneezing with hayfever as the flowers of spring emerge.

The balckwork pattern is my own, developed from a pic of a snowflake I found, and stitched with a combination of variegated and blended threads. The reticella section is also my own design, developed from a drawing I did of a flower.

Originally the piece was going on a book cover, but time was short so it is just mounted it on core board with a hanging string at the back. It will be a while before it comes home, but when it does I may still change it to a book cover.

All the pieces are currently on display at the Concord library her in Sydney.

Piecing for Charity

My local ASG Sewing Group, the Georges Hall Sew'n'Sews, is sewing for charity. Every meeting, one of our members brings along her huge bag of fabric scraps and  we try to put together fabrics to turn into quilts. Some of the hard work has already been done, where embroidererd squares and possible fabrics to go with them have been bagged together. I brought two of these bags home with me last month to see what I could create from them.

In the first bag were some lovely digitized machine embroidered squares, with some very girly handbags and shoes. All stitched onto pink polycotton fabric.

In the bag with the embroidered squares were pieces of other fabrcs, some large, some small, some prints, some plain. All were off cuts, some with odd shaped pieces already cut from them.

So, what to do with it all? How to put it all together?

I started with borders around the embroidered squares, then added some sashings, a fine floral border to tie them all together, then a wide pieced border of plain pink with a pink and white check. Overall effect, not bad. The quilt still needs to be layered with batting & backing, then quilted & bound, but that will happen sometime in the future. I am sure some little girl somewhere will be happy to cuddle up to this once it is finished. Now on to working out what to do with the second package I have.

Quilting For Charity

My new sewing group is on the road again, sewing quilts for charity. This one was embroidered and  pieced by one lady from donated and cut squares , and I offered to quilt and bind it. It is now finished & ready to be donated to a deserving cause.

Sharing the work load of a project like this is interesting. Some of the squares were cut on bias and  some of the strips were not cut straight. Therefore the quilt top is pulling in all kinds of directions because the different grains are fighting against each other. We knew this from the beginning, but we figured it was going to be loved & dragged around for comfort by some grateful child so we continued. The quilting was fun because of all the grain changes, but I still managed, and the bind may not be quite straight, but we figure it will be loved anyway. I have two more to do, both need to be pieced, so they are next on my agenda.

I might add here that our new sewing group is going great guns. We have 16 members on our books, ranging from beginner sewers to experienced dressmakers, and we have plenty of room for more. So if anyone would like to come and join us, all info is on the Australian Sewing Guild website. Just look under the "groups" tab, then click the drop-down arrow in the "select a group" section. Scroll down and select the Georges Hall Sew'n'Sews, then click the "select a group" button. This will give you meeting times, dates, a contact, and also a map of how to find us. We'd love for some new members to join us.