Good news!

After the sad posting on Tuesday I have some great news today!!!
I got a letter yesterday... It said:

Dear Linda

We are pleased to inform you that your quilt “MAGnificence” has been selected by our jurors Helen Sanderson, curator/multi-media artist and Dianne Firth, internationally renowned art quilter, to be part of the STATE of the ART quilt 10 touring exhibition. From the 32 entries received, our jurors have selected 25.

STATE of the ART quilt 10 will be on display at the Australasian Quilt Convention, Melbourne April 29- May 2 and the Textile Art Festival, Brisbane June 25 -27, 2010.

YAAAYYYYY!!!!

I explicitly asked if I could put a photo of the quilt on my blog and that was not a problem. So here it is! I really think think this is the best quilt I have made so far. This is the information about the quilt and the artist statement:

Quilt size: 65x76 cm
Materials used: Hand dyed fabric, paint, paintstiks, thread
Techniques used: Screen printing, stenciling with paintstiks, machine and hand quilting
Artist’s statement: My son recently joined a boys' gymnastics club. Watching the senior members of his club at their training inspired me to make this quilt. I have depicted the six events in men's artistic gymnastics (MAG): still rings, floor exercise, pommel horse, parallel bars, vault and high bars, and tried to capture the movement, grace and sheer power of the gymnasts.

Some other good news this week was that the December issue of Down Under Quilts came out, which has my selvedge quilt, some selvedge items and, most importantly, my selvedge bag project in it! Also very exciting. Here are a few photos (click to see them bigger)






















I'm off to work now - but I just had to share this with you!

Mama

Twenty three years ago on this day, December 1st 1986, my mother died. She was 44 years old and I was 17. It makes me sad that I have already lived much longer without her than with her. I so wish she could have met my husband and my children...

This is my favourite photo of her, me and my grandmother (her mother). It was made on my third birthday. My father left us before I was born and I was raised by these two women. My mother had a progressive disease and when my grandmother died (when I was 15) she moved to a nursing home. I lived with two foster families until I finished high school and started university in another city. Those years were not the best of my life, but I have fond memories of the first 15 years. As you can see they loved me very much.

Busy

I haven't done any sewing in the last week, as I have been (and still am) very busy turning our emigration blog into a book, using this website. It's a lot of work but it will be great to have the whole story of going to and living in Brissy in a book!

I did some fabric dyeing today though: two series of FQs in five gradations (yellow and purple) and two half metre pieces (purple and green).

International Art

Yesterday I received these beautiful cards from Andrea in Paris - so I did get some international art after all! Thanks Andrea, I love them.

Meanwhile Gunnel in Sweden has received my mandala and told me she really likes it (see her comment on the previous post). This international art exchange really is great fun. (let me know if you would like to join and I'll send you the email! I still haven't found 6 participants.)

The Dutch Quilters Guild has put an interview with me on its website - you can read it here. Well, it's in Dutch so most of you will probably not be able to read it... but you can have a look at my quilts. They look very nice there, if I say so myself!

International Art Exchange

Last week I got an email from Emmy in the Netherlands, inviting me to an International Art Exchange. It was a chain letter in a nice form (or so I thought), asking me to send a small work of art ('a little drawing, a print, card, small stitched item, a comic or an art zine, or whatever you think is a good idea') to the number one on the list (the sender was number two), and to send the email on to six other artists. In that email you should of course make the original sender number one and put yourself as number two.

I thought it was a nice idea and made the mandala above for the number one in my email, a lady in Sweden (I'll reveal her name when she has received it. I'm quite sure she doesn't read this blog though). I used the mandala stencil from the book I bought at the Queensland Quilt Show, a silver Paintstik and some handdyed fabric, fast-2-fuse and a blue metallic thread. The diametre is about 15cm.

I sent the email to six of my online art quilt friends/acquaintances. Four of them replied that they were too busy, the other two did not reply. I sent it to six others - four replied that they were too busy, one said she would join in (yay!), one didn't reply... I sent it to five more persons - two replied that they were too busy, the others did not reply...

I guess I may not receive anything, but I had fun making this little work of art and just hope that the recipient will like it too!

Giveaway at Dye Candy

Fellow AQATW member Chris has another giveaway at her blogs Dye Candy and Greetings from the Shady Grove. If you leave a comment on these blogs before Sunday 6 pm (her time) you have a chance to win some of her lovely handdyed fabric!

Small quilting projects

Last week I received the Quilting Daily email, with a link to the 5 Small Quilting Projects from Quilting Arts. Just the sort of thing I felt like doing - small projects that can be finished in one evening, with scraps of my favourite fabrics. I started by making the Pencil Roll:



For the pencil pockets I used my own handdyed fabrics. Doesn't it look gorgeous!



Then I made the Magical Card case, with a piece of painted and stamped fabric.



When you pull the ribbon, the business cards pop up! Too cool.



And finally I made a Luggage Tag - something I have been wanting to make since our trip to the Netherlands in June. I'll have one now when we fly to Melbourne in January!



DH liked it so much that he asked me to make one for him as well, in a more masculine fabric. I offered him a tractor fabric but that wasn't wat he had in mind! Haha. I probably have some sailing boat fabric scraps somewhere...

Colours of Africa

I finished the three quilts I started last weekend at the retreat for Colours of Africa (read their blog here). I only meant to make the elephants in black on a red background, but of course after cutting them out I had the reverse as well and I actually prefer the quilt with the red elephants!



The beads on this quilt are from a necklace I bought in Kenya when I was there in 2002 with my husband (boyfriend at the time). I love it but never wear it; it's just not my style. But the beads go very well with this quilt, I think.

Quilt retreat at Lake Moogerah

Last weekend I was at a quilt retreat near Lake Moogerah. I had a wonderful time (it is great not to have to cook for a whole weekend!) and have been very productive. On Friday evening I finally put together the top of the play quilt for Robbie, with the blocks I got for my birthday two (!) years ago:



On the green fabric in the centre I am going to applique some roads for Robbie to ride his cars on. I think I will use a world map panel for the back, as I did with Hugo and Ernst's quilts - so he can see where we live now (in Australia) and where we are from (the Netherlands).

On Saturday I made a bag with the fabric I bought in the Netherlands:



When the bag was finished I worked on three small quilts for Colours of Africa, a Belgian/Dutch initiative to raise funds for an early childhood centre in South Africa. I will show them here when they are finished, which should be later this week.

There were about 25 ladies at the retreat - and this one male visitor!



It was a great weekend - thanks Julie for organizing it! I'm already looking forward to next year's retreat.

Gone reading

Nothing new to show you today - I haven't done any sewing or quilting in the last week. My in-laws gave me a belated birthday present: the first book in the Millennium trilogy. So I have been reading every free moment and once I finished the book I went off and bought the second one! I'm halfway through that one now and have ordered the third book already...

I love reading, always have, and still read about one book a week, now mostly on the train to and from work, 3 days a week. I read a lot of thrillers (Val McDermid, Minette Walters and Robert Goddard are a few of my favourite writers) and I must say that these books by Stieg Larsson are among the best I have ever read. Highly recommended!

On a quilty note; this weekend I am going to a quilting retreat at Lake Moogerah with Rens. Looking forward to that very much! (I was at that same retreat 2 years ago) I don't know yet what I will work on there - I feel like doing a more traditional quilt after recently finishing a few art quilts. Maybe a quilt for Robbie, he really should have a bigger one...

Kids stuff

In between quilts I am doing some small fun stuff. I made this library bag for Ernst using the Spoonflower swatch made with his Grameldon drawing. He'll get it on his 5th birthday this Saturday. And I decorated t-shirts for him and Hugo using stencils from the book I showed you in the last posting:





The gymnasts quilt is finished, it's called MAGnificence (MAG = Men's Artistic Gymnastics). I'm trying to enter it online in the State of the Art Quilt 2010 exhibition, but the website it not cooperating...

Queensland Quilt Show

I managed to go to the Queensland Quilt Show yesterday and see my quilt hanging there! Compared to some of the other quilts at the show I thought it wasn't very good - I still have a long way to go... But it was nice to be there, meet some people, and, of course, do some shopping!



I bought some paintstiks, angelina and paint, 2 stamps and a gorgeous red handdyed fabric from Lisa from Dyed and Gone to Heaven. All for the quilt I promised to make for my mother-in-law - I am going to start on that one now. I also attended a beading workshop by Lisa and signed up for her beading club! I didn't buy the Down Under Quilts calendar but got it from Deborah because I read her blog! ;-)
I also bought this book which has great stencils for projects for the boys (dragon, bicycle, robot, rocket) and for me (feathers, cityscape, mandala!):



At home I played with the paint, stamp and some older stencils:

Hugo

This is the quilt I have entered in the Queensland Quilt Show. It is based on the photo I showed here. Click on the picture for a larger version. Do you like it? I do - I feel I really 'captured' Hugo.
Hugo likes it too, mainly because of the pirate fabric I used for the border!

Here you can see the winning quilts from the Show. I can't wait to see them IRL on Sunday!

It's that time of the year...

The jacarandas are flowering again. I keep making pictures of them!



Tomorrow the Queensland Quilt Show starts. I won't have time to go until Sunday, but I will post a photo of my quilt hanging there tomorrow.

Second Art and Craft Display

Remember the Art and Craft Display we had at my workplace, the Queensland Tuberculosis Control Centre, last year? This week we had the second edition of that event. My selvedge quilt had a prominent place (kept in place by some heavy medical textbooks!):



My colleagues loved the Tuberculosis journal quilt:



And I loved this throw knitted by one of them:



At home, I suddenly realised there are mandalas hidden in the woodwork!



I'm still adding seed stitches to the gymnasts quilt. It's getting a bit boring... But it has to be finished before the end of this month to try to enter it in the State of the Art Quilt 2010 exhibition.

Tomorrow the boys' grandparents are coming! They will be staying in Brisbane for 1 week, before travelling to the Whitsundays, so I think I won't be doing much quilting in the next few days. But it will be lovely to have some family here for a while.

Mandala and more dyeing

The theme for the next Art Quilts Around the World challenge is mandala. I used this photo from our holiday in the Sunshine Coast Hinterland to make a freezer paper stencil and made the print with discharge paste. Do you like it? I'm not sure if I will use it for the quilt or try something else (I have a few more ideas).

The blue fabric is a handdyed one - I did some more dyeing yesterday.

Seed stitching

I am still busy quilting the gymnasts quilt, adding seed stitching by hand. It's a helluva lot of work but I think the quilt needs it. I used to say I hated hand sewing but I am actually quite enjoying it...

Dyeing again

I signed up for another dyeing class with Marjie McWilliams at Quilt University, Quilters Palette. The first lesson was about dyeing fabrics for landscape quilts - water, sky, mountains, rocks, forest etc. I am very happy with the way my fabrics turned out!

Where Land and Sea meet...

... you often find a lighthouse!



My goal in making this quilt was to try out a new technique - free-hand quilting a scene on PFD fabric (plus batting and backing fabric) and colouring it in with Inktense pencils. I wanted to do a fairly simple image and suddenly, when I was brainstorming about the theme 'where land and sea meet' I thought of a lighthouse.

Googling 'lighthouse' for images to use as inspiration for my drawing resulted in a wealth of websites on lighthouses, enough to inspire a large series of quilts!



Cross-posted at Art Quilts Around the World

Holiday pics

We are back from our lovely mini-holiday - 4 days in Mapleton, in the Sunshine Coast Hinterland. Here are a few pics (more traditional holiday snapshots to be found on our family blog). The bat sculpture above was hanging in the garden of the restaurant in Montville where we had a scrumptious morning tea on Saturday.



This is part of a building that housed an art gallery - unfortunately there was no time to look at the art. I just managed to snatch a picture of this ... (what's it called??? well lid??) in the yard:



A lily:



And a cheeky kookaburra on the campsite (I love kookaburras! My 3-year old calls them kookabooa):



Stay tuned for the unveiling of the land and sea quilts on the Art Quilts Around the World blog tomorrow! I will have to work hard tonight to finish mine...