MILLYPENNY

The Modern Quilters Ireland are just starting a Christmas cushion swap. This years swap is for an 18 x 18" modern Christmas themed cushion. The swap is open to all sewing levels and is a beginner friendly swap, its only open to Irish residents click here for further details . As part of the swap requirements everyone has to make up a Flickr mosiac to give your swap partner an idea of what you would like to receive. It's first time I made a flickr mosiac, so had to spend a bit of time getting it done.  Here's my flickr mosiac: 1. Ely display by Lu Summers 2. Deer Forest 3. Have a merry Christmas cushions 4. Table runner 5. Bright Christmas cushion 6. Great quilting texture 7. Deer cushions 8. For the Birds

 A few weeks ago, I spent the weekend at An Grianan with a group of like-minded friends. We had great fun over the weekend, either sewing or messing around with dyes and paints. It was lovely to have a venue where you could keep working and have your meals served up to you, so no time wasted in cooking etc. I forgot to take many photographs as I was messing around around with gloves, dyes and paints. Here's an action shot of our art room, you can see by the mess that there was plenty of work happening here.   I spent the weekend screen-printing and mono-printing. Here are two samples of what I created over the weekend. Now I just need to decide what to make with them.   A photo from our Show and Tell meeting on the Saturday night

Bit of a belated post, but just realised I never posted anything about Festival of Quilts. I had a great time at the quilt exhibition this year, spent 5 days there! I did a 3 day Shape and Line Design masterclass with Leslie Morgan at FoQ which was brilliant. It was great having a longer workshop, as I got lots of  fabric dyed and printed Leslie adding dye to our pleated and clamped fabrics for shibori  Here's one of the pieces I worked on, the design was made using masking tape on a screen. One of my printed pieces Here's all the shibori dyed pieces from the workshop - they look fabulous together.  And here are some of the quilts which caught my eye at the show: Loved the African prints in this quilt, really eye-catching. I don't usually like Lone Star quilts, but really liked this one.  I had a piece in the Contemporary Quilters "Dislocation" Challenge. I was lucky enough to get my entry selected for this exhibition, here's m

I haven't been getting much sewing done lately. About the only things I've managed to finish are two baby quilts. Got the red quilt delivered to its new owner last night. The new owner is my 1 week old nephew Oisin. . The other quilt is for a 2nd cousin who lives in Germany (my aunt asked if I'd make a baby quilt for her grand-daughter). So I'll be giving that quilt to her in the next fortnight when she's back in Ireland

My scraps are are building up (scrap box is filled to capacity) so decided last week that I'd better do something to use them up. Found my Scrap Republic booklet by Emily Cier and came across this Volume quilt project in it. It's a great way to use up scraps, arrange them all by colour. I'm nearly there, just have to make the purple and black strips.

I have just submitted my online entry to the Dislocation Challenge. Dislocation is the theme for this year's Contemporary Quilt Group Challenge. Here's a detail shot of the quilt, will holding off showing the whole quilt for a while. I called my piece "In the Street Where I was Lost". When I was researching items on the theme of "Dislocation" I came across an article by Samuel Beckett in which he mentioned cultural dislocation, and being lost in the street of places that he used to know. So I was inspired by that idea when coming up with my quilt idea. Still have to add a sleeve and label, but that won't take too long. Now I have to go and make the sample of the quilt to send off as part of the jurying process.

The C ontemporary Quilt Group of the British Isles run a journal quilt project every year. This year I decided to join in, so I'll be making a small quilt every month. The journal quilts  have to be 8 x 8" square, the only rule this year is that each quilt has to contain a line that runs from one side to another. I've also decided to use up my leftover workshop samples and sample pieces for my journal quilts. I keep finding interesting bits and pieces that never got finished or completed, so this will be an opportunity to use them up. Here's Journal Quilt no. 1. Snippets of organza etc. were laid on fabric, free-motion stitched and then the soldering iron was used to distress certain parts. I satin stitched a few thick lines to the quilt. Journal Quilt no. 1 I have a few other journal quilts almost finished, just need to complete the bindings!

Last month I spent a weekend down in Cork at the Cork Textiles Network "Making Tomorrow" Annual Conference.Had a great time there and met loads of lovely people. On Saturday morning we had lectures from Rachael Howard , Cas Holmes and Liz Spillane. Then on Saturday afternoon, everyone went off to their different workshops. I was lucky enough to get on Cas Holmes "Using the Found, Extreme Stitching" Workshop which booked out really fast. A small collage I started at the workshop  Cas Holmes had some really lovely samples that we could all look at and admire! Some of Cas Holmes work I spent the afternoon and next day working on altering paper, monoprints, rubbings etc. to make various collages. One of the collages I worked on One really nice thing about the conference, is that at the end everyone brings displays their work in the canteen area, so you get to see what the other workshops did! Here are some of the baskets made at one class. N

Have been neglecting this blog for ages as when I get home from work it's too dark to take any decent photographs. Hopefully this weekend I'll get around to taking a few decent pictures of what I'm working on.  For the last few weeks I was working on this wall-hanging. It was going to be entered in a competition, but  didn't get it finished in time for the deadline. So I now can take my time finishing it (it could be years that happens though!). The weather this weekend is supposed to be awful, so am planning on staying indoors and working on one of my UFO's which I unearthed last week. The Contemporary Group of the Quilters Guild UK is having a competition at the Festival of Quilts in August. The theme is "DISLOCATION". I've been mulling over the theme for the past week or so, and got an idea last night about what to make. So I have to get started testing out a few ideas in my sketchbook, make some samples and screen-prints,