Stars for Huon

A present! Let's unwrap it!



This quilt is for Huon, my nephew, who was born in early March this year. It is yet another quilt for a baby but I'm happy to say that unlike the others I make, I'll get to see this quilt become well-loved as its owner grows and flourishes in years to come. Huon is my son Rory's first 'first' cousin, and they are 2 years and a week apart in age.

Huon's quilt is, like most of my quilts, a simple 9-block pattern. The blocks are called 'Ohio Stars' and are framed with a stripey lime sashing (which can't be seen very well from the overall pic). The blocks themselves are one of my favourites to make and I believe the only other quilt I've made predominantly comprised of these is the one I made for my Nanna so it seems fitting that another loved family member gets another one. The colours I chose are bright blues and greens and subtle yellows, chosen for their boyish nature and because they'll tie in well with the colours his mother painted his room. The outside sashing has corners that tie in with the middle block, and the quilt is quilted in the ditch. The outside border is a pale lemon yellow, and there was fortunately enough of this material to use for the backing. Although the quilt has a thin cotton wadding, it still contains plenty of warmth. I tend to use cotton wadding in the baby quilts so the recipients don't have any allergic reactions.

Huon is my elder (and only) brother's first child and he will happily carry on the family surname, the first child of the 'next generation' to do so out of all of our cousins.




Each quilt I made is usually inscribed with a date, my name as its maker and usually who the quilt is for. These labels are fixed with the iron-on Vliesofix, and blanket-stitched by hand (albeit messily as I'm not the embroiderer in the family). I've incorporated a kind of inspirational or motivational sentiment in the last couple of quilts made - my good friend Catherine's daughter and now Huon's - so hopefully they'll be something nice to look at and think about in the years to come.

The inscription, by Mark Twain, seems fitting for Huon, given his heritage as his parents are the adventurous type. His father often chooses the more daredevil activities to give our mother cause for anxiety. I'm sure as both cousins grow up, this innate lust for adventure will lead them into all sorts of places (and hopefully not into too much trouble!).

'20 years from now, you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do, than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from safe harbour. Catch the tradewinds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.'
Mark Twain

Luc's Quilt

As with most of the quilts I seem to make these days, this quilt was made to celebrate the impending birth of Dawn and Eric’s first baby. It has turned out to be a much loved quilt – a sentiment I’m very pleased to hear – and I hope that Luc (now 3) will share the quilt with his new baby brother Oscar, who was born in early April this year.

The quilt itself is a simple design – a 3 x 3 squares of ‘wonky star’ 9-square blocks, separated by approx inch-wide sashing. The fabric I used for the squares is a favourite – a thick yellow fabric with lavender coloured flowers. The outside border is a dark purple and the quilt itself is quilted in the ditch. Not terribly complicated itself but simple enough to make the quilt look good by the fabrics and colours selected. I was worried that the quilt was a bit ‘girly’, given the fabric colours I’d chosen (always hard when you don’t know what gender the baby will be) but Dawn assures me that it is well loved despite its appearance.

Most quilts these days, as I’ve said, are generally for babies, and this one was no exception. The friendship I share with Luc’s mother, despite existing these days by brief and sporadic emails, is enduring. It seems to be one of those friendships which don’t require a lot of work and no matter how long it’s been between communication, or meeting face-to-face, one feels that it can continue to flow easily and in good spirit.

I first met Dawn about 10 years ago. We are both fans of Crowded House and as such, are members of a fan mailing list known as Tongue In The Mail, or TITM as many know it. (The name itself refers to an obscure lyric in a Crowded House song). The mailing list was a lot more active in those days and Dawn had posted a message saying that she was on Melbourne’s shores, and did anyone want to meet up? I responded, and we met near Luna Park in St Kilda. We seemed to click from the get go and a friendship blossomed.

From then on, we would meet up and visit places, from Ballarat’s Sovereign Hill to spending Easter at my cousin’s place in Traralgon. We visited several Crowded House haunts and at one point attempted to find a house to move in together in inner Melbourne with another CH fan, which didn’t eventuate.

After several years of living in Melbourne and later New Zealand, Dawn returned to the UK. In 2003, I visited England for the first time and Dawn went out of her way to do some sightseeing with me, from walking around London, visiting Hampton Court Palace, going to a radio comedy show, organising a memorable weekend trip to Bath, Stonehenge, Avebury, Cheddar and Glastonbury. Seeing the Cerne Abbas Giant and walking right up to the Uffington Horse have stood out over the years.

At that time, Dawn introduced me to her Dutch boyfriend Eric, later husband, whom she’d met whilst living and travelling in New Zealand. They married and we later caught up in New Zealand in December 2005 – she on her honeymoon and I with my fiancé, on my own Kiwi adventure prior to my wedding. Despite the years between seeing each other, we easily slipped back into our friendship and enjoyed several days of doing touristy things in Rotorua like Zorbing and getting lost in a mediocre maze.

Dawn and Eric’s ‘European’ (first) son, Lucas, arrived in September 2006. Since then, Dawn and I have corresponded mostly by email. Mostly these have usually been about the big events in our lives – getting married, having children and so forth – but I’ve always found Dawn’s succinct descriptions of news and events quite supportive, amusing and informative. She often provides me with reassuring advice and even though the music of Crowded House may have led our paths to cross, it has featured very little in our conversations since. Despite the distance, I treasure her presence in my life greatly and I feel fortunate to think of her as one of my dearest friends.

I've yet to meet the recipient of this quilt, but I'm confident that our families will meet again sometime in the near future!

Federation Stars

This, by far, is one of my favourite quilts that I’ve made, aside from Nanna’s quilt. It is the first quilt that I’ve made without a pattern and it is by far the largest quilt I’ve made (fitting the top of a queen size bed).

Whenever I was looking for a new project in 2002 and 2003 (judging by the amount of quilts produced in 2002 & 2003), I’d flick through my patchwork and quilting mags – primarily Quilters Companion, Homespun and Patchwork & Quilting. In one of the magazines, I kept coming back to this photo. Someone had made a quilt – either created or used a pattern, not sure which – called Federation Stars. I admired the use of colours used, the wash of shades from blues to reds to greens to yellows – and began to think that this kind of patchwork wouldn’t be hard to do. After all, it was square blocks, with rectangles with white triangles, intercepted by squares of white – which made the stars. Once I’d broken down how it could be made, it made it easy to figure out size and dimensions, which were repeated as needed.

That was the easy part – getting the right shades of fabric was another. I clearly didn’t have enough fabric, so the fun part was to visit patchwork shops and get plenty more. Once I’d stockpiled enough, I started to lay them out on my parent’s dining room table, which almost wasn’t big enough. Laying them out like this made it easy to change fabrics and swap for more appropriate shading where needed. Having a digital camera meant I could take a picture of the layout for later. Handy as a reference when assembling the pieces before they were sewn. It’s a trick I still use today when pinning together patchwork pieces.

Of course, having all these fabrics meant I had quite a stockpile of fabrics to use in future, since the most I’d need from one fabric would be about 6 inches by 6 inches. The excess fabric is still being used in quilts today, and it’s a nice connection between each quilt that I’ve made.

Sewing all the squares and rectangles were easy. So was laying the base, wool wadding and top (pinned together with large safety pins). It was the quilting that gave my Bernina a workout. Normally the poor old thing has its work cut out for it doing a 52inch square quilt, but something that was made for a queen size bed was another thing! It wasn’t so much a problem quilting it as such, more the enormous amount of fabric to push through. It’s probably the reason why I haven’t attempted to quilt anything so large since. It was quilted in the ditch, and the outside border quilted in 1 inch intervals (easily made with masking tape). Once finished, the binding was sewn on, excess edge fabric and wadding sliced off with rotary cutter, and the binding was handsewn up. A label was blanket stitched on the back, which I usually name the quilt, date it, list by name and its recipient. Done!



This quilt brings back memories of the time just before my grandmother passed away – I know I was working on it when she was taken to hospital, because I’d taken the top to work to show some co-workers, and had it with me when I rushed to her hospital (driving over an hour and a half to get there). I’d desperately wanted to show her the top, but her condition had worsened and it was neither the time, nor the place. Another memory I have is taking it to Scarne, my mother’s family’s (and grandmother’s) ancestral home, the family homestead located in Glengarry, and displaying it for visiting relatives to see.

These days, the quilt is pulled out in winter and keeps my bed cosy at night. Its bright colours cheer the room despite the gloomy weather outside. It always makes me smile, reminding me of the enjoyment I got out of it as I selected fabrics and shades, and as I put it together. It still amazes me how the shades flow from one to another.

Cushions

Having completed the 2 quilts for my Nanna and Aunt, I began to think that I ought to do something for my other two maternal aunts – Wendy and Pauline. Somehow I came up with the idea of doing personalised cushions, using a simple block patterns with panels for stitched names, which my mother kindly did since she’s far more talented in the embroidery department.

My Aunty Wendy’s cushion is comprised of a Log Cabin Variation using soft romantic fabrics of blue, red and cream. The panels were stitched with the names of my Aunt and her sons (my two cousins), again using a truetype font from Windows (‘French Script’) which were copied onto the cream panels using a fabric pen (disappears when moistened). My mother then embroidered the names over it and these pieces of fabric were then sewed to the other border fabric.











The cushion front was then quilted, again in the ditch and repeating the lines in the border corners (as above) and then the cushion backing was sewn and the cushion insert added later.

Much like Wendy’s cushion, the end process for my Aunty Pauline’s was the same. The only difference was the centre block – a block called Dutchman’s Puzzle – and its thinner sashing border. I still quite like the fabrics I used on Pauline’s cushion, especially the darker purple centre of the block, and the thin border.











Again, like Wendy’s, the panels on all four sides were embroidered (again, by Mum) with the names of my Aunt, Uncle and their 2 daughters (my cousins). The font is 'Bradley Hand Itc' and is stitched in matching colours teal and purple on opposing panels.

S is for Suzanne

Once I’d made the quilt for my Nanna, intending it to be a Christmas gift, I also thought that making a quilt for my Aunty Suzanne – my mother’s youngest sister – would also be a good idea. Again, like Nanna’s quilt, I used a pattern from Quilter’s Companion magazine, although I changed the colour (from the pattern’s bright carnival look to a mixture of green and purple hues) and block pattern (the blocks with appliquéd letters were originally embroided balloons, something which I’m not confident about doing). Also like Nanna’s quilt, the quilt size was a square 52inches – more like a lap quilt than for the bed.

The design was very simple, lines of wonky star blocks (themselves comprised of 9 squares each) set between lines of simple 9 patch blocks and squares with the letter ‘S’ appliquéd on in blanket stitch. The appliquéd letters were made from oversized printouts using the letter S in different fonts (via Word), then traced onto vliesofix and ironed onto fabric of choice, then cut and ironed onto squares of cream coloured fabric. Again, I quilted in the ditch – lines across rows of blocks – and quilted repeated lines on the border fabric.

The end result came out well and I know my Aunt was impressed!

Nanna's Quilt

This quilt – essentially a Christmas-themed quilt from a pattern in Quilter’s Companion – was my first properly finished quilt. I made it for my maternal grandmother, Nanna for Christmas in 2002.

Quilted in the ditch at the time, as I’d no idea how to quilt it otherwise, it still stands out as one of my favourite quilts to make. Not just because it was for my beloved grandmother – and I was delighted to learn that she took such great enjoyment out of it – but because the colours, shades, fabric all just seemed to click together.

The border fabric was of lustrous red apples, bluest of blueberries and green leafy foliage, quite good for a fabric from Spotlight, which has sadly seems to have lost its great range of affordable and variety of quilting fabrics since then. The blocks are simple 9-square ‘Ohio Star’ blocks, which I’ve used again in other quilts due to their effective simplicity.

My grandmother passed away some 6 months after she received the quilt and the quilt has since returned to my possession, but I take comfort in the fact that she was able to witness my newfound skill with the very first quilt I made.

How it came to be

A brief backtrack on how I got hooked on this crazy thing called quilting.

Back in 2002, I was still living at home with my parents since shifting back from university in 2000. At that time I was in my early 20s, and my mother, frustrated about my lack of having something to do, suggested I get a hobby – specifically, a crafting one, perhaps. So, trawling through her craft/embroidery magazines, I came across quilting, found an ad for a local shop that did beginner courses in patchwork and quilting, booked in for classes and away I went.

Coming along for the ride was my (yet-to-be-realised) trusty Bernina sewing machine which Mum had sensibly rescued from my old high school for about $50, and which had sat on my bedroom floor for some time (prior to using it, I'd half-heartedly thought, "maybe, one day..."). Dusting it out, and decking myself with some sewing materials I thought I might need, I began my first class.

The beginners class was a Sampler class – essentially, we’d learn how to cut, piece and sew all different types of blocks, then join them together to produce a sampler quilt. Learning imperial measurements took some getting used to (1/4 inch!) although in retrospect, it makes so much sense (quilting measurements in metric seem so alien). I finished the class with a bit of knowledge, some new skills and a crazy addiction to this old-fashioned hobby. I was hooked!

I’ve never finished that first quilt – the sampler (above) in blue and yellow and cream – but I’ve finished many more, and I’ll tell their stories as I go.