The Sky is Blue, the Sea is Blue

Progress! The last few days have been spent pinning large areas of colour to form the background. I had no idea how I was going to do this, but it it going fine. Very rough cutting and checking with the chalk marking underneath allow me to place the pieces, overlapping as I go.

The image above shows a close up of the little girl. Some of the hair had to be covered up as the bits are too fine to trim around. What I will do is stitch from the back as I will be able to see the stitching lines, and then trim the excess baclground away. I should be able to just temporarily tack the quilt onto the quilt machine for this.

This is the latest image. You can see that there is now some layering in the sky, and distant bluff on the horizon is in place. I still have to work on the right hand side of the sky. Still very rough

Normally quite camera shy, I asked Geoff to take a photo of me as I pin some fabric on. This is just to show the scale of the quilt. Because it is so big, the detail is not really fine close up. I like that effect and hope to make more big projects this way.
My next task will be to finish the sky, then take it down and start to smooth over all the little wrinkles and rough cutting. I will have to hand baste these pieces down before returning the quilt to the quilting machine. Once it is there, the fun really starts!

News and new links

KoolKat Quilting is taking the plunge and Kathy and Geoff will have their first ever stall at a major craft and quilt event - the Brisbane Craft and Quilt Fair held at the Convention centre, Brisbane on October 21-5. Please be sure to see us at Stall C6 - we'll have some great specials on Kathy's patterns and fabric kits. Kathy has been busy and will have a new pattern, tentatively titled 'Aussie ABC' to launch at the show.

Congratulations once again to Toowoomba Quilters for another successful annual quilt exhibition held during the annual Carnival of Flowers in September. There were some 200 entries. Our thanks to the many club members who have entrusted their quilts to KoolKat for quilting and who displayed their quilts at this and previous exhibitions.

Kathy and Geoff also did 'white glove duty' for the inaugural Australian Machine Quilters' Association exhibition held in Brisbane September 26-7. The standard high and humbling - there is some great work being done by machine quilters across the country. The home page of our website has a link to AMQA where you can find more details.

Meanwhile, here are some great links that Judi B of Bella OnLine gave us when we saw her recently.

http://craftgossip.com/

http://quilterblogs.com/

http://www.iquilt.com.au/