Blogger's Quilt Festival

If you've found your way here from Amy's Creative Side and her amazing Blogger's Quilt Festival, welcome!  This is my little bit of the interwebs where I share my creative life.  I am contributing to the BQF for my first time and I am so happy to be part of it.  I've really enjoyed past Festivals, there are so many great quilty people out there!

The quilt I'm showing is Call Me Crazy.   I made this one a couple of years ago, and I still love it!  It's a pattern by Weekes Ringle and Bill Kerr pattern that was published in the American Better Homes quilting magazine a few years ago.  I love their patterns and have their book Quilts Made Modern which I regularly flick through.  Gorgeous!

I love using fresh cut grass as a backdrop for quilt photos - even if it means getting out on my nature strip to take photos and giving all the neighbours something to wonder about.

As you can see, the bars are all crazy pieced with tone on tone fabrics.  I have to admit, it took me a very long time to do this piecing, I found it really challenging and some of my pieces of fabric finished up much smaller than I intended!  The crazy pieced sections being all the one colour means you can't really tell that I've sewn and trimmed some of those strips into minuscule bits!  All the reds came out of my stash, at the time it used nearly all of the reds in there.  I've since rectified this you'll be pleased to know!

I quilted the bars with wonky straight lines, and then stippled the border and sashing.  It is fairly tightly quilted.

The creamy background fabric is a star pattern that I really love, it's very warm toned.  After trying a heap of different reds for the binding, I tried the navy which is a splodgy hand dyed type print, and I love it.  I think it really frames the reds and cream nicely.  The backing is a Spotlight fabric, I like the way it matches the binding.

As I was taking these photos, Wombat came over for his usual pose on the quilt.  A wattle bird started squawking at us, and then swooped down from his tree at Wombat.  I was standing just near him and had to duck in a hurry.  I've been swooped by magpies and plovers before but never a wattle bird.  I am extremely paranoid about birds so I got quite a fright and had to grab the quilt and retreat inside (with Wombat following close behind I might add).  Fortunately I had some chocolate on hand to soothe my nerves.  Anyone reading from outside Australia might be interested in this link to 'common swooping birds'.   Although they are only acting in the way nature intended, they can be quite scary and for the few weeks that they are active they make walking in some areas like running a gauntlet.  I'm glad I got a decent photo because I was not going out there again tonight!

Pop over to Amy's to see some of the other gorgeous quilts in the Festival.