Patchwork and Quilting

I still have the first "quilt" I made when I was 4 years old. I used to sit under the table when my mum went to patchworker's group, and I remember playing with scraps of fabric.

A couple of years ago my family decided to get together and make friendship quilts. This is when you design a quilt made of blocks or sections, and give a block to everyone in your group to make so that the final product is made by everyone. You can be as vague or specific as you like with your preferences ie. colour, style, fabrics.

Most of our quilts had specific patterns as well as colour schemes.

The blue square in the middle of this block was the starting point and the colour that we had to match. We also had to put our names in the middle.

This rather complicated jigsaw puzzle pattern had to be shades of green. My brother came fabric shopping with me on that day, hence the dinosaurs!

One cousin asked us to give her our favourite saying or verse. 'The flower that blooms in adversity is the most rare and beautiful of all' is my favourite, from Disney's movie Mulan.
We were also given four fabrics that we could use to design a border for the quote. I added some extras that I thought matched.

This was the hardest block for me: a colour gradient of 5x5cm squares! My last row was a tad bit wonky...

I really liked all the teal colours that I used in this block:

This is a piece of a very large picture of flowers. It was hand appliqued (stitched) down.

This quilt was based on lace agate stones.

This was probably the simplest design, but it had to be right because you can see the seams under the white!

The quilt that I gave everyone to do was a fractured landscape: I took a photograph and cut it into four pieces. I only gave everyone a piece, not the whole photo, and I gave it to them in black and white. They had to create their block in whatever colour they wanted. Everyone guessed that it was a bird, which gave them some direction. The results were quire spectacularly different though!

This was one of the blocks that I did myself, with scraps of Indigenous prints:

I want to make four little quilts from the sets of blocks, with black binding around the edges and ties on each side so that I can hang them in different combinations. Hopefully that will happen this year!!