European Machine Quilters Exposition

We are home from a fabulous workshop held yearly in Castletownbere, Ireland. Beryl Cadman organizes the European Machine Quilters Exposition to further the training of Gammill owners in Europe. Castletownbere is a hamlet on the southwestern coast of Ireland and it is remote ... no telephone coverage, no interruptions. Fabulous!

This year Linda Taylor taught the longarm workshops. Linda has received many awards, the most recent one being the Quilters' Newsletter Magazine Teacher of the Year Award, which is quite justly deserved! This may look like good fun, but let me tell you, it can be hard work! And Linda really gave us a lot to do in a very short period of time!

Linda is well known for being one of the pioneers of long-arm quilting. She has been quilting on a Gammill for 16 years and she makes it look like breathing. We didn't manage to make it look so easy or elegant. But just give us a couple of weeks!

With Linda came Rick Taylor, who taught us all about machine maintenance and American country music, and Todd Fletcher, who gave Leslie a few new pointers on the Statler Stitcher. We ate well and slept like babies.

The long-arm classes were all full and the participants came from all over Europe, including Great Brittain, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, and even Cyprus! We were able to make some new friends and catch up with our old ones.

Maria was able to try out a lot of new techniques and, best of all, lots and lots of new threads. We have been wanting to get our hands on some of the new threads we have been reading about and now we have! Linda's line of threads for YLI are neon, no, N-E-O-N bright, glow-in-the-dark bright, wonderful deep jewel tones and even pastels that will show up on anything. We tried polyesters and rayons, anything shiny and new. We even managed to bring home a suitcase full of them to play with some more!

Happy quilting, Marybeth

Open European Quilt Championship in Veldhoven

Saturday we went to visit the Open European Quilt Championship in Veldhoven. I hoped to take many photos and show it to you, but as most of the quilts were quite high on the wall I couldn't take a good quality photos. If you would like to see the winner quilts, I would recommend you to visit their website: www. oeqc.eu.
However I would still like to show one (hope you don't mind if it is from a strange angel, but I'm short and the wall was really high). This quilt was made by Ria Notenboom and won the 2nd price in the Novice category. This was her first quilt. It is an amazing work for a first quilt. We know this quilt quite well as Ria asked us to quilt it for her.
We were happy to see that Ria won a prize with her quilt. She really deserved it. Congratulation!

Ria Notenboom: "Rorii Miyajima"

Fabric Painting Trapsuutjies

It was a long time since I wrote my last note. And the photos I'm going to share with you came from a workshop, which we attended even earlier than my last blog. I did wanted to write about it as soon as we came home, but things just happened. But finally it is here.
We met Laura from Trapsuutjies two years ago in Rijswijk at the Patchwork and Quilt Days. We loved her work/fabrics at first sight and we wanted to take a class with her, have her studio and her full attention just for ourselves. How selfish!! But it took us two years to get there as we were so busy with our company and family.
I save you from the reports of the last two years and cut it short. Finally we had a whole Saturday workshop in her studio in Belgium. We tried out a few techniques, reverse stampings, printing, scratching your design, applying paint with different tools (cards, sponges,etc), creating textures. You can find the description of all the techniques in Laura's website and also the paints: http://www.trapsuutjies.com
It was a great fun. I can recommend it to you. Laura is a very nice teacher and a very good hostess. Her cake and salad were really delicious.
Since than we had a repeat "workshop" in our studio and played with the colors, fabrics, techniques. We are planning to go back to Laura again and do a screenpainting class with her soon.
Here are some photos from the one day workshop.

My daughter's works (she joined us)

"Meeting" with the new Bernina 830

Yesterday we went to our Bernina dealer in Katwijk, Rooijackers Naaimachines (sewing machine shop) to attend the demonstration of the new Bernina 830 by Karen Lipton. I think the new Bernina might be the dream machine for everybody, who loves sewing, but definitely mine. It seems to incorporate the best features, what you expect from a sewing machine: very good lighting, big space for your quilts, sewing in 360 degree directions, automatic needle threader (just press a button), built-in dual feed (no more walking foot) bigger bobbin, multiply spool holders, automatic thread cutter and not to mention my favorite, the touch screen. I can't wait to try it out, but I guess I have to wait for a while. Until than I just think of the nice afternoon, the hospitality of Mr. Rooijackers with cakes and coffee and watching the 830 working.



by Maria

North Sea Quilters in the Patchwork en Quiltdagen in Rijswijk

Of course it can't be a"North Sea Quilters and Friends" exhibition without showing our own works. We selected "Little Amsterdam" and "Kyoto Nights" to exhibit during the Patchwork en Quiltdagen in Rijswijk.

"Little Amsterdam" quilted by Marybeth Tawfik,
designed and pieced by Maria Laza, Leslie Carol Taylor, Marybeth Tawfik

72” x 72”, 2007

This quilt was conceived by the North Sea Quilters as a tribute to the beautiful and distinctive architecture of the Netherlands, our host country. The house facades are all based on real houses found on the canals of Amsterdam. The quilting was done to replicate all the different textures found around these houses: smoke, wind, vines, bricks, cobblestones, and water.

This quilt won 1st prize for Long Arm Quilting at the Open European Championships, Waalre, the Netherlands, 2007.

Kyoto Nights (2008)
by North Sea Quilters: Maria Laza, Leslie Carol Taylor and Marybeth Tawfik
67” x 73”

Kyoto Nights celebrates the large-scale asymmetrical Japanese floral prints that have been so popular in the last few years. Using a hexagon as a base, North Sea Quilters have isolated vignettes of the fabric to give the impression of looking into a Japanese garden at night through a window. The Japanese crests were stitched from patterns on the Statler Stitcher™, the chrysanthemums were first drafted and digitized by Leslie and the “rain” in the bamboo forest was stitched freehand.


This is the end of our report on the exhibition. Thanks for following it during the last couple of weeks.

Marybeth Tawfik's Quilt at North Sea Quilters and Friends exhibition in Rijswijk

During the Patchwork en Quiltdagen in Rijswijk in our exhibition you could also see a quilt of our friend, Annelies, which were beautifully quilted by Marybeth.

"Simply Delicious" quilted by Marybeth Tawfik,

46” x 46”, 2008

This Piece O’ Cake design, hand appliquéd by Annelies Nijland, reminded me very much of my grandmother’s garden. My grandmother spent many, many hours growing the fruits and vegetables that her family would eat throughout the year. She always put up her vine supports by hand using small branches and twine and I have tried to replicate that look by quilting freehand, not using any rulers or markers, to give it that old-fashioned, homemade look that was so very beautiful to me growing up.

details of the quilt

Marybeth Tawfik received her first electric sewing machine at the age of 10 so that her mother would be able to use her own Pfaff. Originally sewing garments, she became interested in patchwork in 1996 while living in Japan, but was too intimidated by the process to begin patchwork until 2001. She purchased her Gammill Optimum Plus® in 2004 at the International Quilt Festival in the Hague. She “practiced” on the machine for 3 years before attempting to quilt other people’s quilt tops. She tries very hard to sew every day, believing that therein lies the path to sanity and serenity.

Leslie Carol Taylor's Quilt at North Sea Quilters and Friends Exhibition in Rijswijk

As the long-arm quilting exhibition during the Patchwork en Quiltdagen 14-15 February in Rijswijk was organized by us, it is obvious that we exhibited also our individual works, like Leslie's Forbidden Fruit.

Leslie Carol Taylor: "Forbidden Fruit" (2008)
65” x 89”

"Forbidden Fruit was originally made for a challenge entitled “Paradise”. The idea was to create an exotic and mysterious atmosphere using batiks in lime, turquoise and black. The flying geese border mimics the markings of the serpent, and in this Garden of Eden there are lemons as well as apples. The design was simple to leave myself plenty of “open space” for quilting. I first drafted the quilting designs for the different parts of the quilt, then digitized and eventually sewed them, using a Gammill® Optimum Plus with Statler Stitcher™ and the new Creative Studio™ software. The quilting designs mimic the mood of the fabrics used for piecing and the variegated thread enhances the black background."

Leslie Carol Taylor was born in the UK and has been sewing for as long as she can remember. She officially learned to do patchwork by hand in France in the eighties. Whilst living in Japan in the late nineties, she discovered you could also quilt by machine and from then nothing has been able to stop her. She has been back in the Netherlands since 2001 where she later met Maria Laza and Marybeth Tawfik. Together they founded North Sea Quilters in 2007. Her trip with Marybeth to the EMQE long-arm quilting retreat in Ireland in May 2007 was to become the most expensive holiday ever, as it resulted in the purchase of a Gammill Optimum Plus with Statler Stitcher Leslie has been quilting for customers since December 2007. She loves enhancing a treasured object entrusted to her, and turning it into something even more beautiful. She has a scientific background which helps and inspires her to digitize her own quilting designs, which the Statler stitches out beautifully. And she has even been known to still sew things by hand...