Quilts of Andreas Wolf at the North Sea Quilters and Friends Exhibition

During the Patchwork en Quiltdagen in Rijswijk between 14-15 February you could also see these two quilts, which were designed, pieced and long-arm quilted by Andreas Wolf.

Andreas Wolf: "Elemantals"
47.5” x 55”

"‘Elemantals’ uses hand-dyed fabrics for the applique and is quilted on a longarm every line. This quilt was displayed at the Festival of Quilts in Birmingham, England. The quilt was machine sewn and longarm quilted on a Gammill® Optimum Plus."

Andreas Wolf: "Opal"
59” x 90”

"This batik quilt was made to showcase our acrylic templates and the fabrics. It was machine sewn and longarm quilted on a Gammill® Optimum Plus using an edge-to-edge pattern."
The templates are available from: www.rainbow-house.de

Andreas Wolf was born in Hamburg 1965 and grew up on the Lake of Konstanz. He began making handicrafts at a very early age, knitting and cross-stitching. The first quilt show he attended was an exhibition of Amish quilts in Konstanz in 1995. He was then inspired to begin making traditional quilts. In 1998 he opened his own quilt shop in Hamburg and began as a professional quilter. In the shop he has everything any quilter would need. He holds classes, attends quilt shows all over Europe, and produces templates for cutting fabric. In 2005 he purchased an Optimum Plus® long arm quilting machine from Gammill and began to custom quilt clients’ quilt tops. Andreas loves to meet nice, creative people and brings a unique perspective to quilting. You can contact Andreas on 0049.40.22697070 or e-mail to quilthouse@t-online.de
www.quilthouse.de

Quilts of Tracey Pereira at the North Sea Quilters and Friends Exhibition

During the Patchwork en Quiltdagen 14-15 February in Rijswijk you had the opportunity to look at the Birmingham winner quilts of Tracey Pereira.

Tracey Pereira:"It Happened Overnight …" (2003)
70” x 90”

"During the past twenty years or so the mysterious and often overnight appearance of crop circles has fascinated the world over. Intrigued by many of these beautiful and intricate designs I used this quilt to focus on this strange phenomena."

The inspiration for the quilting designs comes from the book "Crop Circles" by Werner Anderhub and Hans Peter Roth. Whilst some artistic license has been employed many of the quilting designs are based on actual circle formations. Quilted on a non-stitch regulated Gammill® Classic.

This quilt was the winner of the 2006 Art Prize for Freehand Quilting at the Festival of Quilts, Birmingham, England.

"Cosmic Cousins" long-arm quilted by Tracey Pereira (2006)

85” x 85”

"This two-colour piece incorporates an "Ohio Star" foundation block designed by Carol Doak and pieced by my cousin Emma Armstrong. The on-point layout was a 'happy accident' after discovering insufficient blocks had been made but left an open door for some bespoke quilting. Tracey developed the quilting design and freehand quilted it on her Gammill® Optimum plus quilting machine."

This quilt won 2nd place in 2006 at the Festival of Quilts, Birmingham, England, for a two-person quilt and for long arm quilting. It was also juried into the 2008 Mancuso World Quilt and Textiles tour.

Tracey Pereira is an award-winning quilter based in the South of England. She has been quilting for many years and has taught at both national and international levels. She is also a published author and has made several contributions to UK patchwork and quilting magazines. Most recently, Tracey has produced a number of designs for robotic and computerised quilting and embroidery systems.
Tracey is also an accredited judge with the Quilters Guild of the British Isles.
You can see more about Tracey and her work at www.teepeequilts.co.uk.

Quilts of Robyn Fahy at the North Sea Quilters and Friends exhibition

During the Patchwork en Quiltdagen in Rijswijk you could also see the quilts of Robyn Fahy. You can read more and look at the quilts below.

Robyn Fahy:"Bumblebee"
70” x 90”

"This quilt was created for the Longarm Gallery Exhibition at Festival of Quilts Birmingham 2007. The challenge was to create a quilt measuring 70” x 90” using only black and white and one other colour. I chose yellow. I then quilted the quilt on my hand-guided Gammill® quilting machine using Aurifil 100% cotton thread."

"Chasing the Dragon" quilted by Robyn Fahy
94”x94”


"This quilt was made as a ‘Round Robin’ challenge with a group of friends.
Our group is called ‘The Bags and Tarts’. We all had to make a 24” centre block and then pass it to our next friend to add the next border. Each border size was decided before we began. We then each had to finish our tops with our own 8” final border. I then quilted using various 100% cotton threads on my hand-guided Gammill® Quilting Machine. "

Robyn Fahy moved to the small village of Drumquin, Co. Tyrone, Ireland from Margaret River in Western Australia 22 years ago.
Her interest in patchwork began in 1992. Initially self-taught, she studied every book she could get her hands on. She has since been fortunate enough to travel widely, and take classes with many wonderful teachers in both patchwork and longarm quilting.
About 8 years ago she began her career as a teacher when a local women’s group asked her to teach them patchwork. Since then she has owned her own quilt shop and now holds classes in her custom built studios at home. From there, she felt it was a natural progression to owning her own longarm quilting machine. She now has a hand-guided Gammill® Classic on which she does her own custom work and a Gammill Optimum Plus® Statler Stitcher™ for customer quilts.

Challenge Quilts from the Long-arm Quilting Gallery - Part IV.

This is the last "chapter" of our reports on the challenge quilts show, which North Sea Quilters exhibited in the "Patchwork en Quiltdagen", Rijswijk with the cooperation of Jobina de Boer. These quilts were first shown in Birmingham and it is organized and presented by Beryl Cadman, (Custom Quilting) the European distributor of Gammill® Quilting Machines and Statler Stitcher™ fully computerized quilting system and co-sponsored by Twisted Thread. Scroll down to see the following three quilts and click on the photos to enlarge them.

"“Bouquet of Stars” quilted by Beryl Cadman
Designed and pieced by Krys Evans
90" x 90"

This quilt was designed and pieced by Krys Evans and quilted by Beryl Cadman for the Long-arm Gallery at the Festival of Quilts in Birmingham 2008.

Beryl Cadman has lived in Castletownbere since moving to Ireland from Australia in 1997. A keen patchworker, she imported a Gammill® Quilting Machine shortly after her arrival and subsequently became a distributor in 2000. She has been actively involved in longarm education since this time. Beryl is the only accredited longarm teacher in Europe, having received recognised training from America’s Linda Taylor. She has taught all over Europe and at the Quilt Festival in Houston. She and her students have won numerous awards in the UK and Europe and her quilts have been exhibited all over the world including Yokohama, Japan. An active committee member of the Quilters Guild of Ireland, she is also a member of the Irish Patchwork Society, the Quilters Guild of Germany and an accredited quilt judge. She is also the co-founder of the European Machine Quilters Expo, which provides ongoing education to the longarm quilting community - web site: www.emqe.eu “Custom Quilting Limited has been in business for over eleven years. Many years of experience have taught us the skills and knowledge needed to provide our customers with the support they need to start a quilting business or invest in a hobby. We are the longest-standing dealer of Gammill® Quilting Machines and the Statler Stitcher™ fully computerised quilting system in Europe. We offer a fully integrated service including set-up and training, advanced tuition, maintenance instruction, and follow-up support provided locally.” You can contact Beryl on www.customquilt.com or phone: +353 27 70414

Robyn Fahy: "Epoch"
90” x 90”

This quilt was created for the Long-arm Gallery at Festival of Quilts Birmingham 2008. This year our challenge was to create a quilt measuring 90” x 90” and using two Japanese fabrics provided, along with any other fabrics we chose. I then quilted the quilt with cotton thread on my hand-guided Gammill® Quilting Machine. I spent 54 hours quilting this quilt.

Robyn Fahy moved to the small village of Drumquin, Co. Tyrone, Ireland from Margaret River in Western Australia 22 years ago. Her interest in patchwork began in 1992. Initially self-taught, she studied every book she could get her hands on. She has since been fortunate enough to travel widely, and take classes with many wonderful teachers in both patchwork and longarm quilting. About 8 years ago she began her career as a teacher when a local women’s group asked her to teach them patchwork. Since then she has owned her own quilt shop and now holds classes in her custom built studios at home. From there, she felt it was a natural progression to owning her own longarm quilting machine. She now has a hand-guided Gammill® Classic on which she does her own custom work and a Gammill Optimum Plus® Statler Stitcher™ for customer quilts.

Myriam Debuscherre: "Fanny’s Fans" (detail)
90” x 90”

Fanny is my needlework friend. As she loves fans, I made the quilt for her: Fanny's fans.

Myriam Debuscherre lives in Belgium and received her Gammill® Classic on 11 September 2001. She had her basic lessons during 2001 and 2002 and after practising a few years went to Dallas, Texas, to Linda Taylor’s studio. This was an absolutely perfect week, during which she learned more than she thought was possible.
In October 2006 she won the third prize in the Open European Quiltchampionships in Waalre, the Netherlands.
She is anxiously awaiting delivery of her new Gammill Optimum Plus® with the Statler Stitcher™. To contact Myriam go to her website www.quiltstudio.tk

Challenge Quilts from the Long-arm Quilting Gallery - Part I.

In the next blogs you can see and read about the challenge quilts, which North Sea Quilters exhibited in the "Patchwork en Quiltdagen", Rijswijk with the cooperation of Jobina de Boer. The quilts were first shown in Birmingham 2008 and it is organized and presented by Beryl Cadman, (Custom Quilting) the European distributor of Gammill® Quilting Machines and Statler Stitcher™ fully computerized quilting system and co-sponsored by Twisted Thread. Scroll down to see the first three quilts and click on the photos to enlarge them.

Maria Laza-Bihari: Midnight Minuet
96" x 96"

"I love colours therefore I tried to incorporate the two challenge fabrics into a colorful palette of yellows, reds, purples and greens, moving from dark to lights towards the middle of the quilt. I was always fascinated by the dynamism of the Storm at Sea Pattern, the way it moves your eyes and lets you discover new patterns. This variation of Storm at Sea gave me the opportunity to play with the circles that formed as a secondary pattern. In the quilting I tried to emphasize the circles, by quilting in the ditch, then stitching an airy free-hand quilting around them. The stars were stitched in the ditch. The quilting was done on a Gammill® Optimum Plus long-arm quilting machine, which my North Sea Quilters friends kindly let me use. It is my first long-arm quilted project."

Maria Laza-Bihari was born in Hungary and has always been interested in handicrafts. She bought her first sewing machine with the first bonus from her first job. She caught the “quilting bug” about 10 years ago. She started with traditional hand-pieced patchwork and later moved to piecing and quilting by machine. She was one of the founding members of the International Women’s Contact patchwork group in The Hague. In this group, she met Marybeth Tawfik and Leslie Carol Taylor, who then all travelled together to the International Quilt Expo in Lyon, France, in 2006. By that time Maria was occupied with the idea of how to turn her hobby into her profession. The following year the three women established North Sea Quilters, which gives Maria the wonderful opportunity to combine everything she likes best, patchwork, challenging herself, working in a group and meeting people, making them happy and helping them to learn, grow and find their own ways in quilting.

www.northseaquilters.com

Emma and Pam Ablett: Dragon Flower (detail)
90” x 90”

This quilt was a joint effort. Emma Ablett designed and pieced the top, and advised on quilting patterns to accentuate the piecing. Pam then completed the quilt on the Gammill® longarm quilting machine. The quilting is a mixture of free-hand stitch in the ditch and embellishment, and blocks and borders were fitted using the Statler Stitcher™ computerised quilting system.


As the proud owners of “Quilters Trading Post”, Pam and Emma Abblett are pleased to offer approximately 3000 bolts of fabric. Along with this large collection of fabrics, the shop also offers a quilting service, classes and a fabric printing service for those precious family photos.
The shop has been open now for just over a year and a half and gets busier as each week passes.
www.quilterstradingpost.com

Cheryl Thomas: Cheryl's Star (detail)

90" x 90"

This quilt was created for the Long-arm Gallery at the Festival of Quilts, in Birmingham, 2008. This year the challenge was to create a quilt of 90" x 90" with two Japanese fabrics provided, along with any other fabrics we liked.

Cheryl Thomas lives in Southwest Wales. She is married with 3 sons and a full time job as well.
Cheryl had been a keen quilter for many years and in 2004 her Gammill® Optimum Quilting Machine became a welcome addition to her family. She loves her Gammill and regularly takes classes and attends EMQE each year to further her quilting skills.
Even with her limited time available she contributes to the Longarm Exhibition held at the Festival of Quilts, NEC Birmingham each year.

Maria's Quilt: the Dance of a Quilter - Midnight Minuet

It is my turn to introduce my quilt I made for the long-arm quilting gallery at the Festival of Quilts in Birmingham. How many times I learned that I should trust my first instinct, but I always think, rationalize. This was a fine example of it.

Maria Laza-Bihari: Midnight Minuet

When I started to work with the challenge fabrics, thinking through colour combinations my first reaction was to dig out an old project, as it had all the colours I had in mind: red, purple and green. It was a variation of the Storm at Sea Pattern which I fell in love with a long time ago. But this project had been prepared for hand-piecing and all the pieces were cut in centimetres! I had a look at it and discarded the idea, as it would have been a very time consuming project and this time I wanted to concentrate on the quilting and not the piecing. I took another direction and I played with several ideas, based on sashiko patterns. Days of drawing, designing and finally one morning I woke up with the IDEA. Let's not go into details otherwise I will never finish this blog. One thing is sure Equilter and My Blue Bamboo benefitted from my search for the perfect fabrics. Unfortunately none of them worked well in this design with the challenge fabrics. The outcome was a few interesting projects for the future and of course plenty of beautiful fabrics in my drawers, but concerning the challenge I was back to square one or should I say back to my first instinct, the old Storm at Sea variation. I always wanted to finish it and now everything pointed in this direction. Once I was sure, it went "fairly quickly". All I needed was to sew day and night (as the deadline and my holiday were coming closer) and to take over the living-room floor as a design board. Of course I wouldn't have been able to do this without my family's patience and understanding. I have to acknowledge they were very supportive or maybe just worried that we'd miss our holiday ?! The quilting still was ahead of me. I wanted to stitch in the ditch to emphasize the circles and turn these secondary patterns into the main focus and then fill up with free-hand quilting. I was very excited as this was my first SID on the long-arm quilting machine. It was nice to see how the circles came alive under my fingers. I couldn't finish the quilting completely before it went to Birmingham, I still need to do the free-hand quilting. It was a compromise, as I don't think my family would have accepted if I had cancelled our holiday. I promise I will post a photo of my quilt in our blog, once it is finished. Until then you can look at the photo, taken in Birmingham.

One more thing; I have to thank Marybeth for the name of my quilt, "Midnight Minuet" . It represents the whole story of my quilt.

Summer in The Netherlands

We have been very busy over the summer, not updating the blog obviously, but then it is no secret that we really prefer sewing and quilting to doing anything else.
Now what have we been busy doing??? Well for some reason we thought we would have a quiet time over the summer regarding our machinequilting for customers. Well we are pleased to inform you that there are enough really addicted quilters in NL who keep up their patchwork and quilting all summer and don’t want to go and sit in the garden or go to the beach. Maybe it was because we had rather a lot of rain.... Now we really enjoy quilting other people’s quilts, and we will show you some of the pictures over the coming weeks, but we also like quilting our own projects!!!

So our plan was to work on our own quilts. Our friend Beryl Cadman (Gammill long-arm representative for Europe) organises the long-arm gallery each year at the Festival of Quilts in Birmingham. She usually selects a theme beforehand such as Blue and White Stars (2006) or Black and White and One other Colour (2007). This year the challenge was to completely incorporate two half yards of fabric which we received beforehand: a mauve Japanese floral with chrysanthemums and a small green floral to make a 90” by 90” quilt (about 230cm square - yes that is quite big).

Detail of Robyn Fahy's black and white and yellow quilt

Now we each had our own ideas of what we wanted to do. Marybeth was inspired by the hydrangeas in her garden. Her idea was brilliant: to use a snowball block in different sizes, and vary the colour from top left to bottom right; the centre of the blocks the flowers ranging from hydrangea blue to mauve to pink and the corners the leaves in a variety of greens. Now we don’t know exactly how many different fabrics she used in her quilt, but we think equilter did quite well out of it...

Marybeth Tawfik's "Hortensia Hideaway"

Next time more about Maria’s and Leslie’s quilts!!