Patchwork and Quilt Days in Rijswijk

View of the Challenge Quilts at the Long-arm Quilting Gallery in Birmingham 2008.

We would like to invite you to the Patchwork en Quilt Dagen (Days) Exhibition in Rijswijk on 14-15 February 2009.

We are participating with an Exhibition of North Sea Quilters and Friends, which consists of two parts:

The Long-arm quilting challenge 2008
These quilts were originally hung at The Festival of Quilts in Birmingham in August 2008 and was sponsored by Custom Quilting Ltd. and Gammill.The exhibition consists of 13 large quilts (90 inches square) which each incorporate two challenge fabrics in addition to any other fabrics the maker chose to use in their personal design. North Sea Quilters participated in this challenge with three separate quilts.

A Selection of Long-arm Quilts, Showcasing Different Possibilities
Quilts by Irena Bluhm (USA), Beryl Cadman, Marie-Christine Chammas, Martina Curtis, Robyn Fahy, Liesbeth van der Hilst,Yvonne McKee, Mary Palmer, Tracey Pereira, Andreas Wolf and the North Sea Quilters: Maria Laza, Leslie Carol Taylor and Marybeth Tawfik.

Other Exhibitions During the Show

Feathers

Finalists of the International Quilt Competition “Feathers”, organized by the 14^de Carrefour Européen du Patchwork in Val d’Argent, France, where these quilts were first exhibited from 18th to 21th September 2008.

StiQS

StiQs is a group of enthusiastic quilters, whose approach to quilting has became more and more free with time. They pursue their own way whilst still adhering to some basic techniques. Although textile remains the most important material, it is certainly not the only one they incorparate in their work. StiQS was founded in 2006. All members completed the course “Speciality Quilting”, organized by “Kunstfactor” the Dutch national institute for amateur art. For more information see: www.stiqs.nl

Elly Prins

Elly Prins has been quilting since 1993. She has always quilted by machine and was the first quilter in The Netherlands to introduce long-arm quilting. Having followed courses in the US she has developed into a quilter with great experience in the field of machine quilting. This exhibition gives an overview of the stages of her development.

Vendors

Shops from both The Netherlands and abroad will offer a large selection of fabric, books, patterns and speciality tools during the Patchwork and Quilting Days.

Presentations and Lectures

There will be a lecture or presentation every hour on both days.

You can read more on our website www.northseaquilters.com under the News section.

For Dutch translation, please visit our website: www.northseaquilters.com under the News section.

More information www.exporijswijk.nl.

Information about advance purchase of entrance tickets: www.jobinadeboer.nl

We hope to see you at Rijswijk,

Maria, Leslie and Marybeth

North Sea Quilters Exhibition at Rooijackers

From the 8th November until Christmas you can see an exhibition of our works at Rooijackers, sewing machine shop/ official Bernina Artista dealer. You can visit the exhibition during opening hours from Monday To Friday from 10.00-18.00 and on Saturday from 10.00-17.00. To find out more about Rooijackers or download a route to their shop, please go to their website www.probleemlozenaaimachines.nl. Have a glance at the photos, taken at Mr. Rooijacker's showroom.
You can combine visiting the exhibition with a walk on the beach Promenade, a nice lunch at one of the beach restaurants and turn your excursion into a fun day-outing.



Maria Laza-Bihari

Winner of the Long-arm Quilting Voucher

North Sea Quilters organized a lottery among those quilters who visited our booth and signed up to our newsletter at the General Exhibition (Algemene tentoonstelling) of the Dutch Quilter's Guild (Quiltersgilde) in Arnhem. The prize of the lottery was a 95 Euro long-arm quilting voucher, which is an equivalent of quilting a 165 x 180 cm sized patchwork top with an intensive phantograph .

The president of the Dutch Quilter's Guild, Jeanne Hamers-van der Werff drew the winning lottery at the end of the exhibition on the 10th September.

The winner of the 95 Euro long-arm quilting voucher is Mevr. A. Sauer.

We would like to congratulate to the winner!

Jeanne Hamers-van der Werff and Leslie Carol Taylor during the drawing of the winner lottery ticket.

Participation at the ASH PTA Information Fair

In the last couple of weeks we were very busy attending various open days, fairs, patchwork exhibition, which meant less time for writing our blog. I'll try to make up for it and give an overview about these events. Let's start with the ASH PTA Information Fair at The American School of the Hague, which was hold on the 6th September. This is a great event for the parents to meet the representatives of local organizations, clubs, churches, small business. This was the second time that we took part in it and we met many familiar faces. Thanks to "Little Amsterdam" everybody knew where North Sea Quilters was. It was nice talking to all the quilt loving/admiring people and to give information to the newcomer quilters about quilting in The Netherlands. I hope this will help them to carry on with their hobby even in their new home.

Maria

Darling Husbands

This blog is about our other halves. We generally hear the story that partners have no idea why we spend our leisure time cutting up perfectly good fabric into little pieces and then sewing the pieces back together again. Well come on, seriously, isn't that obvious??!!??!!

The next point of contention is about the stash of fabric we quilters all have. Why we don't use it up. Well, the answer to that one is obvious too, I mean, you don't ask a stamp collector whether he's used up his first edition stamps to write to his Aunt Grace in South Africa, do you?

These are very general remarks we hear around us. However, we also hear a lot of stories about very supportive husbands who happily follow their wives around to all kinds of quilting venues. Now, whilst these are not our stories to tell, we are allowed to disclose facts about our own darling husbands.

Sandor has happily put up with Maria's quilts being on the living room floor (the obvious design board), between him and the television for days on end (I think he could just about use the remote control). His job means he has to travel. To faraway countries. But the silk and other fabrics he has brought back for Maria are to die for. Her North Sea Quilters reversible jacket is an example of the silk he brought back from Cambodia.

Wahid has put up with Marybeth's Gammill long-arm quilting machine being in their BEDROOM for many years. And recently has really been absolutely fantastic; he accompanied Marybeth on their last visit to Egypt to the Tentmakers of Cairo's quarters in the city*. Even though the taxi driver was not happy about going there. With Wahid as an interpreter Marybeth got to talk to some of the tentmakers, and, of course, buy some of their work.

Now Bob, has happily watched Leslie convert their garage into the North Sea Quilters Studio and in addition has agreed to accompany us to the Quilt Show in Val d'Argent in Sainte-Marie-aux-Mines again this year. Now, we know he is a francophile, and likes to take pictures of quilts, but to still agree to go after this picture he took last year ....

DHs at Val d'Argent, September 2007

So this blog is dedicated to all partners, who show an interest in what their other halves do, whatever that may be!!!!

* also covered in a recent article in QuiltersLog, the European Quilter's magazine

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.

Leslie's Quilt

So to continue from yesterday, I will talk about the quilt I made for the Festival of Quilts in Birmingham this year. Well for some time I had wanted to make a pickle dish quilt. For those of you who don’t know, a pickle dish is like a double-wedding ring but with triangles instead of squares in the rings. That’s made it a lot clearer hasn’t it?

Pickle Dish Quilt

Now I had fallen in love with the double wide quilters’ sateen we buy from Christian Lane Quilters. We have used it on the back of some of our quilts and it is truely gorgeous. Combined with a mixture of purples and greens, this quilt was going to look stunning. And using the sateen for the background would leave me plenty of space to machine quilt to my heart’s desire.
The point about the pickle dish is that it involves curved piecing, and cutting curved pieces. Now that is not easy at the best of times. Trying to cut curved pieces from 108” wide slippery sateen is hard. Piecing bias pieces of stretchy slippery sateen is practically impossible, but then I do like a challenge.
Anyway, the top got pieced and I was really happy, and then I started on the quilting. As I am the proud owner of a Statler Stitcher, I knew I could draw my own design, digitize it using Autosketch and that with the Statler’s Creative Studio programme, fit the quilting exactly where I wanted on the quilt. In the end I decided on a peony with some swirls around it and the name of the quilt became “Peony Pickle”.

Digitised Peony

At the moment we are at the Quiltersgilde ATT, the Dutch Quilt Guild’s Annual General Show in Arnhem, The Netherlands. So we will be able to tell you all about that on one of our next blogs.

Leslie Carol Taylor's quilt in the long-arm gallery at the Festival of Quilts 2008