Christmas Aftermath

Yesterday afternoon we joined the exodus from Wellington. It took us 100 minutes to travel 21 km on the national highway - what a disgrace! There was no accident holding the traffic up, just the bottlenecks at Waikanae and Otaki.
I know, my moaning about it isn't going to change it - this has been a problem for many years.
I wanted to show you a photo of a 'Santa' gift to each of the girls - it was inexpensive but will be heaps of fun! This is Rebecca watering her garden at night with an aquatorch!

It also comes with a red and a green cover so you can change the light!

Happy Holidays!

 Wishing you all happy holidays, great time with family, time to relax and enjoy good food.
Thank you for visiting my blog and leaving comments.

The Quilting Is Finished

Yes, I've finally finished the quilting on another Symposium challenge. And because I can't show you the quilt, here's a teaser:

Thanks to Leah Day for some of the great quilting designs I have used. You see the feather on the light fabric at the top left hand? well, that's the ONLY feather quilting I have done in the 1m x 0.6m background. There are no flower designs either.
Just have to do the binding, decide on a title and put on the hanging sleeve.
Yippee!!

We Are Published!

S.I.X. has a double page spread in the latest New Zealand Quilter magazine which arrived in my mail box this morning. This is the 6" x 12" challenge Facets of a Rectangle where we exhibited at Taylor Jensen Gallery (you can see the photos in the August archives). I am pretty excited that 2 of my pieces were chosen to be published, and the biggest photo is the triptych of the fantails. I have to admit that I was quite concerned with my entries, because they were so very different than the others' works. I mean, look at the monarch triptych! and the bark selection! In the end, I guess you have to be true to yourself. It was an exhibition of 6 individuals' work and we all have different strengths, time to trial/experiment, and vastly different ideas. Sure, the others sold pieces and I didn't (I was a little sad about that), but then some of the world's greatest artists didn't have their work recognised until after they had died (please, I don't want that to happen!!).

S.I.X. Have a Play Day

Well, we have all been very busy, but had promised ourselves a play day and also to sort out our next group challenge. Fortunately it was a warm afternoon without too much wind, so we could dry our things outside - also we needed plenty of ventilation for what we were working with. In the USA you would use Citra Solv, here in NZ we have found that D-Limonene (from a cleaning supplies store) does the same thing. Some of us tried different magazines, but, believe me National Geographic has the BEST results.

Sue used plenty of liquid!

This one I had plastic wrap over the top

Sue used lots of cleaning fluid and lost some colour from her pages, but the effects were very dramatic. Cheryl found ghost pictures of people appearing from the reverse of the page or the opposite - so cool! You have to use gloves otherwise your fingers get covered in printers ink - which does come off, but stays under the nails for longer.
I think that next time I will halve the magazine first and have a look at the pages deciding which ones to fold, cover with plastic wrap, etc. Working with damp gloves it was quite difficult to separate pages, especially when you needed to tear them out and lay them out to dry. But a GREAT afternoon.
Now to using the pages - some will end up being scanned and printed on to fabric - who needs to buy when you can make your own - even over-printing!