2016 New Quilt Bloggers Hop

Hello, and welcome to my corner of the Quilt Blogiverse. I’m Sue and I live in Perth,

Western Australia. I work full-time auditing surveys of new strata plans and I’m trained in Cartography (map making), so yes, I am a maths geek.

I love gardening, walking, swimming, moonlight, animals, time with friends, time alone, and birdsong. And sewing.  I also knit and fancy myself as a bit of a diy-er. I’m never happy unless I have a project to think about and I just love planning. I am the queen of the to-do list. My favourite TV shows are murder mysteries, my favourite movie (currently, they change frequently) is Rango and my favourite books are Bridge of Birds by Barry Hughart, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee and A Painted House by John Grisham.

I think I started quilting because I have always had a love for fabric and, basically, I needed something to make with it. The quilts hanging in the LQS were beautiful and learning new skills appealed as well. My first couple of quilts were applique projects I found in quilt magazines and they went together simply enough to make me believe that I could conquer this skill mountain (the naïve confidence of the beginner!). I’ve learnt my quilting skills through books, magazines, videos and now on-line classes. I love on-line quilting classes for the ability to learn from the quilting experts we would normally never see here in Australia.

I’ve been quilting for around 15 years but there was a span of a few years where I didn’t  actually sew any quilts but worked on home dec projects and did a bit of garment sewing. During this time I kept my hand in by buying fabric (buying fabric is part of quilting don’t you think?) and sorting it into piles for future projects. None of them ever saw the light of day and by the time I was ready to get back into it I had an overwhelming fabric stash. While I was having a break, the modern quilt movement was born and I found the quilts attracted me a lot more than traditional ones and large-scale blocks and negative space were appealing for my limited sewing time.

I started quilt blogging because I wanted to be part of the on-line quilting community and (I don’t want to start an argument here) blogs appeal to me more than Instagram. My first post was an entry into the 2015 Pantone Color of the Year challenge run by Adrienne at On the Windy Side and Anne from Play Crafts. My goal is to one day publish unique and original quilt patterns that go viral in the quilting community (never set small goals ;-) ) but until then it remains a place where I can show and tell and be part of it all.

My favourite quilt is definitely this up-sized version of Lyn from Lily’s Quilts Double Fat Jack tutorial. It has everything I look for – gorgeous fabric, simple large block(s) that are fast to put together and it turned out – hooray!

My BLOGGING TIP is that you should follow your own blog, that way if there are any problems with your feed you won’t be relying on your readers to come looking for you months later and let you know.

My QUILTING (and second blogging) TIP is compare apples with apples. There are a lot of blogs out there with masses of followers showing beautifully made quilts with a well-developed individual style. You’re wondering how you’re ever going to get to that same place. My exercise for you is to go to your favourite blogs and look for an archive in the sidebar. If they have one showing you can then find their first post. Go to it and read it. Look! They started out in just the same place as you are now. Feel better? Great, my job is done. (I've done this myself, I only found one that this didn’t work for – if you go there you’ll know who I mean. If you press me for initials I’ll tell you.)

Quilt-alongs, bees, swaps, fabric and colour challenges, link-ups, round robins, real-time sew alongs on instagram  -   my QUESTIONS for you are what sort of on-line quilt challenges do you like to participate in? and what would you like to see or see more of?

It’s hard to believe we’ve made it to the final week of the 2016 New Quilt Bloggers Hop and we are packing our bags to leave and returning to our normal lives. We have become as close as strangers thrown together into a Facebook group could be as we struggled to make sense of blogging tech issues. So long and keep in touch *sob*. I’d like to give a big thankyou to Yvonne at Quilting Jetgirl, Cheryl at Meadow Mist Designs and Stephanie at Late Night Quilter for running the whole shebang. It’s been a great experience and I’ve enjoyed it immensely!

Here’s to the future for all of us!