The quilting world, like the wider community, is full of tales of people overcoming adversity to do remarkable things. Today I draw your attention to the beautiful quilts of textile artist Esther Aliu. Esther specialises in stencils and is an accomplished domestic machine quilter. Her work is extraordinary and all the more so when you consider that she has experienced serious vision impairments. I am delighted to see that Esther has been selected as guest artist at this year’s Victorian Quilters’ Showcase at the Craft & Quilt Fair from 24th July 2007 at the Melbourne Exhibition Centre. If you can’t get to see her special exhibition of 24 selected quilts, take a look at Esther’s blog to track the journey of her latest masterpiece that she completed in just 3 weeks.

Disclaimer: I freely admit that I warmed to Esther from the moment I first met her and she uttered the words to gladden any blogger’s heart “I read your blog every day and am so inspired…”

A pleasant diversion while I was in New Zealand was a trip to The Ribbon Rose in Ellerslie. Their fabric selection is not very extensive but I rarely buy fabric these days anyway. By contrast, their selection of embroidery and stitching threads is stupendous. I couldn’t resist this overdyed Perle 8 thread by Threadworx:

This diagram is for the benefit of Chantel and anyone else who couldn’t work out the blobs from the other day:

As Lola correctly noted, it is the silhouette of a woman looking down. The illuminated outline of her features can be discerned on the right hand side of the blobs.

The theme for this year’s Guild challenge is Coast and Country. Members are permitted to focus on either theme element or both. (See the Guild website for more details.) Quilts are due on 28 September but, since I will be away, I am delivering mine this week. I can’t show the entire 50×70cm quilt but here is a detail shot of Allagai Bay (a companion piece to Tudibaring):

The sleeve is on. Now I just have to do the label and you will recall from a previous post how much I don’t enjoy this particular step…

In You Can’t Go Home Again, fellow “Twelve” Karen has written about returning, as an adult, to the home you grew up in. Somehow you see things differently. With recent events, I have been recalling visits to my grandmother’s house. In my lifetime, she lived in a four locations but the modest decor rarely changed. Amongst her wall ornaments was a simple black and gold cut-out stencil - a kind of optical illusion that I remember squinting at as a child. I transferred the image to fabric using Shiva paintstiks with a freezer paper stencil. What do you see?
  
And yes, I did consider using this as the basis of my “illumination” 12×12 quilt which is due on 1 August (US time). After trying out some quilting (click on the first version above) I decided against it. I quilted around the “blobs” (which is all the Laundry King can see) and experimented with some “grid” quilting but the remaining puffiness bugs me. Besides, plain black fabric catches lint and dust and is a pain to photograph…

Here’s a sneak preview of a project coming up in the September issue of Down Under Quilts. You can see the entire quilt if you join me for my next Power Stripping workshop on Friday, 25 July at Horsley Patch.

Be quick, the class is nearly full!

My favourite play thing from yesterday’s “play day” was a rubber mesh pot mat that Erica picked up from a $2 shop. It worked well both as a stamp and for rubbing:

Erica, Pamela and I got together today to play with stamping, painting, rubbings, paintstiks and so on. Who could resist this table of goodies that Pamela had set up?
And here are some of the colourful results:

More pictures tomorrow…

I’ve previously posted a photo of my maternal grandparents in their youth and now I share this photo of my paternal grandparents, Grandma and Grandpa Smith:

This shot was one of several photos that my father picked out to put up on a notice board at a family gathering last week. Later on we spent some time going through other photos and papers and started scanning documents to distribute amongst the greater family. The exercise reminded me once again of the value in preparing proper photo albums and recording dates, events and names. My grandmother was not the world’s greatest photographer, cut off heads and crazy angles were typical, but she took many photos AND she got them processed. What state are your precious photos in?