I have converted another fabric book page to Journal quilt. This one was to record workshops that I did with Katie Pasquini when she visited OZ in 1987…It has a Photo from the workshop (the actual photo is stitched on), her signature (I have signatures on fabric from most of the tutors that I have done workshops with) and I made a miniature of the colour wheel from the workshop. This Page was wide enough so rather than border it I added a bar of fabrics from the workshop across the top to make it up to size.
For the colour workshop we each took along 2 squares each (2 1/2 inch squares) of 50 fabrics, we kept one pile and put the other in the centre of the table, then Katie opened a suitcase and tipped out a mountain of fabric squares with which we happily played all day….At the end of the day katie said that it was her last colour workshop in OZ and that she wasn’t paying excess baggage to take all the squares back to the USA, so could we go through them and pick out the basic colour wheel colours so that she would have enough to start again and could we put the rest, which would be all the drabber colours, in the garbage bin….We did put them in the garbage bin and then we looked in the bin, looked at each other and we took them out of the bin again…
I took home a plastic shopping bag of squares and as I sorted them some were drab even ugly, some were not quilting fabrics and some were cut very off grain, so some ended up going straight back in the bin….Of the rest my sister in law took enough to make a double bed quilt…This detail from my Hearts and Flowers Quilt shows how I used some for crazy quilting….
Those little squares of Fabric are also responsible for another of my UFOs….I picked out the pinks and blues and sorted them into lights and darks and used them to make a medallion centre (36″ x 42″) for a quilt….
And still there was more which got packed into a shoe box where they lived for 15 years…2002 my niece Lily, then aged 6, could sew on the hand wound toy sewing machine and had shown such patients using it that when I got sick of threading it I offered to let her sew on the Big sewing machine…To practice I gave her the shoe box of squares, they where perfect for her to practice with, they where small enough to handle and as they had already been thrown in the garbage bin once it didn’t matter if they went of the back of the machine and into the garbage bin again…..I showed her how to put the squares into pairs and put a guide mark on the machine and showed her how to use it…well she hadn’t done very many seams before she was doing a pretty good 1/4″ seam….and she hadn’t stitched very many more seams before she asked me if they could be a quilt….Talk about ambitious, I explained to her that it would take a lot of stitching but if she was prepared to do it then They could be a quilt…I straightened one side of each pair, pinned them into a 4 patch and showed her how to stitch the longer seams…..Her older sisters and brother assisted with the ironing and squaring up the 4 patches which lily stitched into pairs and then joined the pairs into squares and joined the squares until she had herself a quilt…we added a narrow pink borders and a dark binding….I did some straight line quilting on it and then Lily’s 14 year old sister Lauren added free machine quilted pictures….This quilt got its name ‘Lily love hear’ when the sewing machine started to play up and Lauren and I where looking with horror at the loopy stitches on the back of a heart that she had just quilted, Lily looked at it and said “there’s a Love heart on my quilt, that means I love my quilt” Those loopy stitches are still on the back of the quilt. Lily’s quilt won the childrens encouragement award at the Canberra Quiltes Exhibition that year…and it was another colour lesson for me because they really where a miss matched lot of fabrics and I would never have thought that they would look as good as they do….And if you think that I am proud of these kids, you would be right.
 And this is all that remains of what must have been thousands of fabric squares.
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