Thursday, July 3, 2014

A farewell quilt.

As you have probably guessed from the previous post our retiring school principal, Dionne, is an extremely well loved and respected member of our community. Some of the crafty parents at the school wanted to put our efforts towards creating a keepsake for her. This is what eventuated.
A sumptuously warm plum coloured quilt made from recycled jumpers.

With so many crafty people participating, was it a case of too many cooks spoil the broth? Never. In fact we proved the other adage to be true: many hands do in fact make light work. 

We enjoyed each other's company, shared our skills and talents - along with tea, sunshine,stories and cake. And their was plenty of warm unspoiled broth too.

Justine washed the jumpers, and then, with my industrial cutting machine, I was naturally in charge of cutting the many 12 cm x 12 cm square (under strict advice from task master Karen to be accurate! Yikes...no pressure.) 

We met at Jenny's warm light filled house and lay the squares out on the huge bench. Next thing multiple hands were rearranging and changing contrasting squares in a fairly hilarious felty crafty game of tetris!

Each row was labeled and stacked then the dueling sewing machines were brought out and lifted onto Jenny's generous dining table (I must point out that everything at Jenny's place is larger than life and of generous proportions - from the huge welcoming front door, to the huge sun-filled windows, to the huge old dog, Betty and most of all to the huge generous nature of Jenny herself.) 




Karen, an experienced professional maker, backed the quilt with a natural coloured linen and made her own bias binding from wool suiting.

Then all hands were on deck for hand stitching leaf designs and squares.Jenny finished it with a hand embroidered message in the corner and a colour co-ordinated bag to keep the quilt in. 
As you can see, Dionne loved it.  
And we loved making it. I learned so much from these women. Community-minded crafty company - the best.

2 comments:

  1. Oh WOW. That is just beautiful. Lucky principal! Can’t imagine anything nicer to snuggle under in this rotten weather.

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  2. What a beautiful thing you girls made! Something I'm sure Dionne will always treasure.

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