One of my favourite sites is Astronomy Picture of the Day, isn’t this one a beauty? It’s a Meteor and Moonbow over Wallaman Falls, Australia.
But I love this astronomy picture quilt too, by quilter and astronomy enthusiast Judy W. Ross. It’s definitely different and there’s such a lot of work involved in it, it really makes me want to get stuck into quilting.
The quilts below are more traditional than the Song of the Clyde quilts I think but there’s still loads of work in them as you can see. I’m just sorry that my photos aren’t great, I had to quickly snap them while there were no people standing in front of the quilts, it was so crowded.
So pretty and girly.
I don’t know about you, but I would love to have this as the view out of my window, rainbow and all.
I should have gone around taking notes. This one has a poem on it but I haven’t a clue what it says. The collage/quilt makes me think of “granny’s hielan’ hame” though. It looks like Loch Lomond with all the wee islands. Deceptively naive looking and it’s another location I would like to live in.
I just have a few more photos of the Creative Stitches exhibition at Glasgow to show – but I’ll leave them for another post!
As I was saying before, it’s sometimes difficult to see the difference between quilts and embroideries. I think it’s probably just that some wadding/batting is used in the quilt whereas embroideries are just layers of material and stitches. Anyway, these ones are definitely quilts as they were part of an exhibition of the Quilters’ Guild.
The name of the exhibition was The Song of the Clyde, the Clyde is obviously the river which runs through Glasgow and was/is famous for shipbuilding. I suppose these were quilted by the Glasgow branch of the guild.
I think this one of cranes is my favourite.
But this one was fab too.
I was so busy chatting to the lady from the Quilter’s Guild that I didn’t get a chance to read what this one was all about. Gorgeous colours though!
The one below is much more muted but still lovely.
I presume the red shapes are the propellers of ships.
And this one is made from an old linen map which has been sliced up and interspersed with fabric which has been quilted.
There were so many beautiful quilts on show, this is just a few of them. Of course there were lots of DO NOT TOUCH notices about, which was understandable, but honestly I had to go about hanging on to my camera round my neck because they’re all so temptingly tactile looking.
I went to the Creative Stitches Exhibition at the SECC in Glasgow on Sunday, it was the first time I had been so I didn’t really know what to expect. It was hoaching/heaving with women and just a few men (not mine)! All sorts of crafts were featured and there were plenty of knitters and crochet folks about but I was a wee bit disappointed by the knitted things which were on display. As far as I could see there didn’t seem to be much in the way of traditional knitting nor anything really innovative. Thinking back to the 1980s which was when there was a last big resurgence in the craft I remember it as being more exciting somehow – yes knitting can be exciting!
It was quite difficult to get photos but I did just manage to snap some of the Downton Abbey costumes – as you can see.
I took lots of photos of quilts and embroideries as that’s mainly what I’m interested in and I thought I’d start off with this one, a tribute to Jane Austen. It’s about a metre square I think and although this was part of the Quilter’s Guild Exhibition it also has a lot of embroidery on it.
In fact I think it’s often quite difficult to figure out what is meant to be embroidery or quilting. The two crafts seem to cross over into each other’s territory a lot. I would call quite a lot of the exhibits collages, but whatever they’re called I’m just awestruck by the beauty of some of them. I’ll be posting some real crackers soon!