Spring and Fractured QAL

Tomorrow is officially the first day of Spring here in New Zealand, according to the weather forecast today and tomorrow would be lovely fresh springlike days, for once they look as if they may be spot on! Today there is a blue sky and sunshine, birds were singing like crazy just on dawn and were trying to have me feed them about a half hour earlier than my usual time so their body clocks must be changing gear and thinking about getting into baby raising mode soon.

We did have one spring-like day during the week and I took a photo of the little cottage named Green Gables down in Howick, this is the base for the Howick Art Group and my husband and I are members, John is the painter. They are open Friday, Saturday and Sunday only and have two rooms with work displayed by members and each month there is an extra room given over to a solo exhibition. Three years ago I had a quilt exhibition there (bear in mind these rooms are only small)  which I really enjoyed, there is no room to hang a full size quilt but I had a number of very small pieces in addition to a couple of throws and table runners and I am booked to hold another one in February - slight panicky feeling - as I am not really organised so I'm really going to have get my skates on. I spent some time last night getting ideas together and working out how many pieces would look good in the small space. I could take my quilt ladder down which will help with the space problem. Hopefully I will also have a few felted pieces and probably two or three of my Silk series using the sari silk.

You can see it's a cute little place especially at this time of year with the daffodils in full bloom. It is more or less surrounded by immense oak trees which are just glorious whether in full leaf or showing their bare branches and in Autumn the pathway and outdoor exhibition area are covered in acorns, reminds me of primary school days tramping home from school scrunching through the dried Autumn leaves.

One piece from my exhibition last time was this schoolhouse wall hanging, this is a photo taken in the wrong position on a windy day! I had  a number of fat quarters of fabric from Fig Tree sitting on the shelf waiting to be used and they seemed just right for this one.

On my list of things to do, or rather for J to do is set up a good area outside for shots of quilts so if the good weather holds I might get lucky.

The quilt for our daughter is still a work in progress, a work yet to be started is the quilt for our youngest grandson and my progress with cutting for fabrics for the Fractured QAL is coming along.

Just finished cutting the strips yesterday - the greens and yellows on the left and the other strips, which I know I posted last time, below. Just starting to sort the darks out today and I'm finding that's the tricky bit deciding which fabrics I want to put in there! You can see I have used a lot of Kaffe Fassett/Philip Jacobs fabrics in there along with a few batiks so the question is whether I have sufficient darks in the range from the above mentioned designers. also pulled a large assortment of dyed fabrics which could be a possibility and there are some very dark batiks on my table so today will be spent as a play day. Another alternative is to not go too dark but medium dark - we'll see.

One week to go now to start date for  FQAL

Enjoy your weekend

Maureen