What Are Quilters Blogging About Today?

 Today on the Endeavourers Challenge blog we are revealing our responses to this quarter's Challenge - Patterns in Nature. Now, given that I proposed this particular challenge you would think that I would find it really easy to come up with a quilt to fit the theme, wouldn't you? Alas, no that was not the case, I dithered for ages over what to make. 

Then one day this photo popped up on my screen. The photo was taken a few years ago when we visited Northern Ireland and Donegal and went to see the Giant's Causeway. The site ...

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 There have been some very strange fabrics passing through my sewing machine recently! I love making clothes for the grandchildren, as you know, but it is especially fun to make them costumes. 

I knew as soon as I saw this mummy wrap fabric from  Kids Print Fabrics that our elder grandson would love a mummy costume for Halloween. As I wanted him to get more than one nights use out of it, I made it as a separate top and leggings with a balaclava to complete the outfit, so that he can wear them later as pyjamas without the balaclava ...

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 This quarter's theme for the Endeavourers Challege was Collage and, I must admit that I really struggled to come up with something to fit the theme for most of the quarter :( 

 I finally finished "Floating Around", above, on the day of the deadline! 

At a Textile Printing Summer School last year, I had put together these pieces of printed fabric but not progressed further with them so they lay in a cupboard for a year. The theme for the summer school had been leaves and grasses and, at the time, I felt that, although I really liked the colours ...

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 This quarter's theme for The Endeavourers challenge was maps. 

As you can see we love a good map :) Indeed, the front map in the row is from a map maker right here in the town, who is the first port of call when a road trip is in the planning.

My original plan for the challenge was a (rather) ambitious revolving set of maps based upon the border fluctuations in the UK and Ireland over the last 100 years. Fortunately, common sense prevailed and that plan was shelved :)

Instead, I took my inspiration from these maps and an endeavour ...

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 The theme for this quarter's Endeavourers Challenge is Animal Kingdom. As ever, it took me ages to decide what to do for the Challenge but, a recent trip to Mull provided the perfect inspiration. 

Our younger grandson shares his name with a Highland Cow character in a series of books that we have bought for him over the years. Living in Northumberland he doesn't get the opportunity to see real-live Highland Cows that often, so he was delighted when we sent him this photo from our holiday trip. 

His bedtime story pick often features his namesake books, so ...

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 The next reveal for the latest Endeavourers Challenge is due today. Unusually for this quarter's project we had no theme to work to, which sounds like it should have made life easier, but it really didn't! Being a procrastinator at the best of times, having free rein to choose a topic for the Challenge just ramped up the procrastination :)

 

Finally, and I do mean finally, I decided to create a companion piece for an earlier Challenge piece "Making Waves", which was my project in November 2020 for the theme "The Sea". 

 

 Making Waves was inspired by the sea ...

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 It is time for another quarterly reveal from the Endeavourers Art Quilt Group. We were down to the very last suggested theme for this quarter which is Emotions/Feelings. I am sure that you will not be surprised to know that even although I knew that this was the only theme left, I had zero inspiration for much of the last three months :)

Finally I decided to use the language of flowers as my representation of an emotion, and the emotions/feelings I chose to depict were Joy and Gratitude, which is symbolised by a pink rose. This quote might ...

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 It is time for another Endeavourers Challenge reveal! This quarter the theme was "a newspaper headline", well didn't that provide endless scope! 

There have been lots of apocalyptic headlines in the last year or so, but I decided to go for something a bit different for the inspiration for my quilt. Like many of you, I suspect, our summer holiday this year was a "staycation", which as we live by the sea wasn't exactly a hardship :) There are no beach huts nearby, but if there were I wonder would they be selling for the record sums described by ...

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 It is time to reveal the latest Endeavourers Challenge quilt, this quarter the theme was Colour Theory. I thought that I had this theme sussed when I bought a postcard of Munsell's Colour System in a Dundee museum nearly two years ago! Hah!, no such luck, when I started researching the Colour System I realised that it would take a lot more research and a lot of fabric, or fabric painting to do the theme justice, so I ditched that idea :)

Not being of a particularly scientific bent, I wanted to avoid tieing myself up in knots with systems ...

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 The start of a new month and it's time for another Endeavourers  reveal and the theme for this quarter is Memories. As ever the problem is pinning down a project for the theme from the multitude of ideas floating around in my head :)

 

 During my deliberations I kept coming back to Alzheimer's devastating effect on my Dad's memory in the last couple of years of his life. Lost Connections above is my attempt at representing some of the confusion and frustration that he, and we, felt as the disease took an ever stronger grip on him.

 

 I ...

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 It is reveal day for this quarter's Endeavourers Challenge, this time the theme for the Challenge was "The Sea".

 

I have called my piece "Making Waves", it is made with strips of upcycled denim for the waves with quilting cotton scraps for the island in the distance. 

 

 Over the years I have amassed a store of cast-off denim jeans that my sons either grew out of or decided were no longer their style, so I was delighted to have the perfect excuse to dig them out and start cutting into them. 

 

 This is the view from my sewing room ...

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It is time to reveal our projects for The Endeavourers Quilt group for this quarter. The theme was "A scene from a book". No shortage of inspiration there then :)

When I was clearing out my parents flat last year I came across my Mum's old recipe books.



Tucked inside that battered notebook of handwritten recipes and magazine cuttings was this little recipe book from Be-Ro, a leading flour miller in the UK. The book was published in the 1950's, and as my parents were married in 1954, I am assuming that my Mum was a new bride when ...

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It's the first of the month and the reveal day for the next challenge of The Endeavourers Art Quilt group.

The theme for this quarter was "Wishes", well that certainly taxed my poor brain! Once again the hardest part of the quarterly challenge was actually coming up with something in my head that would fit the theme, the second hardest part is then trying to create what is in my head :)

Fortunately, in all of my musings on the theme of "Wishes" I came across this old Scottish proverb "If wishes were horses, beggars would ride". The saying was ...

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Today is the next reveal in the Endeavourers Quilt Group, this quarter the theme for our quilts was "Dreams" and it was a bit of a struggle I have to say. My original plan for the challenge was to create a Dreamcatcher but I could not get what I wanted, something transparent and flimsy, to work as a quilt, so with a week to go to the deadline, it was time for a rethink!

Wynken, Blynken and Nod!

Thinking about dreams got me to thinking, naturally, about sleep and then to the rhymes and songs we used as parents, and ...

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