Caring Hearts Quilts - Elaine Rose

One of my first quilt patterns was a Elaine Rose one, a cushion. This time I am tackling a 68" size quilt, but no doubt it will grow bigger to cover the length and width of a queen-sized bed. I basically wanted a new project to take along to my Wednesday class and came across this one in my magazine "wish list" pile! 

When I first started quilting and purchasing magazines I would put in bookmarks for all the beautiful quilts I would make one day!! Naturally I went through them again and then took a more realistic view of my bookmarks and narrowed down to the ones I would "actually" make or have the time to do it. So, this Caring Hearts quilt was in that narrowed down pile and looked to be pretty basic enough to use up some of my fabric I had started to buy over past five years.

The quilt consists of nine patches surrounded by, you guessed it, caring hearts.

The fabric I am using for the nine patches was brought through the Sew Pretty website (now the Make Cafe). The fabrics have a mixture of mushrooms, imaginary little people and ant trails! I basically went for it and cut long strips into 2.5" wide and then sewed them together. Then of course I cut and sewed them back together again! The things we do for making a quilt!!

Here is a piccie of some of my strips sewn together before I cut them up.

Landscape class

Back in May a few of us took a landscape class at Quilters Quarters. I've always wanted to learn the basics behind the art of putting pieces of fabric together to form a picture. For myself I chose a very easy image, that of a stained glass landscape with a lighthouse. A few chose very hard challenges that included sky, mountains, hills, bushes, shrubs, roads, rivers and boulders all in the one image, crikey!


The course was over two days, 10-4 each day. By 3pm on the second day I think most of us were truly fagged. As much as I love to patch and quilt, staying focused and sewing for two days is pretty full on, but I'm so pleased I gave it a go. I have yet to quilt it together, but now that I have the fundamentals behind me I can now make a start on another one with more confidence.

Here are some pics of everybody's landscapes at the end of day two:

My simple landscape with lighthouse

Judith's West Coast with swing bridge

The challenging one with all the bells and whistles

Katherine's West Coast tree

Otira Gorge with the viaduct

Julie's Milford Sound 

Before the light was added

Detail of lighthouse

Hard work focussing