My CQ@10 challenge piece at Festival of Quilts.

To celebrate Contemporary Quilt's tenth anniversary, we were set a challenge to produce a quilt between one and five meters in diameter, inspired by Tony Howell's photograph of East Poole Tin Mine in Cornwall, used with permission (see below.)

I have called it, 'Sardines and tin, a marriage made in Cornwall'. I used black cotton sateen for the background, with a variety of cotton threads for the sky, sea, foreground and border, and a black thread for the quilting of the building and wheel. 

I think the black and white photograph is very powerful, and I was very drawn to the cloud formations in the sky. I decided to make the most of the sky, by free motion quilting around the structure of the tin mine itself, and I also felt that the introduction of too much colour would be a distraction from these elements, so chose to use fairly neutral shades for the threads, with the structure of the mine silhouetted in black against the sky.

I also have a small piece in the challenge set by the European Quilt Association's exhibition which you can see above. This challenge was to be a small quilt based on the title 'Crossroads', and my entry above, is called 'Mapping my Life'. I appliqued the curved strips of cream cotton fabric onto a black and cream printed cotton, and outlined them by couching down black knitting wool, before free motion quilting patterns in black thread along the multiple crossing roads.

A close-up of the above quilt.

If you manage to get to the festival of Quilts at the NEC in Birmingham over the next four days, you will be able to see my two small, and very modest contributions to what will be a wonderful exhibition of some of the most fantastic quilts, produced by some of the most talented quilters' in the world!

I'm certainly looking forward to it, and will no doubt have some exciting images to show you in my next post......so, watch this space, or better still, get along to the NEC and see for yourself.