09/03/2009 by Erica.

No more finished pieces but this seems to be a time for inpiration. Is it because it is spring? Maybe this is when the ideas flow, summer and autumn I develop them and in winter I actually finish. Spring is my favourite season.

Loose Threads had a meeting on Friday, everyone could make it this time (no snow!) except Liz who is still out in Pakistan and there was a lot to discuss. Mary had been putting together our Ice challenges, and everyone brought their tree pieces. We talked through a lot of ideas and I came away feeling so inspired it was difficult to sleep. The next morning the sun came out and for me the sun always inspire a need to dye for some reason. Of course life is getting in the way and I won’t be doing any this week - family visits, other projects, other work. This morning I need to finish a row for a Row Robin quilt I am making with my other group but maybe this afternoon I can get a couple of ideas down in my sketchbook. I might also make a few more leaves - an idea I have for the Nature in Art exhibition in 2011 that will require a few hundred of them. Watch this space.

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07/03/2009 by Anna.

Just reading in my popular patchwork, an exhibition by Grenville Quilters at Grateley village hall (between Andover and Sailbury) station road, Grateley,Andover,Hampshire. Open 10am-4.00pm, Admission £1.00, free parking and trader is New threads.

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02/03/2009 by Kevin.

I earlier stated

“As an ‘outsider’ to the patch world – I am totally amazed about how the perception of patchwork is so different to the reality.  The public perception of patchworking is a woman sitting in a rocking chair, cutting up old shirts and sheets with scissors and sewing them together to eventually make a quilt.”   

In continuing this viewpoint I would like to talk about the cutting up of material. The vision of using scissors is very outdated.  Today’s patchworkers use rotary cutters (a glorified pizza cutter!) to cut up material and do so on a calibrated cutting pad - as a precision paper cutter would use.  On top of this to help make the right cut an acrylic template is used.  This help to get the precision in the sections used for patch. However don’t think it is just a single acrylic template.  Any patchworker will have a large library of these acrylic templates.  In fact the collection of these templates seems to be a standard obsession among patchworkers.

So scissors are not used? Hmm - not sure where scissors are used, but there certainly is no shortage of scissors in my house.  In something that looks more like a scene from some horror movie - scissors seem to be everywhere I look in the house.  Strangely, it seems, none of these scissors can be used for anything other than material (all 100+ of them) - so if I want to cut a piece of paper I apparently have to tear it by hand, rather than use these specialist instruments (that don’t seem to be used in any case!).

Will I ever understand this world?

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