It’s hard to make a dull coloured quilt. Tonal difference is always important, but it feels a lot harder when tone becomes all you have to work with.

Earlier this year I entered a quilt into the Aotearoa Quilters annual colour challenge. It’s been running since 2013. The first colour was red, (see one of my red entried below) and they’ve been through most colours since then, so last year they switched it up to Colours of Spring, and this year it was Colours of Winter.

Now that’s always going to throw a curveball into a colour challenge! Winter is not exactly known for being colourful. But it’s a challenge, so I guess being challenging is part and parcel of the whole deal.

My Colours of Spring quilt was called ‘Season of Potential’ and featured a nest on a pink background with bright blue song thrush eggs. It now resides in it’s forever home in Australia. When pondering what to create for Winter, I decided to carry on the nest theme, and yes, I think it will work for the last two seasons if AQ decide to finish off the season theme.

I find winter to be a season of grey. We never get snow where I live and only the occasional frost, and we have lots of evergreen trees, so it seems like there should be plenty of colour around, but it just seems like everything is greyed off. Even the sky is dull, we don’t get a lot of those brilliant cold clear days that further south does. Can you tell that winter isn’t my favourite season?

So I pulled grey fabrics from my stash to see if I could find an appropriately wintery feeling sky background and I came up with a hand painted one. Next was the tree branch. I wanted some colour in the quilt, so I chose a strong purplish brown for a good contrast against the background. Then I began to build my nest.

I worked with pre fused fabrics and cut slim strips. I learnt from my spring quilt to fuse down a silk organza base first to avoid ‘holes’ in the base of the nest, then build up the curved walls, ironing each strip down as I went. I kept the darker strips to the bottom and added a few lighter ones as I got near the top for definition. I forgot to photograph my winter nest in construction, but here are some photos of my spring nest, you can see when I had to add an organza base to cover holes. You’ll also notice that my spring nest is a little more of a bird’s eye view (pun intended!) to highlight the eggs, but I wanted my winter nest to really look like a nest and not a blob, so it has a slightly more side-on viewpoint.

Lastly I added windblown leaves to add to the wintery effect, and machine quilted everything down, adding twigs to the branches and extra texture to the nest. I titled it ‘Season of Quiescence.’

I must have conveyed something Wintery, as I was very pleased to win a merit award for my efforts. Thanks to Aroha Quilts who sponsored my prize. I’m looking forward to spending my voucher with them next time I see them at a show!

These quilts will travel Aotearoa for a year, check the schedule below if you would like to see either of the AQ travelling exhibitions – Colours of Winter and the members juried challenge, Winging It. I have a quilt in both!

September	Kapiti Coast Quilters Otaihanga, Kapiti Coast	Winging It	13 – 14 September
September	Christchurch Quilters	Colours of Winter	25 – 28 September
October	Golden Bay Patchwork and Quilt Guild	Winging It Colours of Winter	26 – 27 October
October	Auckland Festival of Quilts	Winging It Colours of Winter	31 October – 2 November
2026
May	Rose City Quilters, Palmerston North	Winging It Colours of Winter	5 May
May	Taranaki Quilting and Patchworkers	Winging It Colours of Winter	15 – 17 May
June	Whangamata Patch and Quilt	Winging It Colours of Winter	30 May to 1 June

Howdy!

It’s been a while since I dropped in to your inbox, but seeing as I’ve a whole new bunch of subscribers I thought it was time to say hello again. 

Last weekend I was in Christchurch for The Great New Zealand Quilt Show. What a whirlwind! About a year ago I made the crazy committment to be a merchant at the show, selling my hand-dyed fabric and threads. So that was me, frantically planning and preparing for the last few months. Plus I wanted to have quilts hanging in the show, so there was also some busy creative stitching happening.

And it was a big success! I had loads of fun, saw heaps of friends and made some new ones, got lovely compliments on my work, and I made enough $ that I’d consider doing it again (let’s not beat around the bush, I couldn’t do it just for the love!)

Now that I’m home, and the next deadline isn’t looming, I’m a little bit aimless. Do you get that? When you’ve been super busy, but then the goal is reached, and you’re a little bit lost? The to-do list was bulging and then suddenly seems sparse, with nothing urgent enough to spark motivation?

What do you do to kick yourself into gear again? I’m going to do some serious journalling, studio tidying, and UFO sorting so see what sifts to the top, but I’d love to hear your ideas. 

Charlotte

My Quilts at The Great NZ Quilt Show

I was thrilled to have five quilts accepted to hang at the show. It’s a juried show, which means quilts are chosen from photographs to make a quality, cohesive exhibition. I also had two quilts hanging in the challenge sections; one of which is off to it’s new home in Australia shortly and the other will travel around NZ for the next year.

Here are two of my quilts that were hanging in the main exhibition. Both are about vines, but in different ways….

Vine 1.0

This is a bit of a departure from my usual style, it was fun to play with and respond to shapes that had featured in my 100 days project paper cutting sketchbook from a few years ago. I entered this into the modern category.

64cm x 130cm

Made from linen, upcycled fabrics, hand-dyed embroidery thread.

Techniques: Hand applique, machine piecing, hand embroidery, hand quilting, free motion and ruler quilting.

$800

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Tangled

The vine motif has long been used as the supporting act in traditional quilting. I decided to elevate it to the starring role in this quilt, giving it a contemporary colour palate and drawing the viewer in to the beauty a vine has in its own right.

60cm x 144cm

Made with hand-dyed fabric and upcycled textiles.

Techniques: hand-dyeing, upcycling, raw-edge fusible applique, free motion quilting.

$900

Thoughts on Feedback

The Great NZ Quilt Show is run by Aotearoa Quilters, the National Association of quilters in New Zealand. One of their missions is to educate, and to support this they ensure that their show judges provide feedback to exhibitors. 

I’ve made quilts for more than 20 years now, and I’ve heard many people talk about whether you should or should not get feedback, how helpful or unhelpful feedback can be, how they don’t want to enter because they don’t like feedback, or they didn’t get feedback and they wanted it….so many contrasting conversations!

I think the judges did a good job on feedback at this show, it’s not an easy job. Personally, when I am asked for feedback I want to give supportive comments that point out what was successful, but I also want to give the creator some direction to improve – because otherwise what is the point? I dug through some of my older writings and found this extract from my speech from when I judged the Auckland Festival of Quilts in 2022. 

“One of the major requirements of being a judge is to be able to remove ‘self’ from the process and to be as objective as possible.

We take it very seriously – we are quilters too and know how special our quilts can become to us. We spend so much time with them they can become like our babies! So we know that a misplaced or misinterpreted comment can wound and negatively impact our joy of making.

But I also believe feedback can help us on our quilting journey, it can give us a new perspective on our work. I hope that if you receive constructive feedback from the judges, that you too will be able to remove ‘self’ and look at it objectively before you agree, disagree, or flush the comment sheet down the loo!”

Do you find it easy to receive feedback or a critique? It’s both a skill to receive as well as to give.

New Thread Colour

At the show I asked for votes to decide the name of my new thread colour, a vibrant orange. The choices were: 

1. Valiant Charger (my husband’s first car was an orange Valiant Charger!)
2. Traffic Cone Season (it’s a NZ themed joke about road works…)
3. Orange Roughy (a deep-sea Pacific Ocean fish that can live for a hundred years)
4. Copper Butterfly (a native NZ butterfly with several subspecies)

Funny thing though – choices one, three and four all got the same number of votes. So I sent an emergency votey email to my stitching group, and the new name for my thread is:

ORANGE ROUGHY!

P.S. The beautiful pink fabric is a tea towel from Flossiphy.art who was also a merchant at the GNZQS. She does lovely stuff, and I’m always happy to support another NZ artist. You should check her out.

Thanks for reading, happy stitching!

So excited that the symposium class list has been released. There are over 100 classes so quilters have a lot of choice!

I decided to do a little video so I can expand on details for the three classes I am scheduled to teach. Day 1 and 2 is my learn how to hand-dye fabric class, called ‘Colour with Texture’ and by the end of it, you’ll have metres of beautiful, individual fabrics AND you’ll be confident to go home and keep creating more. Day 3 is a one day class called ‘Imagery by Stencil’ and it’s all about the wonderful tool of freezer paper stencils. So much fun and so much scope to experiment! Day 4 and 5 is an expanded version of my ‘Trees and Triangles’ class, where we will paint cotton fabric in a colour wash to cut up and piece into triangle borders, and paint silk organza to layer up and use as tree foliage.

Anyhoo! Enough writing and reading, have a watch and you’ll see all my class samples and get all the deets. Feel free to drop me a line with any questions you have.

Artist Statement: I love to watch birds in my garden and their natural habitats, unconstrained by cages. These birds began as a study of movement and light. How could I capture the sense of freedom of flight?

36.5 cm x 76 cm (14 inches x 30 inches)

Hand-printed cotton, hand-dyed silk organza and cotton, raw-edge applique and free-motion quilting.

For sale $NZD385 plus any postage required. This textile art work comes with a hanging sleeve ready to hang on your wall. Update: This quilt is now SOLD!

A week or so ago I posted a video on the ‘socials’ asking for input into which UFO (unfinished object) I should finish. It’s easy to get distracted by a new experiment or idea or a deadline that has to be met, and then suddenly, work that I was excited about has piled up in the ‘not finished’ pile.

After moving house and organising my new studio it became apparent that I have lots of UFO’s just waiting for a few hours. I also had a fair amount of UFO’s that were in the ‘what was I thinking?!’ pile – but we don’t need to talk about those!

This was the one that got the most votes in the ‘finish next’ election, and I promised myself that I wouldn’t start anything new until something was finished. Turns out, that is really good motivation!

Above is what it looked like before the vote. I finished the quilting in the background with several different thread colours. I added some circles (berries? You decide what they are) in the lower left corner. I cut away the silk organza from the leaves in the top right corner and I added beads for the birds eyes. Then to finish it, I used a facing to turn the raw edge to the back, and it was ready to go.

Have a great Sunday!