Mary Hawke was the proud winner of Best in Show at the Auckland Festival of Quilts 2015 with her quilt 'Dear Jane'. A big thank you to Mary who spent half an hour of her time chatting to me about making 'Dear Jane', her love of small blocks, how she gets things done and lots of other quilty goodness.
'Dear Jane' was made from the book written by Brenda Manges Papadakis. Brenda drafted the 225 block patterns from the original design of the 1863 Jane A. Stickle quilt and it has been immensely popular in the quilting world with hundreds of 'Baby Janes' being made in as many colour combinations and block arrangements as you can think of.
Mary stayed true to the original design of 'Dear Jane' and she also tried to keep the colours as close as possible to the original. Her quilt was professionally quilted by her friend, Colleen Burr, who made a wonderful job of it.
Here is a link to the Dear Jane book on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Dear-Jane-Hundred-Twenty-five-Patterns/dp/1881588157
Here is a link to the Dear Jane website - there is so much information about making the quilt along with email lists for 'Janiacs', links to photographs of finished Dear Jane quilts and much, much more: http://www.dearjane.com/newbie_info.htm
Here is a link to Linda Franz' instructions for scalloped borders and binding that Mary used to help her achieve such a perfect quilt: http://lindafranz.com/index.php?sectionId=38
This is Mary receiving her prize of a brand new Bernina sewing machine. Yay! Bernina! Mary will make good use of this as her second machine, but she also loves her handwork. Mary confesses to having made two Farmers Wife quilts from start to finish!
The interview starts about half way through the audio. To begin with I give you a run down on what's been happening in my quilting adventures, so if you are only interested in the interview with Mary, skip the first 30 minutes or so.
Here is the link to the tutorial on half-rectangle triangles that I talked about: http://athousandneedles.com/2014/05/tutorial-half-rectangle-triangles/
I hope you enjoy our interview and if you have made your own Dear Jane quilt, please give us a link in the comments so we can all admire your hard work.
(I've been banging my head against the podcasting wall this week, and I can't get an audio player to embed and actually show up in my blog post - sorry! So I've included links to listen in Podbean instead.)
Own the book - love it!!, own the software, have made quite a few blocks and I pull it out every few years to do a few more. In fact it might be time to do a few more...
ReplyDeleteI loved the interview with Mary! I used to do a lot of quilts entirely by hand but it takes so long and I have such a long to do list.
ReplyDeleteI appreciate first hand the amount of work that goes into a Dear Jane quilt, having made my own. It's been a flimsy for over a year now as I try to decide on a quilting pattern. Just when I feel ready, I change my mind! Here's mine for anyone interested http://www.weezyworks.com/2014/08/21/dear-joan-is-a-flimsy/