'Summer Dragonfly' accepted to Living Colour!

So the good news is I can't show you my quilt that I submitted to Living Colour!  It's good news because it was accepted along with 31 others and will be travelling internationally for at least the next year.  Pretty exciting!!  These are the confirmed venues taken from the Living Colour website:

The exhibition will premiere at the Australasian Quilt Convention 10-13 April 2014 and will tour in 2014 and 2015. The following venues have been confirmed:

• Australasian Quilt Convention, Melbourne: 10-13 April 2014
• Creative Textile Show, Canberra: 2-4 May 2014
• QuiltWest, Craft & Quilt Fair,Perth: 21-25 May 2014
• Sydney Quilt Show, Craft & Quilt Fair: 9-13 July 2014
• Quilt Symposium Manawatu, Palmerston North, New Zealand: 15-21 January 2015
• Gosford Regional Gallery, Gosford: 21 March-22 April 2015

Apparently there were 177 entries so I'm feeling a little bit humbled.

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Today is Waitangi Day in New Zealand.  It's a public holiday and as we live pretty close to Waitangi itself, we usually go along.  But not today, it's rainy and windy and generally yucky.  We also planned to paint some more window sills but that ain't happening either.  So what's a girl to do?  More shelf cleaning of course!

I made this wallhanging for the NZ Hoffman Challenge quite a few years ago.  Then I folded it up and put it in the cupboard and it's been taking up space ever since.  I don't like it enough to hang it on the wall, but I can't quite bring myself to chuck it either.

Well, a few slices with the rotary cutter later, a bit of zig-zag along the edge,  a couple of buttons and I have a scissor or rotary cutter pouch and a pocket for my mini cutting board and a small ruler.   Perfect for a sewing date at a friends.

And then I found this little UFO.  It's silk roving type stuff (I don't know what you call it when it's silk) free-motion stitched down onto hand woven wool and I've begun hand stitching here and there.  But what on earth do I do with it?  It's too fragile to become a pouch or anything useful.  Any suggestions?

I think the next UFO I'm going to show you is the hated one that Suz mentioned in a comment on my blog yesterday....so come back again tomorrow!

Waitangi Day

The 6th of February is Waitangi Day (pronounced why-tongue-ee), a public holiday in New Zealand.  It celebrates the day the Treaty of Waitangi was signed between the crown and (most of) the Maori tribes of NZ.  And because we live down the road, and hadn't been along for a couple of years, we decided that this year we would head along and join the fun.

We watched the Navy brass band and the guard of honour form for the 21 gun salute (that came from the Naval frigate you can see anchored out in the bay).  We ate whitebait fritters and candy floss and drank a kawakawa soft drink.  The kids played on a bouncy castle and we all escaped to the shade of the pohutakawa trees for a while.

But for me, the best bit of the day was watching the Red Checkers perform an awesome aerial show.  Several times they had me gasping or clapping and the kids loved it too.  It was a great day and we were all tired and happy by the end of it.

I'm thinking about doing a monthly picture of 'what's on your design wall?'.  Here's what's on mine at the beginning of February.  Lots of stuff jostling for space.  It's made me make a resolution (shock horror, I tried so hard to steer clear of them in January!).  I'm going to endeavour to finish two projects before I allow myself to start another....do you think it will work?