Shirley Mooney on The New Zealand Quilt Show Podcast

Sunday, September 3, 2017

Shirley Mooney on The New Zealand Quilt Show Podcast

Shirley Mooney has been quilting and creating for more than twenty years. She is adventurous, experimental and prolific – her personal motto (and name of her blog) being ‘don’t wait to create’!

Shirley has a profound love of colour and texture and this is evident when you see her many quilts featuring fabric manipulation either with 3D piecing or fabric weaving, her innovative use of bold striped fabrics, or her eye-catching kaleidoscope blocks.

Shirley's Quilt As You Go class sample.

Not only a quilt maker, Shirley also knits, crochets, garment sews, felts and lately has taken up weaving. She is also a well-known teacher and is constantly evolving new classes for her students – she is full of energy and loves to inspire and motivate. Shirley believes there is a masterpiece inside everyone!

Shirley and I have a fun conversation about how she learned to quilt and why she is so interested in learning new skills. We talk about one of her earliest quilts that she made for her husband that she is currently unpicking and requilting due to a bit of a shrinkage issue.

Shirley's husband's quilt that is currently having a makeover.

We talk about Shirley's style, which rather than a particular 'look', is more about being bold, being innovative, trying new things and pushing the boundary's of what you can do with a technique - and always being colourful!

Hundreds and Thousands by Shirley Mooney - made with dimensional bow-tie blocks.

Shirley is part of the team at The Wellington Sewing Centre and we discuss how much Shirley loves her job working amongst yarn and fabric and how a professional development push from her boss, Jo, made her take a weaving class - which has now become a new passion! Shirley gives us an insight into what's happening with craft in the community and how keen young people are to learn new skills - even macrame!

One of Shirley's weaving projects

Shirley is teaching three classes as The Quilt Symposium Christchurch 2017. Stacking Bowties, a dimensional quilt block class; Weaving Kiwi-Style; making meshwork and weaving with fabric strips; and Quilt As You Go, learning a quilt as you go technique to help when making big quilts.

Shirley's Kimono Quilt, Winner of Best of Country at the World Quilt Show, incorporating meshwork..

Shirley's must have in her studio is a design wall. She uses bumph (curtain insulating from Lewis's) as her design wall and thinks it's better than quilt batting for holding blocks.

Shirley loves her 90 degree angle nosed tweezers.