With entries from local, interstate and overseas quilters, the Quilters’ Guild of NSW’s annual show showcases an amazing array of quilting talent. View this year’s winners here.

Best in Show is Wheelflower Medallion by Merelyn Pearce, which is inspired by the art of Margaret Preston.

The menu line across the top of the page leads you to galleries of winners in each section.

The Guild has requested that the images on their site not be reposted elsewhere, so thus there is no image here – but plenty for you to enjoy on their website.

Graphic designer David Butler has an article on designing your own logo here.

If you’re after inspiration for typefaces/fonts/lettering, the printpattern blog had a heads up on a new book, New Vintage Type. It’s available from Amazon UK or US, or I’m sure at your local independent bookshop.

If you haven’t looked through the archives at printpattern before, treat yourself. She finds, and shares, the most wonderful range of ideas and covers so many designers’ work.

If you happen to have some old books that you’ve finished with (or if you haven’t, any white elephant stall/ thrift shop/ op shop/Goodwill has Plenty!) then there’s a list of links for using them as craft materials on the Bookshop Blog here. Embroidery, journals, sculpture, stash boxes and more. If you’re in the summer holidays of the southern hemisphere right now, this could be an inexpensive and entertaining holiday craft activity.

Alternatively, maybe you’d like to buy a book made into a clock. This is from recycleeh at etsy.

Six unique Kens

No No, don’t stop reading and say, “I don’t do Barbies…”

I won’t retell the whole story here, but if you click on this link, you’ll get it in full. It’s one of the funniest, most delightful crafting things I’ve seen in a long time – six teenage boys, the power of sewing and great amusement. Maybe it’s got potential for one of your children’s favourite teachers? (I know the school year’s just started in the northern hemisphere, but it’s coming to an end, with a term to go, here in Oz).

Greengrocer mosaic by Ruth Buchanan

If you’re stuck for colour inspiration, try wandering the aisles of a greengrocer’s shop and really look to see the colour combinations. It’s so simple to resort to assumptions, and inspiring to see how colours really go together (let alone textures). The variety of subtle browns and creams in taro root. The colour run from creamy yellow to pinky red on white cherries. The suffragette brilliance of beetroot. The sheer variety in polyanthus (that one’s pretty seasonal, but worth looking forward to). Take some photos, to help you see, and try them in the palette generator.

I put photos together for the mosaic above with fd’s flickr toys mosaic generator from one midwinter visit to a favourite (well lit!) greengrocer’s.

If you have other suggestions for colour palettes and inspirations, by all means share them in the comments. How do you arrive at the colour combinations you use in your craftwork?

fd’s flickr toys palette generator

fd’s flickr toys offer lots of possibilities for manipulating, exploring and combining your photos. If you’re looking to use a photo in craftwork, or just have a photo with colours you like – but you’d like to work out more precisely what they are – then the palette generator tool might be just what you need. You can upload from your own computer, so you don’t need to be a Flickr member to play.

Put in a photo and get back the colours and codes for it, as per the above example.

Renaissance Revival by Mariya Waters: Best in Show

At The Quilters Guild of NSW Inc annual Quilt Show held at the end of June 2007, Mariya Waters’ quilt, Renaissance Revival, won Best in Show. Read the quiltmaker’s statement and see detailed photos of front and back here. A gallery of the winning quilts can be found here and the Guild’s blog, Template Free, is here.

A view of part of the show, which is held in conjuction with the Craft and Quilt Fair. In addition to the exhibition of members’ quilts, there was an exhibition of Guild challenge quilts from Going to Pieces and the 2008 calendar challenge, a demonstration area with community quilts and Kidskills, an Art to Wear exhibition, Best in Show quilts from other Australian states and territories, Texstyle (major works by final-year secondary students) and Peac-ed with Love (quilts by Vietnam veterans’ partners and friends).

Quilt photograph courtesy of The Quilters’ Guild of NSW Inc.

Choosing colour combinations for craft, such as quilting, can be a challenge. You can find yourself slipping into palettes that are influenced by factors such as what colours suit you to wear, which can confine your choices unnecessarily (eg. mustard: hard to wear, wonderful in quilts).

Bog standard paint chip displays with graduated colours can be a source of chips to mix and consider, but also look for examples where the paint company has done the work, such as the display below which I saw in a hardware store recently. Rather nice colour combinations, I thought.

Paint chip palettes

Here’s an online tool that generates paint palettes and which you could also play with for crafting purposes. There are also a bunch of palettes to inspire you here.

From threadingwater:

As another Mother’s Day nears, I started wondering how many women soldiers have lost their lives in Iraq? How many mothers, wives, lovers? How many women who would have been mothers, wives, lovers, friends?…my initial goal [was to] find 79 people, each willing to stitch the name of one female Coalition casualty from the Iraq War.

She plans to sew the muslin pieces into a tote bag.

Why a tote? Because I want something utilitarian. Something that will go out into the world every day as a reminder of this horrible loss, made more horrible as people recognize that these names represent only a very small portion of the human toll this war has taken. And, for every volunteer who contributes a stitched name, I will send the tote to you. Put it to use. Take it to the market, keep it in your mini-van as you drive your kids to school. Stuff it with your knitting. A week. Two. Whatever seems right to you.

All I ask in return is that you keep sending the tote on, and that you record your feelings and experiences with the project on your blog (if you have one) or in a letter.

Read more about how it started here, while the blog’s most recent entries are here.

Image from this story

Just over a year ago in April 2006 at Beaconsfield in northern Tasmania, a mine accident killed one man and trapped two more. They were underground for days – the first joy of finding, five days later, that two had survived became a long wait while their colleagues found a way to get them out safely. They were trapped over half a mile or almost a kilometre underground – 925 metres. It was two weeks (or 321 hours) after the mine collapse that they walked free and put their name tags onto “safe”. That afternoon was the funeral of their colleague who had not survived the initial rockfall.

Later in the year, a ‘close-knit community knitting’ project began, to knit a scarf 925m long. You can read the ’seed’ story, from the ABC (Australia’s public broadcaster) here. People were invited to contribute small sections, to be joined together, their work symbolising the careful work of the many people involved in the rescue.

As the picture above shows you, many people started knitting. There were knitting days in the town, and contributions from farther afield (Tasmania, other Australian states, overseas) – read more here.

On the first anniversary of the accident, the “Close-Knit Community Scarf” was unveiled by local schoolchildren as part of the ceremony.

It is astonishing how many ways the work of our hands can serve to unite, to remember, to draw us together as human beings and people and communities. This is just one. The many AIDS quilt projects around the world are another, and the list of the multifarious possibilities, often beginning as the “what-if?” thought of one or a few people, is long and wonderful and humbling and grand. The value can be as much, or more, in the process as in the product, and about patience and commitment, not just skill.