2nd Prize at Rheged April 09

I have been away to Scotland, I wish I could say that I had been enjoying myself but in fact I bagged another Munro (Scottish 3000 foot Hill) and managed to be a good meal for a few midges as we camped in Glen Coe. Silly to camp in August I know but Bella came with us and she enjoyed her first real camp. For instance at night she was first into the tent and usually settled down into my sleeping bag with her little head on my pillow and always seemed to be peacefully asleep immediately. So I had to make the best of it. If you want to read the full report it is on my other blog which is here Or you can look at it from my bloglist below. (I know some of you ladies like to read about my adventures in the hills.)

You may remember I said I would put some piccies on the blog of my little quilt which won 2ND prize at Rheged in April at the North West Regional Day. I have shown the complete quilt before but no close ups, so this is the reason I am really blogging tonight. And I was up another 4 Wainwright fells today with a couple of clients and it seemed to be a good idea to give Wainwright his due because you know the subject of the competition was called 'Myths and Legends'. I chose Alfred Wainwright because he is a legend in the Lake District for writing his very famous guide books to the fells and they are in my opinion still as relevant today as when he wrote them starting way back in the 50's.

So the piccie above is Wainwright sitting with his back against a lichen covered cairn staring out over the landscape he loved so well, with his little terrier at his feet and puffing away on his trusty pipe. I made the quilt by scanning in some of the lovely little pen and ink drawings which he made for his books and then printed them on cotton fabric which I had treated with Bubble Jet 2000. Then after I played around with the design a bit I found the idea of grouping little vignettes around a central piccie of a Lake District scene gave the best way of showing off his amusing drawings. I tried to place him around the edges looking in as it were.

This next piccie shows him striking a pose against another cairn in his summer gear, note the braces....I could not resist putting beads on them for the buttons and then adding some chain stitch and a few more beads to the cairn with some French knots and also some special fluffy ones for the top of his socks.

Of course the one thing you notice around here are the sheep and AW rather tongue in cheek knew how to make fun of himself in his drawings. These two sheep are standing on the rough fellside which I embellished with some slanting whip stitch, a bit of zig zag and some odd bits of wool underneath to give the appearance of bracken.

Sometimes his images speak for themselves. So I just did some random straight stitch here and added a bit of colour to the man with Berol fabric marker pens.

I will show you more next time, until then, happy sewing.