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Inspirations
Working Together - Thinking Apart...
This is Maiko - four panels (two by HB on the left, two by HH on the right) bound separately and joined together with Japanese feather-stitch. Shortlisted at Festival of Quilts 2025!
At Festival of Quilts in 2018, shortly after the unbelievable foolishness that was Brexit, we were talking to a good German friend and magical dyer-of-fabric, Heide Stoll-Weber, and, as it was unlikely that she would ever trade in this country again, we invested in a most delicious and extravagant pack of her fabrics. We came home, cut all the pieces in half, and went away with a decision on the size of the finished pieces, everything else (including the background Oakshott colours) was our own decisions. HH (on the left) had just an idea of triangles, and the blocks are improvised...
Strangely enough (HB Writes) although we hadn't collaborated at all regarding the design content of these quilts, we both created layouts based on the equilateral triangle. Of course, we each put our own individual spin on this basic building block and my Foundation Paper Pieced (FPP) 3-D triangles went on to form the basis of my first block of the month, BAMBOOZLED.
NB: If you want to sign up for BAMBOOZLED it will only be available in BOM format until the end of October (it is a rolling sign-up, and your subscription would still run the full twelve months). CLICK HERE to see all HB's current Block of the Month programmes.
Late in 2023, having booked an exhibition space for September 2024, we made another pair - this is Central Park. This time we pulled a selection of fabrics from our stashes, and again added our own background fabrics. HH's half (left again) is all improv, and much influenced by a lot of improv curved piecing which has been a recent recurrent motif. Once again, almost no cross-referencing apart from the size (chosen so that the two pieces together would be well-proportioned for a postcard)
Around the time we first discussed making this pair of quilts (HB writes) I had been asked to teach New York Beauty at one of our local quilt shops. I enjoyed making the blocks so much that I decided to push the design further - some would say to extremes! We were fascinated to see, when we put these two quilts together, that again we had both landed on a similar design motif with our choice of curved blocks.
HB has used this quilt as the jumping off for her next BOM: STREAMLINE which will be launching this Autumn - stay tuned to the MAQ Newsletter for further details.
And, here we are at Festival of Quilts in 2024, with Blue Moon
The left half is HB's and is Red Bee Moon. The right half is HH's and is Red Tree Moon...
HH - I found this one much harder - I had surgery early in the year, and could not sew for ages. Meanwhile the HB half was made and I found it discouragingly good. Eventually the deadline caused a major attack of get-on-with-it, and it got done, in my usual improvisational style. We wanted a shaded effect which was tricky...
The size this time came from my Moon series (ongoing) which are all 200 by 60 cm - each of the halves is this size, and we plan to show them together but possibly sell them separately. At this scale we actually had to sew them together to keep the alignment, as far as the bottom of the moon...
I have been playing with creating pictorial imagery recently, animals in particular, in FPP (HB writes) and wanted to push on from the 'cute' to the more formidable. I think this could be the start of a new series of seriously big insects - I do like things that are out of scale! Yes, my side of this quilt was carefully planned, drawn out and coloured before I ever started sewing - that's just the way I roll.
Following the success of HH's Modern Jazz quilt, now in The Quilters' Guild collection, we were delighted to hear that Quiltfest 2019 was to ask for pieces inspired by the pattern (it had been in The Quilter magazine and was a grand success) to make an exhibit. Follow the links for the exhibition page with lots of lovely quilts, including these two (well, we had to carry this onwards...)
HH's Black-White-Pink went to Festival of Quilts as well.
These quilts are 48 by 24 inches, this being about the smallest size required. We both played with the idea of combining the blocks to make further arrangements...
This pair of quilts was slightly different from the ones shown above in the fact that we were working from an existing pattern, albeit one of HH's (HB writes). We actually worked on them together in the studio. HH made her totally improv layout in irregular sections and pinned them up on the design wall where she then filled in the gaps while HB made a series of improv blocks that all trimmed to 4-inches square which were then arranged on the big table and sewn together in a traditional grid-like fashion. Although these two quilts contain the same four basic blocks they couldn't be more differnt. I am still proud of the fact that I managed to combine all four of the blocks (tigers, floating stones, wonky star and modern crosses) into one.
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