New Colourshott Fat Eighths Picks: Freesia

Charlotte of Displacement Activity got all poetic about Oakshott, in this case the new fat eighths we are calling Freesia:

As always, photographs just don’t do these fabrics justice – it’s impossible to see how they glow and shimmer unless you get to see them in person. I spent absolutely ages putting them in different orders, pairing them up and generally stroking them and can absolutely and confidently assert that they are at least five gazillion times more gorgeous in real life.

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Then, as part of Lily’s Quilts Bloghop, she  turned them into this:

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full instructions for making Reflections on this page of  Displacement Activity.

Oakshott in Canada

Susan Fletcher of Alderspring Design in British Columbia, Canada has just taken delivery of  the new Autumn range of Colourshott (thank you FedEx!):
2014-08SusanAlderspringSusan’s speciality is Sashiko. She shares the technique on her blog A Threaded Needle, which is also her retail site for Oakshott fabrics. She is now getting ready to introduce the range to you all at the Creative Stitches exhibitions in Edmonton (12-13 Sep) and Calgary (26-27 Sep).
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Diamond Jewels

With a cry of:

I wasn’t going to waste any of my Oakshott!

Amy Friend (of During Quiet Time) set about devising a contemporary design that helps the Colourshott fabrics vibrate, that develops paper piecing techniques, and that allows for any amount of creativity you’d want to administer to make the colour placement your own! So much so that it comes in four different Diamond Jewels kits: one as a runner and three as quilts (lap, twin or queen).

DJQKIT_DiamondJewelsQuilt_quiltThank you Amy, over there in Massachusetts, USA

 

Designer Chatt: Lynne Goldsworthy of Lily's Quilts

Shotthrough managed to catch up with Lynne in her Derbyshire home after she’d had a successful Fat Quarterly retreat in London. This was the third retreat they’d run and they had had to pare down the numbers to ‘only’ 80.

LynneGoldsworthy

As well as full-time mothering and house-managing Lynne approaches her quilting as a full-time occupation and spends about two-thirds of her time quilting and the rest doing admin (including running the enterprising Lily’s Quilts, and some tenth of it on Fat Quarterly).

Her sewing skills were developed at the knees of her mother and both grandmothers in that wonderful art of creating new and recycling old clothes. But she has put that behind her in order to concentrate on the art of quilting quilts (not bags or clothes etc.) – and don’t we love the results?

The clarity and purity of her designs seem to echo her general approach to life. She is anti-hoarding (there’s a lesson for a lot of us) and once the drawers start to get full she offers fabrics out on Instagram; she’s attempted to hand quilt but the slowness of the process has been too much and those projects were never finished.

Luckily for us though she has finished plenty of other projects with the help of her trusty Janome Horizon; a Hera marker (a few steps up from using the back of a knife); and a ‘brilliant’ Frixion pen (you know, iron off the lines after). While we were on the subject of tools Shotthrough offered her a bottomless purse and she spent it on a new Janome Horizon and was tempted to add in a Longarm machine, as long as the purse also bought her a new sewing room extension (the dining room gets cleared once a year for Christmas!).

When asked how she kept comfortable when sewing, her advice was to make sure your chair height was correct so that you sat with all those healthy right angles for good posture. Oh, and don’t turn round to talk to your daughter in the middle of using a rotary cutter, ouch.

Lynne loves re-creating traditional patterns with new fabrics and just sucks up inspiration from everything in her surroundings (nature, printed photographs, other quilters’  work), but avoids consciously going online for inspiration because that inevitably leads to a rather circular existence.

Luckily for Oakshott she loves our fabrics and describes them as: “high end, luxurious, rather like a solid Liberty lawn”.  An impulsive, late-night email one Sunday about three years ago resulted in the ongoing collaboration between Lynne and Oakshott and we’ve been the lucky recipients of her talents ever since.

Lynne uses the new Colourshott (first two) and Lipari (for Trade Winds) ranges for her three latest quilt designs for Oakshott Fabrics, which are available as kits:

 OSHQKIT_OakshottSchoolhouseKit_quilt Oakshott Schoolhouse Quilt, where she uses three shades of the same Colourshott colour on each schoolhouse to achieve a 3D effect to give  a modern look to a traditional design she loves.
 CRQHKIT_CrossRoadsKit_Quilt Crossroads is so-called because she was just pipped to the post by another quilter who used the name that was Lynne’s original inspiration, Hashtags.
 TWQHKIT_TradeWindsKit_Quilt Trade Winds,  where she wanted the feel of a traditional block by using a single Lipari colour for each one. The name came following a plea on Instagram.

2014 Festival of Quilts

At this year’s Festival of Quilts on 7-10 August you can stock up on your Oakshott Fabrics at either Stand G21, Pinwheels, or Stand N4, The Bramble Patch.

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Oakshott packs of Lakes, Ruby Red and Lipari at the 2013 Festival of Quilts

See more about this year’s Festival of Quilts on their website.

 

Sneak preview

 

 

All we know now is it is:

 

a table runner using 4 eighths … very closely quilted -matchstick quilting – a la modern style. It’s designed to use almost all the fabric, cutting two blocks from each piece, and shuffling the colours.

pallets-smallMore will be revealed at the 2014 Festival of Quilts [7–10 August] by Heather Hasthorpe of Without Pins.

 

 

That Lock Gate

Thanks again to Lily’s Quilts we can show you a truly English scene, designed by a holidaying New Zealander. Thanks SusanClaire Mayfield we hope you are enjoying the waterways.

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Full make up details using a bundle 8  x  fat 1/8′s Oakshott New Forest on the Gourmet Quilter blog.