The second gallery showing quilts from the Expo Magic Quilt in Lyon is now ready for viewing in the gallery.

I’ve added the first set of pictures we took at the Patchwork & Quilt Expo X in Lyon to the gallery. More to come later…

We have been away on 2 weeks holiday. The last Thursday and Friday of which were spent in Lyon. We spent most of Thursday at the Quilt Expo X organised by the International Quilt Association. It was rather heavy on American quilts I felt. But some really stunning work on display, including Wagire - Rhapsody in silk dedicated to the late Ikuko Fujishiro showing silk quilts pieced with thousands of tiny patches by hand. One quilt had 1 cm hexagons - over 17000 of them. No photos allowed

I particularly enjoyed looking at the Journal Quilts 2005 exhibition. It was interesting to read what the quilters had to say about their pages.

We spent half a day on Friday at the Expo Magic Quilt, which felt more international somehow. There was an exhibition of European Art Quilters, but unfortunately photography wasn’t allowed here either. There were a number of quilters featured from this part of Germany. Also featured were quite a few quilts from Australian quilters - they seem to have quite a distictive style - but there again it may have just been those exhibited here.

No time right now but there will be a gallery coming up with some of the quilts we photographed (in the sections where photography was allowed).

I have been busy this week doing the machine quilting on Breaking Out. I have mostly done in the ditch and shadow quilting but did do some meandering on the darker orange diamond. The material has small black circles made up of tiny dots printed on it, so it was easy to practise meandering by joining up the dots. Also the pattern is quite forgiving in that it hides the mistakes. There weren’t too many though. A smaller quilt is much more manageable than a large one. From which you can gather that the MQing was done on the Bernina and not on the Pfaff on the quilting frame.

Today I finished the quilt top for my Breaking Out quilt.

I am pleased with the finished results, especially the 3D breaking out bit in the centre. I had a brain wave in the bath last week. (It’s where my best ideas come to me!) Last Saturday I was at my local quilting shop and bought some extra stable interfacing, which they use for bags. The additional trick (which was the bath bit) was to use the padding stitch to encourage the curling that you usually use in tailoring to shape collars and lapels. After setting it with the steam iron I appear to have pretty stable curls.

Next job is to quilt it. I’ve got to think about that yet.