Topiary Quilt Pattern | Cluckingham Palace

My Topiary quilt has come back from the quilter and the PDF pattern is now in the Etsy shop (30% off till Tuesday noon). Paper patterns will be available in a week or so. Thanks to all of you who asked to be notified about the pattern's release - I appreciate your patience and for making beautiful heirloom quilts with my patterns!

The long arm quilting was done by the lovely Elaine from Quilting on the Vines in my local town, McLaren Vale. She is seriously my life saver sometimes!! I love the petals in the quilting reflecting the applique petals on the quilt. The fabrics I used are the new Grandale collection by Keera Job for Riley Blake Designs.

In other news I have been very busy sewing for spring quilt market where my newest collection 'Summer Blush' will be launching. Let's just say that my sewing machine is in desperate need of a service after so many hours of use (and I'm in desperate need of some sleep).  I will save photos of what I made for the Riley Blake booth in Portland for another blog post.

Life on our little hobby farm has also been super busy - the new chicken coop aka 'Cluckingham Palace' is now operational and we've expanded our brood - we have 17 chickens now and 5 guinea fowl (which are the funniest birds ever). The guineas are quite young so they 'adopted' one of our Araucanas as their mum - who had absolutely no say in the matter - and follow her around everywhere, much to the poor chicken's annoyance. It's impossible to tell them apart as they are all black with grey mottling so we called them 'Dave'. Yes, they all have the same name - they're not even all males! "Oh look there go the Daves" is a common phrase in our house. We sometimes sit out on our porch and watch the chickens going about their business, shuffling around with their cute fluffy bums - hours of endless entertainment. The multi coloured eggs are pretty awesome too!

We also renovated my sewing room after deciding against having a separate sewing studio erected on the property - we simply couldn't justify the cost when there was a perfectly good spare bedroom.  I actually adore this space which has the best light in the whole house, plenty of fabric storage, and I'm really loving the crisp white walls and hardwood floors. I realised over the years that I work much better as a designer in a minimalist workspace - so no more mini quilts on walls or other visual distractions. It was sad packing them all into storage but I'm loving how clean and uncluttered it feels now!

Time for me to get back to sewing now - for the next few weeks I will be concentrating on my new book as my deadline is approaching fast. Thank you for visiting today!