Diamond Days of May

We received our copies of the new Australian Patchwork and Quilting magazine today (Vol 14 No 5). I have a project in this issue, and there are also a bunch of other fantastic quilts featured as projects. And they have covered the Australian Quilt Convention and the Best of Australia quilts.... so it certainly is jam packed with quilting goodness.

Of course I have to say that though because it also includes my profile, and pictures of some of the quilts/projects I have finished lately. Very exciting stuff.

One of the pictures shows my Diamond Days of May quilt. It is nice and bright, and (to my eye anyway) it jumps off the page. Coincidentally I've just finished writing the pattern for this quilt and have also cut some kits for the shop. So I decided to post about this quilt today.

The top photo is the whole quilt, and the bottom is a collage of some close-ups I have taken. I think that it is always interesting to see a more detailed view of quilts. You get a completely different impression of most quilts from flat photos to how they actually look in person, but a details photo bridges that gap.

Diamond Days of May was started last May, when we first received the Charm fabrics from the US but that's actually not the May that the quilt name refers to. My grandmother, May Taylor, was diagnosed with cancer in April 2005 and I spent a few weeks with grandma and pop in Cowra before she passed away in July 2005.

I cut all of the fabrics for the blocks at their kitchen table and sewed all of the half square triangle units on grandma's old Bernina machine. The diamond shapes were quilted sitting at a SewEzi portable sewing table set up temporarily in their lounge room.

Grandma was a keen sewer and soft toy maker and she was very brave in her fabric and colour choices. This was the last of my quilts that she saw me working on and she liked the bright colours and large patterns used in this quilt.

So Diamond Days of May seemed a fitting name for this quilt, a name that came to me during the many, many hours of machine quilting worked onto the large borders.

Once I finished the quilt I had to pack it away for a little while because I had become so accustomed to seeing these colours and patterns. But now, several months on, whenever I see or use the quilt the bright colours jump out at me and it seems a very happy quilt to have around.