Oreo the cat fundraiser

 

While we were away having a lovely time at the National Quilt Championships, Fiona's cat Oreo went missing, only to turn up on Sunday badly injured after being hit by a car, breaking her legs.  Somehow this little cat managed to drag herself home, and was whisked off to the vets by Fiona's son asap.  Luckily she didn't have worse injuries but the vet's bill is going to be around £2000.

 

A couple of fundraisers have been started, so I've decided to do an extra one with my Fanoe quilt pattern PDF file. Fiona, Oreo's human, has made several versions of this quilt - her grey and white one looked fab!

CLICK HERE TO BUY FANOE PDF

So from now until the end of July (or until we raise enough for the vet bills), all the sales of this pattern pdf will be going to Oreo's vet fund (NB - Payhip, where I host the pattern, deal with the EU VAT for me and take a 5% commission but I will make up the difference, so every pattern sold will raise £7 for Oreo).

As I don't have any cats of my own at the moment, Fi's cats are my surrogate kitties...

UPDATE - Katie at Japan Crafts is putting together a fabric pack for the blocks and the border (you'll need to add something plain-ish or an ultra small print for the setting triangles). It will be a multi coloured version but with a lot of blues. See the Japan Crafts Facebook page and also the Japan Crafts website for some of the fabrics that will be included (the information won't be on the website immediately).  For every fabric pack that is sold, Katie will donate £10 to Oreo's vet fund.

The quilt also looks great in blue and white - here are Rhona Thomson's Kekfesto cotton version and my blue and white yukata one.

Fanoe II - in yukata cottons

100% vintage Japanese yukata cottons, some produced using chusen stencilling, with a few printed and one woven, for a remake of my Fanoe quilt.  I will have the pattern available at the Knitting and Stitching Show at Edinburgh this week and the quilt top on show.  Eventually it will be hand quilted.  After getting the borders on today (a bit delayed due to an eye problem which lost me a couple of days of being able to see properly), the weather was really a bit too windy to take a photo outside, so Glyn ended up having to pin the quilt to the garage wall (luckily, it is wooden), so the quilt top didn't take off!  I am very pleased with how it has worked out.  Using large scale prints really adds to this design.  The first version was red and white but I always planned to make it in blues.

Red & White Quilt exhibit in New York & my Fanoe quilt

Mary Jenkins on her "Little Welsh Quilts and Other Traditions" blog (see my blog list) mentions an upcoming exhibition of red and white quilts in New York. Lucky thing is going to see it too! Click the link to read her blog post and get links to exhibition info too -

Red & White Quilts on Mary's blog

Red and white is such a fresh combination for quilts. The old quilts used the colourfast Turkey Red dye - we have to be a bit more careful with our reds nowadays, as they aren't always colourfast.

The quilt in the photo above is my Fanoe quilt, which will be in the Danish quilt guild's magazine "Kludemagasinet" next year. It was longarm pantograph quilted by Pam Ablett at The Quilter's Trading Post, Whitchurch.

Red and White quilt

This quilt has been in my sketchbook since my trip to Fanoe, Denmark in September 2009. The block is inspired by the front door windows in Sonderho, a beautiful village on the southern end of the island. You can just glimpse the front door on this house - see the little diamond shaped window? I put them in the middle of my blocks (there's a picture from another house here). The colourway is inspired by the Danish and English flags, which are almost opposites of each other - white on red and red on white (although of course the position of the cross is a little different).


Antique Dutch tiles are seen all over the island too (they were brought there as ship's ballast), so I was also thinking of those a bit when I drafted the block. There's a tile museum and restaurant in Sonderho, where I snapped these (another quilt sometime!)



Takenoko has been supervising through the workroom window. I took a chance spreading those blocks out on the bed, as he usually wants to "help", but I think he was still out.