My super-nana is turning 79 this year and has a skill bank like a treasure chest! All my life she’s been fiddling away with things that I often felt completely removed from; cross-stitching, knitting, pottery, soft-toy making and quilting… the list goes on!
Her making me my favourite soft toys as a wee-one brought me into the paradigm that these commodities we have all around us have been constructed by hands. A thought-gift that keeps on giving as we face sustainability issues in production systems globally.
But I’ll leave the soft toys for another blog. When I was 15, Nana walked me through the process of making a quilt!
It took weeks and weeeeks and we started by sewing together the squares, then sewed the squares together, then created the edging… It’s really rewarding to see it all coming together.
It’s a really peaceful experience that I highly recommend, especially if you have a quilting group or a buddy – a nana, a brother, a bestie!
The most beautiful thing about quilting is the amazing fabrics with gorgeous subtle patterns in such a spectrum of colours; you can spend hours aligning them and then rearranging them to delight in the aesthetics!
The worst thing about quilting is making mistakes and unpicking… but you get used to it .
It would be a wonderful winter mission to make a quilt, or a good project to give away for Christmas!
Enjoy this hilarious picture of me in my stunning uniform with my quilt in a quilting show in West Auckland J My quilt is called “Neptune’s Window” and is king single sized.
Nanatech 
Kia ora Chelsea, cool post! Love you and your quilt! Awesome!
This made me think of a couple of projects my mum had going in relation to quilting a while back. One was a buddy quilt where she and a friend each made two identical squares a month, representing how that month had been for them, then swapped one through the post. At the end they had these beautiful colourful quilt squares to sew together and… voila!
The second project was done as a thankyou gift from the St. Martin Island Community to our wonderful historian who had just written an amazing book. The quilt was made of bands of a)photos printed on material from the community throughout its history and b)special fabrics donated by members of the community of pieces of clothing that meant a lot to them.
Perhaps these two projects might spark some interest with Nanatechers…
Arohanui,
R