Colori di Sardegna or Colours of Sardinia

After nearly six years I have finished another UFO!!!!  Jumping for joy as I never thought I would ever see the end of this one.  Six years ago some very good friends of ours who were originally from Sardinia in the Mediterranean and which is part of Italy, were building a new house.  I promised  I would make them a house-warming present and decided to create a crazy quilted picture entitled "Colori di Sardegna" or in English, "Colours of Sardinia".   I set about collecting lots of photos from the net and from travel brochures to see just what Sardinia actually looked like - lots of bright, clear blues and turquoises in the sky and ocean, buildings in cream and pastels with terracotta tiles, flowers of pinks and reds..........easy!!  Wrong.

Here it is, in it's frame although not yet fixed in the frame. Two views, one of the embroidery and one with the frame around the edge.  I guess one of the positive things about spending a lot of time sitting at home with a husband who is having chemo for cancer and who often doesn't feel crash hot, is that I am getting a lot of UFOs completed.  This one in particular has been my problem child from ages so it is soooooo good to be seeing the back of it.  I just hope our Sardinian friends, Ennio and Anna, like it.

I tried to cover most aspects of the island from jewel coloured bays and beaches, sparkling white sand, a school of Sardines, Orange coral, rocky areas where tiny lizards bask in the sun, vivid blue Dragonflies (the wings are wired so they are 3D), grape growing areas, Poppies in the fields and ancient stone Nuraghi  which are represented by the circles in the bottom right corner. It is not meant to be an actual picture but just to represent the colours...... The buildings and church were sewn ad-hoc so they are crooked and a bit crazy as they tumble down the hill but that is part of the look that I wanted to achieve. I hope it has worked because there is no way that I am going to change anything at this stage, it has taken too long.

This is my original pieced background - as you can see, a lot changed from this point onwards.  I got rid of the heavy brown bits on the left.  The bottom brown pieces were meant to represent rocks and frankly I have absolutely no idea now what the top pieces were supposed to be - not a clue!!  The houses in the village got removed and replaced by more realistic looking buildings while the church..........that church gave me so many problems and in the end I gave up.  I got half way through it and lost the plot.  So it stayed rolled up in my cupboard for a further four years and every time I looked at it, I shuddered because I'd done too much to throw it away but yet I couldn't see where to go next. I think it was the church that threw me. I used a scrap of material that was used to make a Bishop's cope and the creator gave me a tiny smidgeon as it was very, very, very expensive and the gold threads are actual 22ct gold threads. I wanted to show the opulence of the insides of the churches but it didn't work.  The outsides are what you see and they are plain, cream walls and terracotta tiles.....I was trying to show the inside-out and it stopped me in my tracks for all that time. 

GROW YOUR BLOG

  Today is the day of the Grow Your Blog party organised by Vicki of "2 Bags Full".  I have never joined a blog party before so it will be interesting to see what happens.  My own blog is all about my love of crazy quilts and the methods of embellishing them.  I love to blog about my swaps with other crazy quilters too because we can all learn from one another.  My big "life-time" project is to make a cream on cream crazy quilt and blog about each block as it gets completed.  Altogether my quilt needs 96 blocks (12 long x 8 across) and each one is constructed from fabric that are various shades of cream from almost-white-ivory to deep "choc-milk" colour and all the embellishments and embroidery are also in different shades of cream with the addition of pearls and tiny bits of metallic gold.  In the beginning, I just added gold metal charms but these are all going to be removed and replaced by gold thread embroidery which won't tarnish.......can you imagine the mess of trying to clean tarnished metal charms on cream fabric??? It will be worth my time and effort to fix this problem before I do anymore blocks.  So basically this blog is about all aspects of crazy quilting and the associated crafts of embroidery, silk ribbon embroidery, lacework, tatting, crochet and beading.

2012 and 2013 Christmas cracker swaps

These are the most recent swaps that I have participated in - Christmas cracker swaps with Southern Cross Crazies.  I really enjoyed making these as some of the favourite colour choices can be a real challenge.  It's great fun waiting to see the crackers which come back in return as well.

Here are the 2012 cracker outers.  Unfortunately I cannot find the image for the third but the colour choices were:
Faye - Autumn
Maureen and Natascha - both Victorian Pastels.

And here are the 2013 ones which were only posted off on December 1st 2013.  The favourite colour choices were:
Arlene - Yellows, Blues and Creams (because of the Mulberry colour in the woman's coat and feathered hat, I added that colour as well.
Jenifer - All shades of blue.
Glenda - Greens, Pinks, Mauves, Aqua colours.