In the past, I have made pieces that are so close to quilting – but always referred to them as embroidery because they were not traditional quilting and I have never actually made a traditional quilt. At the end 2012, I left the comfortable environment of Committed to Cloth, retired from the City, decided to start quilting and set myself a number of goals.

The plan – start improv cutting and piecing in black and white, introduce colour as I progressed. I now have over 40 quilts of varied sizes in this series. The series was named Pieces of Crow – I would have liked to go to the States and attend Nancy Crow workshops. This wasn’t practical as I needed to do 2 workshops back to back which meant a 3 to 4 week stay in the USA, hotels and a car, 200 metres of fabric (and I only use my hand dyed cloth) and so on. It wasn’t go to happen!

The first one is badly stitched. one eight of an inch between parallel lines is hard to keep even. It needed a walking foot and doing such fine lines with a walking foot I find difficult. The second was slightly better.

By the time I got to number 4, I was cheeky enough to enter it into the Fine Art Quilt Masters as Festival of Quilts in 2013.  I called it POC XL as it was much bigger than the first three.

The following year, Bush Fire, was accepted for FAQM. I had introduced colour by this point – actually, it is bleached IKEA black cotton. As well as FAQM, this quilt travelled to the USA with the World of Quilts shows.

A number of the others in this series have been accepted into various exhibitions.

A taste of India (detail) travelled with Wide Horizons IV around Europe and the USA and finally to China.

Below are detail images of some of the other pieces in this series – the yellow ones were a mistake for two reasons, a quilt with lots of yellow is unlikely to be accepted for a show as it is difficult to fit into a coherent exhibition (lesson learnt) and the smaller horizontal slithers I added, broke up the design.

Next time will be about the mini-series within POC.