Lesley Coles at Flowerpatch

A return visit by Lesley Coles, to Flowerpatch Quilters October meeting, was an enthralling delight. Lesley brought along so many of her quilts, etc for us to see, spanning 4 decades of patchwork sewing from hexagons, through an abundance of Christmas sewing to her latest modern wall hangings. Here is just a small selection:

This small rectangular cushion lies on a riot of colourful quilts

This block is one of nine that make up a Sudoku quilt. Can you see the clever use of fabric so that no.1 square is made from one fabric; no.2 square is made from two fabrics, one of which is the fabric in the first square; no.3 square is made from three fabrics, using the two fabrics from before plus another; etc. etc? This means that the no.1 fabric is dominant and appears in each square of the quilt linking them all for a pleasing effect. The fabrics used are Oakshott.

Lesley is lucky enough to live near our beautiful Cornish coast and many of her later works reflect her love of the coastal scenery. These two small scenes are of Godrevy lighthouse and of engine houses on the cliffs.

I love the colour blend of these two pieces inspired by the sea, especially the addition of the subtle fish in this first pic which shows just a small section of a finished wall hanging

and this is a smaller wallhanging in similar colours - I like the strippy piecing.

Lesley is always full of new ideas and enjoys running workshops and writing articles for patchwork magazines, as well sewing for charity, herself and for exhibition. Thank you Lesley for a lovely evening.

October is the month when we present a cheque to charity. Money is raised by selling raffle tickets for a quilt and at our exhibition. This is the quilt that we raffled - Autumn Gold.

Cornwall Blood Bikes was our chosen charity for 2016/2017 and we were so pleased that four volunteers came to our meeting to accept the £3000 that we had raised. They were delighted with the amount ........... and they were delightful! Alan Moss gave a short talk about the organisation which has 70 volunteers in Cornwall. They are on call from 5pm to 7am the following morning and at weekends, delivering blood, and sometimes breast milk, as needed. This saves the hospitals having to use expensive taxis during these hours. Last year they totalled over 2000 deliveries on their motorbikes. Please do click on this link if you'd like to know more about the charity - Cornwall Blood Bikes and this is the article that appeared in our local newspaper. when we presented the cheque.

Next meeting is on Thursday, 9th November 2017 at Central Methodist Church Hall, Launceston, PL15 8BA and starts at 7.30pm. Penny O'Connor will be giving a talk about her lovely machine stitched embroideries.
It is also our AGM so please bring along any thoughts on how we can improve Flowerpatch and ideas for next year's charity as we will be voting on this.

Happy Stitching
Anita x