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nine members of the Lewis quilt group have been busy the last six months or so making a quilt in Harris tweed to represent Lewis in the (LLQS), group section of the Far and Away exhibit, a month ago the quilt was finally finished and photographed by the Stornoway Gazette photographer to be shown in that weeks issue of the Gazette, Thursday 12th April.

So at last I can revel on my blog the story and how I tell it, some of you may remember the post about sending 5 (now 6) quilts to , well someone said ‘wouldn’t it be nice to send a quilt made from Harris tweed’ several people responded ‘yes’ so in all nine of us set to the project, the criteria for the design as set by
‘Quilters are invited to create a work that takes inspiration from the splendour of the Scottish isles. Traditional block patchwork, pictorial quilts or contemporary interpretations, hand and/or standard or longarm machine techniques are all acceptable.’

Being a group quilt the design had to be one where each member of the group could put her design signature to it and the easiest way to achieve this is to use the traditional format of individual blocks, then each quilter could create her own blocks in her individual style, to add a twist to this lay out it was decided to assemble the blocks on point (diamond style) instead of the more common rectangular grid, so each block would sing out clear the decision was made to alternate these pictorial blocks with plaid blocks, a plaid was decided on and to keep continuity it was decided to use the individual colours of the plaid to create the slightly abstract pictorial blocks, now we all had to chose what part of beautiful Lewis we would centre our blocks on, I chose to do a Blackhouse and one of my favourite beaches Dail Mor.