Rag Picking with Yvonne

I have been exchanging emails with Yvonne for a while after I "met" her on KiwiQuilters and she helped me sort out my registration to attend the mini-symposium in Timaru so I was very pleased to be able to meet up with her, and her husband, Gary, when we arrived on South Island at the end of March.  By very happy coincidence there was a meeting of the Picton Quilters that very night and they were hosting a group of quilters on tour from Australia.  The first sign of the meeting was this magnificent car:

It is world famous in New Zealand and much photographed, isn't it great?  The Picton ladies do loan the cover to other groups for their own publicity which I think is very generous of them.
We had a lovely evening with a great dinner and particularly good puddings and a heated debate on the table I was at about whether pavlova is a Kiwi dessert or an Aussie one with both groups claiming it for their own!

The Picton ladies had put up a fantastic display of their work as you can see in the photo above, there are some very talented quilters in Picton that's for sure.  The show and tell was fantastic and I particularly enjoyed seeing the work of Ruth Bloomfield which she calls "confetti" - very small pieces of fabric are used to create detailed designs.  My contribution to the show and tell was the lovely Japanese heart that Nat made for me, I showed it as an illustration of the links that are created by quilting across the world and via the blogging community.

I felt very honoured to be at the meeting in Picton and not only won a great raffle prize (after drawing my own ticket!!) but received lovely goodies from the Kiwi ladies as their guest and also lovely goodies from the Aussie which they had made for their hosts.  Yvonne gave me a Picton Quilters badge which I am very proud to wear.
At the end of the evening Pauline Rogers of Quilters World in Toowoomba in Australia gave a delightful gadget demonstration and, of course, there was the opportunity to buy!  I'll report back when I'm home and I've had a chance to try out the things I was tempted by!
Here's a picture of Yvonne and I but of course this wasn't our only meeting.

We met again in Timaru where Yvonne was helping on the Christofer Robyn Quilts stand (they're based in Wanaka and have some great stuff) and then enjoyed Happy Hour after we'd both been in our respective workshops.  No luck with spot prizes there though and I haven't had a phone call so I suppose I could throw my raffle tickets away now!  At Happy Hour I met some more KiwiQuilters and also met up with some of the Picton group again and some lovely ladies from Marlborough.
There was some lovely work on display at Timaru including the Hoffman Challenge pieces which are also featured in the current NZ Quilter magazine.  I particularly liked these entries in the symposium challenges and apologise that I can't credit them but of course they were numbered, not named.

There was also work on display by the tutors and this brings me to what I did.  A workshop with Meryl Caudwell on miniature quilts and the design we tackled was Storm at Sea.  These pictures are of Meryl's examples, I'll share my when it's finished. I did manage to finish two rows of blocks and am pleased with what I achieved, it's just not a lot to show for a day's work!  I did show it at Happy Hour and received very friendly laughter!

The day after the workshop I headed to Temuka, a few miles north of Timaru to visit Sue Dwyer and team at Obsession 2 Quilt.  This is my other "must visit" quilt shop for you if you are in NZ.  What fabulous people and what a great shop.  The ladies went out of their way to be helpful, they made a nice cup of tea for Al and I, they offered advice, discounts, goody bags and a great range of fabrics, notions, books, workshops and quilting services.  I wish I lived nearer!  I also won a great rotary cutter in their competition for the person who had travelled the furthest to mini-symposium!  Here are a few photos to give you a flavour:

And finally, before we got the Interislander ferry back to North Island, we went to see Yvonne and Gary again, in their lovely home in Picton.  We had a lovely couple of hours of tea, cheese scones and happy chat and I had the chance to enjoy a little while in Yvonne's sewing room.  Gary calls quilters "rag pickers", it's meant in a friendly way and I think it's lovely!  We had a great time rag picking!  Thanks Yvonne, none of this would have happened without you.