Helen Godden Trunk Show - Longarm Quilting Art! HQ Live

[Music] [Applause] [Music] welcome to HQ live I'm Vicky ha from handi quilter and joining me today is Helen Godin all the way from Australia thank you for joining us thank you good eye everybody tell me what you do on the quilter you are about her I'm the international ambassador for handy coda on the sweet 16 and I love and you have amazing quilts for us today we're going to have a trunk show and Helen's gonna tell us a little bit about our life and show us a lot of quilts so let's get started sure thank all right let's do it so thank you very much for being here and I'm going to share with you today a bit of my story of how I became a quilter and my adventures with handy quarter and the sweet 16 so it all started as a young child I did a lot of painting and drawing and always doodling I used to get in trouble for actually doodling on paper and you know wasting paper wasting pen I even doodled on mums tablecloth once so I've always been doodling I've always enjoyed painting and drawing and that culminated in my adult life I continued to paint t-shirts for a living so I then in Canberra where I live which is the capital of Australia I started a little business in a busy tourist location hand-painting t-shirts so whilst the 80s so that was very popular back then with birds and flowers and fish and leaves and you know big roses on the t-shirts and things like that so it was very popular and I had that business for 13 years I had completed a education degree at university but they never actually went into teaching in the classroom but as it turns out I teach adults now so then I was married we had a baby we all know how that actually happens but 13 years into that I closed my business and gave birth to my beautiful little daughter Anika and suffered a bit of the postnatal depression that a lot of people go through it's just all part of it unfortunately and then just the thoughts coming out of that time in my life I was back in my small space doing some painting doing some watercolor painting and I get that phone call to say my husband as unfortunately he had a serious accident he is quite okay now so we don't have to worry about it now but it meant our whole life was really turned upside down for quite a while I was very lucky and that my parents were able to move from Sydney to Canberra Sydney is only three hours north of Canberra and they moved down and were able to help my husband and my daughter own ID to get through this difficult time as a result of that my mother I now realize is incredibly clever as all mothers are and she encouraged me into her sewing room her quilting room to start playing with her fabrics now I had never been interested in sewing I've never touched a sewing machine I appreciated what mum did and the accuracy that she put into her piecing etc but the idea of joined together blue and pink triangles in floral prints just didn't appeal to this artists mind at all so but Mum persisted and invited me along to a quilt show so I dutifully attended with my mother and for the very first time saw someone doing free motion quilting and was completely blown away with the concept that a sewing machine can stitch in any other direction then straight ahead because everything my mum had always done was always in a straight line accurate precise straight okay so here I was watching someone for the first time managing to make swirls and patterns and flowers and stitch anywhere and literally drawing with that sewing machine it was absolutely a like globe moment for me I quite pestered this woman until she gave me some key instructions so when home with mum and I said now this woman she said any machine can do it mum say your machine should be able to do it so mums looking in her manual and I'm saying this woman she said we must use the darn foot which is the darn foot mum it's the darning foot sweetheart okay so we popped that on now mum this woman she told me that you don't feed the dogs you put the dogs down the back and you don't feed them I have no idea what she's talking about mum says it's this little button here we dropped this little thing away so mum got all set up and she's still looking in the manual trying to work out how on earth her machine could do these flowing flowery things and I just started quilting so took all my drawing background my doodling background or my art ideas and just put it there on fabric and that was a domestic machine using it to just draw lines it was a drawing tool for me and apparently if I put three layers together it's called a quilt but otherwise I just was loving the ability to draw on fabric so with that I had stepped into that quote world of which I knew nothing about it at all so that was just one of those moments so then pretty soon I started to make quilts and predominantly in the beginning they were raw edge applique working on different designs and taking it to the local guild with mum and I could always tell if it was a good quilt because you'd hold up a quilt and the audience they sort of suck in order ah and so your quilt sort of goes in like a sail and there's one particular quilt one of the ladies said you should send that to Houston what's that it's a big show in America so I did I've sent in the entry form and it was accepted into Houston and I had no understanding of what that meant to be accepted at Houston to be on display I really did not think very much of it at all the next year came along and I thought I might try this again entered a quilt I didn't get this amazing letter it back then it was letters not email saying god won an award and that they were going to fly me to Houston and royal treatment with the red carpet and and I took this letter along to my guild and said is this real or is this one of those scam things and they said you really have to go this is a once-in-a-lifetime this is Wow and it's happened three times but you know that's all good so off I went to Houston and experienced what that is for the very first time and it was just mind-blowing the quality of the quilts the the gathering of like-minded people I went on my own and yet made so many friends because you're all there with that common love of quilting and color and thread it was a total ironing week for me took me a long time to get over it the following year my husband came along with me to Houston which was brilliant for him to us see how I suddenly fit into this quilt world how I suddenly found a new career for myself because prior to that hand painting t-shirts and a teaching degree that I'd never used didn't look very much on paper at the age of 40 to start up a new career path it didn't look like anything on paper and yet suddenly here I was becoming part of the court world being an award winner there's been 14 awards at Houston which in 15 years which some people say bit crass to count but you know you do remember your gold medals there's no question about it so then in that year with my husband came with me in the very last half-hour of Houston someone said to me go check out handy quarter I said what's that because I'd said to them how am I going to quilt these quilts and keep them bigger but keep them flat and so over to handi quilter we went and that's when I met and the great team there and saw for the first time a sweet 16 at the time then it was an HQ 16 and I sat on that machine and my husband saying this is it babe this is it this is the one you've got to get this he could see that that space was going to mean I could quilt larger bigger easier with more control he could see it straight away and I'm like hang on thinking about the American dollar compared to the Australian dollar just just hang on there and he was insisting this is it you've got to have won this is it so we came home with a sweet 16 and now we have sweet 16s available in Australia and that's all through hand equal to USA and our local distributors and I'm so lucky to have become the international ambassador for this wonderful machine so I love it so that since 2007 and then we introduced them into Australia in 2010 and then they've now moved outside into the rest of the world to share the love of quilting with a much bigger audience so all my quilts are made on the sweet 16 very early on they were on a domestic machine in fact I had won two awards at quilt at Houston before I even owned my own sewing machine because I was not going to be a quilter I was an artist I wasn't going to go down that path but I'm just so lucky that art quilting is so accepted now in the quilt world that it's absolutely a major part of it all I find that such a brilliant way to express myself one of the reasons I love working in the quilt medium rather than formal artwork is the size I can get to if I were still framing my artwork there's the expense of physically framing a big piece and then how do you ship it anywhere I mean just from a practical point of view I love the quilting that it's I can roll it up put it in my suitcase it adds all that texture into it it's it's a touchy-feely kind of thing we all love touching fabric I mean there's many a times I'm quite guilty of just stroking a piece of fabric it's just part of the addiction I think so so I have got quite a few quilts to share with you today they're not necessarily in any particular order they're not my award winners so many of those have been sold these are literally what I had with me for this event for teaching so it's no particular order but they are some of my favorites so I'd like to share those with you today so this is rather special it is of course got the Australian theme with that this is called upper gum tree and it is a koala not a koala bear but this was made for a specific challenge in Australia a q-see challenge where they actually had a theme each year and I really love a theme because I often have so many ideas that by having a theme at channels that one idea and I know that's what I need to aim for plus I love a good deadline so this one is done with a mosaic technique where these are small fragments of fabric that already have that iron-on webbing on the back and then I've laid them down to create the tonal variation within that koala it helps give him a bit of texture slightly very kind of look as well and then I've gone over that with my glide foot which is the beautiful sort of cupped clear foot that means I can stitch over all that raw edge applique without catching it and you know lifting up those little edges of fabric so these are all little tiny pieces yep just placed in there - yeah and I actually use tweezers a lot of the time because my big hands can't get in there so and with the iron-on webbing underneath you can just keep layering a bit more and add another light better another dark bit until it's what's right so yeah and the gum trees worked very well on this this is a piece of Bartek fabric had a slight sort of stripe to it and these colors are exactly how the gum tree is it's a whitey a white soft green beautiful smooth bark of the gum tree it's just gorgeous because of course the koalas can only live in the gum tree and eat the gum leaves so ok sure I have in the past that actually works to put a layer of what I call tooled you call tulle on top really fine that does help it also visually joins all those colors and melds those colors together a little bit and so that is another option is to use the jewel over the top and that works really well I think the collage quilting and mosaic coating is very popular at the moment so this is a good example of it the background fabric here it's it's rather funny it's one that mum and I bought very early on in my quilting career when I didn't want to spend any money on fabric and it was a whole dollar a meter at home or $1 a yard because I thought that's all I'm going to spend and we've used a lot of that fabric on the backs of quilts but for this one it was the right fabric for the front of the quilt so that is the fabric mum and I refer to as the ugly one but there it is but the quilting in that if you can see that it's a technique I like to do where it gives it lots of flowing lines in amongst the gum leaves to help give them that movement in the breeze to help you just that sort of landscape idea up a gum tree and I even have some 70s vintage Australian and wildflower fabric for the back of that one just for a bit of fun this is one of my favorites this is my muse this is my daughter this is the beautiful in occur she in this picture was about 15 and this is painted on calico or what you call muslin with my dies with liquid radiance dyes and it's very much painted in a watercolor technique so it's using all my art skills here to paint that whole surface and then get into the quilting because the quicker I can paint it there quicker I can get onto my sweet 16 because that's the part really it's the painting and the stitching when they come together that's probably love so is there any piecing on this at all no this is effectively whole cloth yeah just that cream that cream color there so then I've actually used a double batting on this one and that's where I don't know if the camera can pick up these little squares here's that are really puffing up with the double batting so that shows you sometimes how important that what you don't quilt is as important as what you do quilt yeah she has what I like about this one the original photo was actually taken in the centre of Australia on a Salt Lake because we have those two here we are in Salt Lake City but we have salt lakes as well inland seas and so that's the glow coming up on her face and then I altered the photo in an an app a free app called dream scope and in that app it sort of changed her hair into these sort of chunks of color it's sort of abstracted a couple of curls over there on her side as well and then when put time I'd painted it it really looked like two little monkeys or two little humans there and that's my husband and I just having that little voice in her ear so I quite like that one so that's my daughter in a car because I don't often do straight lines although I've got two here today but I usually do more contour lines when I'm doing a face so I usually will try and find a cheek and do sort of rounded contours and then have that line go up and over the nose to try and describe that because quite often for instance just stippling on a face it just completely flattens it and then here are trying to have the nose come forward and the lips come forward and understand the shaping so here I did go with straight lines and that's where I used my preview paper the handy handy called a preview paper over the top so that I could plan directional lines so it's a see-through plastic that I can draw on and then remove so it's a way of testing and previewing my designs and with the paint there is no second chance once it's quilted you can unpick it so it's really to get it right first time but I was quite happy with the different directions on that one but I had to go geometric because the whole thing has that geometric feel to it yeah yep [Music] so this really is a bit of fun here and really shows you my sense of humor quite frankly so this again was another challenge quilt where the theme was tradition with a twist so I've gone with the idea of traditional breakfast feast but it's all a little bit twisted and not quite right so we've got a lovely vars here with flowers that happen to be bacon and eggs sorry to the vegans out there and this is our little buds that's just opening of course that's an egg gonna open up if you see the background is a watermelon but it's actually an umbrella because there's its hook there so the teapot is actually a fish bowl without cutlery seaweed and blueberry pebbles and he's looking rather bemused about what's going on and then over here we have the double breasted pair the zippered banana with the YKK logo on there a lemon that's all stitched up I've got the orange peel here is more like pencil shavings and then the strawberry with the pins it's a pin cushion and then the apple has the postage stamps so I've even included a date that you know it doesn't really exist it's the leap leap year for that year and it's got my Australia Post and it's got my dragonfly so all my quilts have a dragonfly in them somewhere but this is all painted on again the muslin so that's the cream white coming through painted with my dies and then I'm able to put that under the throat space of that sweet 16 and just go crazy with adding all that extra detail and my quilting so what I love is that this is a high-impact design from a distance but as soon as you get up close there's so much more to see in that quilting and I really want people to be able to stand and and you know have a giggle at what the quilting adds to the whole piece and it really tells you more about my sense of humor as well and my you know quirky ways so breakfast banquet and the label on this one is an egg bouquet that's the one breakfast bouquet so again in down here I've stitched in the white areas but left the purple checkers to puff up on their own and on these the texture is when I use the dye but I add salt onto it and that's the the texture you're seeing through there is salt yeah and then the quilting behind I often refer to my quilting in the background as wallpaper and in this case it actually is wallpaper but the idea of it can be tricky but I love having the quilting be behind those elements so your mind knows that that feather continues behind and that gives you then some depth in the quilt it a firm bit of fun that one yes my favorite girl again luckily I've only got the one so this is in ocurred now this is a different style of paint this is an acrylic paint that I use on a black fabric and it is called Lumiere by jacquard and it has the beautiful pearlescent and metallics or the golds and coppers and this paint only requires one layer to cover the black so I can get really strong colors and get a quite different look to when I'm painting in that watercolor style on the light colors or the acrylic pearlescent on the dark colors so again this was a photo of my daughter that I modified in a filter on the phone to sort of abstract her hair through there so yes so quite often people are confused when I describe it and they say so you painted the fabric first and then you applicate it on no no I painted onto the black fabric so where you see the black that is the black fabric coming through or in the face there's yes there is a bit of a contour through there and you can see on her nose I've actually you know literally stitched that little ball of the nose there and it is it is quite scary when you launch into a face but having that preview paper helps and then emphasising the lip shapes and trying to find those those natural cheek lines yeah yeah I think it is all part of the same process as I'm as I'm painting it or designing in the first place the quilting is coming but it's always just a plan it's always just a starting point because you always change your mind as you go that's the beauty of particularly of art quilting is it's such a creative process where you're asking yourself the what-if questions along the way what if I did do this with more flowing organic shapes rather than the straight lines how would it look what would change about the finished result so I'm always asking those questions of myself and I usually do have a pretty good idea in mind of how I'm going to quilt it but I'm open to change as the muse takes me so yeah do you ever stand back when you're partially quilted stand back and look at it so that you can say yes because once you've quilted on paint you can't go back now now there's no one there's no unpicking there's no one sewing a useful tool I do have is one of those little papers through the front door so then you can it's the same as an artist closing one eye basically it helps you get the overall look and and see it for what it is so it's one of those peepers or alternatively even is taking a photo of it with your camera just brings the whole piece together and you see that's one whole image and you can straightaway then see if there's a complete imbalance of colors or shape or something like that now this is a fairly recent piece and this combines both of my favorite painting techniques and it's given me lots of open space here to go crazy with some extreme quilting as I call it so the background of this was painted using my favorite dyes my liquid radiance and you might be able to sort of see some some rig angular straight sort of mandala kind of designs and then over the top are the more decorative ones with the Lumiere paint the metallic paint but it did start with an ink painting here just a free hand painting of the woman using an Indian ink so I had it so the whole fabric started out plain cream and then the black and then the dye and then the colors and all the stitching and so it's called content because she is totally content in her own skin when she is surrounded by color and vibrant patterns and that's basically me and that's how I wish I still looked so there we go because you know I'm now a real quilter I have got that fat quarter but unfortunately it's turning into a whole yard so yeah so that's content so I love all the patterns but again in here you can see I've tried to identify like her shoulder her cheek shoulder again even her breast has that you know curvature on it around the buttocks there and her bottom and a calf you can see trying to find those muscular lines there because I wanted to fill it with some stitching but if I just went with a flat grid or stippling or something just straight it just flattens it down to nothing this actually gives her shape and contour right so this is actually my friend sharpie I really should have no this is the black this is ink as in okay a bottle of Indian ink but there is Sharpie so anyone who knows me knows I don't leave home without a black sharpie in my handbag so I have stitched I have drawn around the shapes after I've painted them with the sharpie so they might stitch in there with the black I've already got a good strong solid black line because just the one thread was not going to be enough impact and going over at numerous times hard work so I use the sharpie this is where having had 40 years as an artist beforehand does make it easier but for anyone else they certainly could practice it on paper and draw on and I think I did drawn there at first with probably a friction pen or something that I knew would disappear later but I really wanted her to look very free hand and very loose so I did use quite a wide brush and literally did that in about two minutes so that it was loose and very informal and then we have the more formal surroundings but I must say when I painted her I actually had thought of this yet I was I did this a whole series of just simple black on white and then I've used them for various different things over the last you know 12 months yeah yep so this is just a little one but this again is that Lumiere paint and those beautiful colors this is one of my favorite colors here this is this is that secret weapon Jade which I think you're wearing today in your little jacket there it's that beautiful color but this is a typical class that I teach where I give the students a design to work from and we paint and then we quilt and then we actually paint back into our quilting so if the camera can pick up on that what that does for me my theory is that the the stitch line that the actual thread is so fine and I'm trying to show off my quilting skills and that's you know hard to actually see by now painting in between those two lines it now makes that a quarter inch wide and really shows off my patterning and has more impact so the end result is that we're actually almost creating our own fabric and it looks like we've had a piece of beautiful graded fabric with that pattern on it and we've cut that section out in applique but it's actually painted on there so I just find I've got more control to really make it look how I want it to look by using my paint so you have quite a variety of quilting and because you're not a piece ER you've quilted your own because you know me Vicky I can't face that let alone a curved flying geese I mean lot of people out there probably very clever I can draw it I can quilt it and I can paint it but I can't piece it some continuous curve which you call curved around there and then I do like to include some area of more traditional looking piecing so I call this pinch work because it's painted patchwork see paint work so they've got the combination of pinch work and then the set of more art quilting freeform yeah my Dragonfly yep so you didn't have to because I thought when you said at the beginning you put a dragonfly in every one of those quilts as the all the quotes we've seen so far is they can sometimes be one that gets missed but in the main there should be a dragonfly though yeah done anyone complain if you can't find the dragonfly just a quick sample here another class that I do this is called crackpots but it it really is a still life abstract art class but I don't call it that because people would be a bit terrified so we create our own pots we have an overlapping design area which just gives us different areas to color and different areas to practice our free motion quilting yeah and then we do have just some textural work here we've got some metallic the metallic thread I love to use is of course the superior brand they really are brilliant I can stitch a whole quilt with metallic and have maybe one break in you know two hours of of quilting and you know me on the sweet eye stitch pretty fast these are most spirit dancers these are the little fellows along here but I just noticed a there's actually a two-headed one here so I usually say to my students if you manage to have one head per pair of legs you've achieved but yeah but we're not going to unpick it it's all part of the fun the heads and then you come back and do the body no no actually do the legs first and then and then come back and do the heads it is really fun to what yeah it's it's a fun one it's a fun one and then in this class because it's sort of an abstract Picasso still life kind of class I then have the students I give them a challenge and it's called the dead fish challenge and if you can see in here there's a quilt a dead fish and they all sort of what but usually we find a shape that's suitable and someone always says yeah I've got my dead fishes we have a lot of fun in our classes now this is a bit different this is something new so this will actually it's not new the scarf is about 40 to 50 years old it's actually a scarf so an acetate or polyester scarf that was very typical souvenir back in the 70s more than likely in America here too you'd have them that represent different states or animals or regions etc so I've been collecting these now and then I stabilized them and quilt them on the sweet 16 but what I love about it is with that satin I get that shadow every time so it's dark and lights dark and light with every stitch I make so that's pretty heavily stitched it's got the double yeah it's got the double again but I'm really happy with how that comes up but it's also a bit of a social statement because now of course our as rock as it used to be called is now called uluru so there's kind of a bit of a cultural cringe there as well but yeah it's something different you can do with them scarves when you're out collecting them at the thrift shops and things like that you never know what you're going to find now this is a complete step into the unknown for me Vicky oh my goodness this girl that doesn't piece I have actually taught myself to do foundation paper piecing and guess what never going to do it again I loved the design process I did enjoy making it but I had no idea the patience and the accuracy involved and accuracy is not my middle name but this is a new pattern that I'm now going to be launching very soon and it's called crazy for cactus and I even done some hand stitching on there which to me is just wow I can't believe I did it but it's never going to happen again so there we go but still quilted on my sweet 16 but of course each block was made individually and then all put together so a bit more appreciation for those of you that do your foundation paper piecing this will be an online pattern that's available yeah okay it's more of a pattern this one well of course Vicky's at Helen Gordon calm so that's my website where I sell all my patterns and my favourite painting products my dvds might have lots of classes they can choose from some of those classes are run through the website and some are run through Facebook and then so on Facebook it's Helen Gordon quilts okay so find me there and my my whole mantra is education and inspiration on a daily basis I'm always putting something up there for you to get you excited in your sewing room get your quilting there's always lots of information there whether it be for domestic people or sweet sweet 16 girls there's always something there for you so find me on Facebook as well so it's so much different than there's a lot of straight lines in this who is that hard for you to do straight lines after all no because I knew that's what this one needed it just needed this the simpler slightly more modern look I did not use a ruler but I absolutely could have used one of the rulers to do this but I just get in there and do things freehand it's just how I am so the rulers are great I know a lot of the ladies out there excellent with the Handy quarter rulers the way they can work them but I'm really more of a freehand kind of girl crazy for cactus this one's pretty special this one is all couched so couched with yarn onto the surface of that quilt now couching is something that Isis had been around for a long time the technique of couching but usually on a domestic machine it's the yarn goes through to the needle but it stitches in a lovely straight line well this girl doesn't really do straight lines I want to do free motion so I had been using yarn and other crochet type yarns in my bobbin and doing bobbin work on my sweet 16 which is totally doable except you only get about two yards on that bobbin and you just get started and then you've got a rewind another bobbin so I really wanted to be able to work from the top of a quilt with the whole ball of yarn right there to feed through with me while I was doing my free motion work so my dad and I designed a couching foot we then tested it within bought it at a handy quarter they tested it they improved it and now it's out there on our machines so this is what's so great about the company they actually listen to 2/3 and listen to the quilter and listen to our ideas and make them work for everybody so this is all you think our couching feet so this was a piece of hand dyed fabric that graded from the lighter blue right the way through to the dark and then i've couched all the different yarns on top so when you're working in a landscape piece you have to start from the back because you really want those trees to be on top and then you want that tree on top so this tree didn't come into it until I was almost down to there yeah and then I have them a little bit of over dying just to darken some areas but it all came together beautifully the little log cabin was perfect with the yarn and a lot of these are actually in acrylic yarn because the acrylic has is quite inexpensive to buy and it's very consistent in its thickness and it runs through the couching feet really well and it's quite a forgiving technique because you're coming covering quite a big area and guess what you can't see your stitch quality so it's quite forgiving same weight of yarn I think this is predominantly the same weight but you can use the thicker yarns of because of course we have the three different size feet so you'd use the bigger the three millimeter hole for a thicker yarn but in the main I'm using the first the 1.5 mil that seems to suit for most of our average yarn yes no I don't think I have used a solid which maybe maybe just here I mean look at this beautiful color through here so then to get the effect of the water it was just repeating the same but getting that movement in there and then we've included there's a lot of space down here with that fabric coming through to give us that reflective look down there so this is actually based on Missoula Montana is the actual place it's from that's the actual background fabric peeking through yes it's all yarn I have actually stitched over that with a bit more texture to try and get the markings on those birch trees and there is a little bit of dye I have added in there at times but yeah that's just pretty well all yarn really yeah just another whole technique it's it does belong to Darrin okay one more of the couch yes and there's two techniques that I know that you've got yes so this one's pretty special so it's got the couching again but you can see it's very much in the Australian colors of our outback so we've got a hint here at the indigenous Dreamtime patterning and in the spinifex grass and the sand dunes and a drought stricken tree and the background these are what's called cutter tjuta which otherwise the olgas is the anglo-saxon name for them kata juta actually means bald head and that's what those rocks do look like there are formation in the middle yep a formation in the middle of Australia absolutely ancient rock formations but I've created this in Bleach painting so this again started out plain black fabric what type of black fabric could you recommend the cheaper the better an actual fact Viki so because the the cheaper blacks are often over dyed over something else and quite often it's a red based fabric that they start with to then over die to get it to be black enough in the same way as our black trousers or black blouses will fade with washing and they sometimes will have a brown look or a green look or even an aubergine kind of look it's because it's been over died out of something else to get it dark enough so that the cheaper quality of fabrics have often been over dyed and plus they have a little bit of starch in them to make them look more presentable at the shop you know in the shop and that little bit of starch also gives me more control and unbleached painting okay so the process is is to to take the black fabric and to do your bleaching your first and then you're going to do your quilting of just your regular thread hmm and then so how do you mark if you were you know if you were drawing or did you just start do you have because you can't use a blue marker no so this is where I use one of my markers that ions away so I've got a marker called a panda pencil and no we can find it on your on my website but that's how I would just loosely draw some areas do the bleach painting neutralize it all wash it and iron it now sandwich it up do all the background quilting and then the catching up on top so so the quite light couching here but when we get let's just rain yes up here when we get down here this is total yeah couch totally covered it's not black no that is the black so from a distance this actually gets a bit of a look of those 70s painting on velvet which were those touristy things we had them in Australia unfortunately it sounds like you had them here and that actually is what it looks like it gets that slightly fuzzy look like those black velvet paintings but this is my dream time stitching which is in the top up here as well right so indigenous australian indigenous artwork is typically in the central areas concentric circles joined by pathways now we can't quilt consent we can but it's hard to quilt just circles we want to quilt a spiral to make that quote line continuous so this is my version of making that to pattern but in a continuous lines I call that dream time quilting I call this one slice of Australia because you're just getting a slice yeah so we we've been so fed with all sorts of information today this has been so exciting and I'm sure our viewers are are just like whoa this lady I've got a website I've got to see what because there are you are truly an artist you are truly an artist in everything you do thank you so thank you for joining us today this has been incredible I know that you have some block of the month I think that's what you call them yes that they can go and join in on and learn the painting and the quilting yep there's lots of different classes I have online right and that there's a quilt behind it oh yeah here that one yes I think I hope that we're watching that because that is tell me about that question that was last year's block of the month but it's still available to people now so you come in and once you've paid your membership fee you then have a private Facebook group where you'll get access to every pattern for each month and they get a video of me painting and a video complete video of me quilting and I'm on the sweet 16 and PDFs on the video that was absolutely harmless color charts everything's there so that each month they can complete that whole block and at the end of the nine months we then have one month which is all the finishing in the putting together etc so that's called feathered friends block of the month and that's on Helen Gordon calm and then you have you have some more coming up I know I've got a new one it's pretty exciting it's all based on Alice in Wonderland so it's called curiouser amazing yeah curiouser and curiouser which is quite hard to say but in that one I haven't even finished the entire quilt yet I designed it but I'm only releasing a block each month so they have to stay curious to think what's going on okay well thank you for joining us now first of all again I know we've said this let's tell how we can find you so Helen Gordon calm it's my website and then on facebook helen Godin quilts I'd love to see you there come and see what I get up to so subscribe it's a lot there subscribe to our YouTube channel so that you can see all of our HQ lives it's on the second Thursday of every month and Helen I just have to give you a great big hug it's always in I love a so delightful having been here anything I'm trying to learn all of those new words that you say roar edge and a drawer and well I've seen you practicing on paper and doodle I think I've got that the little guys figured out so I hit they don't get to hags we think I have another looking at me a little time so but thank you for joining us today we'll see you again next month for another HQ live thanks everybody thanks [Applause]

Channel: Handi Quilter

Views: 20,778

Rating: 4.927928 out of 5

Keywords: Handi Quilter, Longarm, Sewing, Quilting, Quilts, Free-motion Quilting, Finishing Quilts, quilter, longarm quilt, quilting tips

Id: 7X3XVt1P_Lw

Length: 43min 12sec (2592 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 09 2020