Breast Cancer Research Fundraiser

Earlier this year both Helen & I were honoured & thrilled to be asked to be the designers of two beautiful quilts and assist in raising money and awareness for Breast Cancer Research. Below are 2 photos of the quilts. There is also a poster available from here which is being circulated everywhere in the hope that you can print it out and display it prominently to advertise the upcoming ebay auction of these two glorious quilts. Click on the photos & you will be taken to a high resolution pdf that you can print on your home colour printer with professional results. We thankyou for your assistance in this fundraiser!

The auction starts on Nov 1st on http://www.ebay.com.au/

For more details & hopefully a direct link to the auction when it starts visit http://www.completecraft.com.au/

These are using the Northcott/Monarch range of Quest for a Cure fabrics and the instructions have been published in Homespun & Quilters Companion magazine here in Australia. Many shops are providing these as kits with part proceeds of sales of fabrics going to Breast Cancer Research!
We are very pleased with the results and hope that you can help us out by letting everyone know about the auction and passing on the poster to assist in advertising!

cheers from a sunny day in South Australia where we are just starting to harvest our crops!

Tracey

What I've been up to....

Hi all!

I’ve been very quiet lately with head down & bum on seat trying to juggle all my work to keep everyone happy. Not sure if I’ve totally succeeded with quilting mounting up to be done to deadlines!

Anyway, thought I would share at least one thing that I’ve been working on and achieved……My first E-book in conjunction with my sister, Helen Stubbings who is my partner in Wysistas!

This is a 6 part e-book that is FREE by simply subscribing to it via our website http://www.wysistas.com

I have been madly working on this and the new Downloadable Quizzles® that are now available on the site – boy what a drama learning how to do all this! Thank goodness for good help is all I can say VBG.

This has all come about due to our Quizzles® -Interactive Quilt Patterns on CDRom being reviewed by Alex & Ricky on www.thequiltshow.com that went to air this week! We are so excited and thrilled that they chose our patterns to review and demonstrate on their show that we decided to create the book as a thank you to all those that visited our site to see more.

So now, if you want to learn more, you can play with a Quizzle Trial right on the website to see what they are all about. They are intended for everyone, but aimed at new, beginner quilters with very detailed instructions and diagrams to assist them to create more quilt tops for us machine quilters to have to quilt LOL….(I sure have an ulterior motive here don’t I)

We are so pleased with the wonderful response already this week that I just had to share with a few more thousand friends’ right here….

Cheers from warm & sunny South Australia where our crops are almost ready to harvest.

Junior Debutante Ball

Well it is finally all over!! We have spent the last 10 weeks traipsing into town so that my youngest, Sarah (nearly 9) could practise & learn to dance to partipate in a Junior Debutante Ball which was being run as a fundraiser for the Make a Wish Foundation for critically ill children. We had 22 young couples doing their debut & they were all georgous!

Here is a photo of my Sarah & her partner David. (Looks like the carefully prepared hair do was already mucked up by this stage after playing outside first!)

We were very proud of her as she & her partner had to answer questions on stage in front of 250 odd people & they spoke extremely well. They were also in perfect time to the music whilst their little group of 18 performed 'The Jive' for all of us. Quite a few were so nervous that they sped along & got themselves a little confused. They were aged from 5 yrs to 9yrs in this group, then we had another 26 older kids up to 13 yrs old doing the Tango afterwards.

It was a good night & lots of fun & raised lots of money for the Make a Wish Foundation.

Thanks to her Auntie Helen who made this dress for her daughter Tess, to wear as a flowergirl in a wedding last year. It fitted fine and was well complimented!

Back to quilting now....have been really good this past 3 weeks getting 8 customer quilts done! Haven't done this many since March with all my travelling and other business's to attend to. Feels good to get some quilting done & the cupboard cleaned out some....

cheers

Tracey

This'n'that

Well I have had a wonderful week with my parents up here on the farm. Started off last Wednesday when they arrived and they got stuck into my poor neglected garden! They brought with them the power tools to trim, prune & totally clean up my garden that normally has to look after itself whilst I am quilting.....

I do hope that certain plants will bounce back as they have been pruned very hard LOL

Over the weekend, mum & I went off to Clare to attend a Rural Women's Gathering. We had a fantastic time with 250 other women from all across South Australia. We had Friday night games, fantastic motivational guest speakers & entertainment, informative & fun workshops & bus tours. Saturday evening saw us laughing all evening with a gourmet meal & listening to our own Fiona O'loughlin - comedian extroardinaire! Sunday was a full cooked breakfast in the vines and a lovely brisk walk on the Riesling Trail followed by a bazaar with lots of goodies to entice us. Lastly our final keynote speaker and farewells for another year....

This was the 12th annual Rural Women's Gathering and I have now attended 8 of them and was chairperson for the committee organising the 3rd RWG here locally with 300 attendees & 70+ workshops on offer. They are a fantastic way to meet other people, network & learn new things. I am still involved here on the Yorke Peninsula in our YP Women's Network that provides networking opportunities and training to women in our regional/rural area.

Back home again & very weary, we are greeted by my eldest, Emma - who lets me know that all the subjects that she has chosen to do at the school in Adelaide have been accepted/approved & so it seems she is definitely going! We still need to look into assistance for living away from home allowance to see if we are eligible for any at all.

So to answer you Lyn - yep she's going! Think this will be harder on mum than her!!

Better get back to quilting to pay for all this now...mum & dad left yesterday for home 7 hrs away. They are off again in 2 weeks to visit my sister, Helen, in Tasmania & their 3 grand daughters over there....
cheers

Black wholecloth

Well I'm back from netball & might feel it later! Spent an hour chasing 9-11yr olds around the court....

I wanted to acknowledge the designers of the patterns that I used in my black sateen wholecloth in my previous post. The centre snowflake design was done by Linda Lawson and the swag/rose design is from One Song Needle Arts Company. Thankyou to those talented digitisers & designers for the fantastic patterns that are now available to us. The Intelliquilter allowed me to add extra swags & join everything together to create the frame around Linda's snowflake.

Better go to bed soon!
cheers

Lone star

Well I did get that quilt finished!!

Here are a couple of photos....

Pretty good piecing considering this customer has not been a patchworker for very long! I do hope she will be happy with the quilting result....

Next is a couple of photos of a quilt that I did using my Intelliquilter. Just to see what it could do!

It is on black sateen using gold metallic thread from Superior. I only had one thread break on this quilt and designed the whole thing whilst sitting in my chair in front of the fire one night. Once the fabric was pinned on it only took 2 hours to quilt the metallic thread design (whilst I was on the phone as well) then a further couple of hours to do the background fill afterwards.

I was really pleased on how well it all lined up for me, especially when it was my first wholecloth attempt with this system....

off to play a mother/daughter game of netball now for the last training session for the winter season....wish me luck!

cheers

Ok I think I've done this right now.....I've added myself to the MQResource blog ring! It must take some time for my blog to show up on the list on the webring so I'll have to check again tomorrow...

Absolutely must do some quilting now today so I can finish this lonestar quilt for a customer. Very interesting way to do her applique!! I think it is with glue as it is so rock hard that I'm frightened to allow my needle to go near it.

cu

Family decisions

Hi again
We are going through a trying time with my 14yr old pushing us to allow her to live away from home and attend a new school in our capital city (about 2 hrs from here) The school is great - a public one (coz we can't afford the private boarding schools here) and they do have an accredited supervised homestay program for International & Rurally isolated students as well.

She has great aspirations in the IT field and our current school albeit a lovely Christian school locally, has only got 25o students from reception to Yr 10 (middle school) currently. They have achieved approval to extend their school to Yr 11 & 12 next year, but with minimal students still they will have limited skilled teachers & subjects to offer. They are all equipped for open access learning via internet/computers etc, but I am reluctant to rely on the discipline of my (sometimes lazy) eldest daughter to actually excell in those subjects when she has no peers to work with or a qualified teacher to push her into achieving the best she can do....

Is it just me? Am I simply being selfish in not wanting to let her go? Or am I worrying that she might fall in a heap in a strange environment. She may just flourish and attain great things....she is determined to do this however, so today I have to go into our school and announce this news to the Deputy Principal & then live with the consequences....

I think I've been chicken to do this up until now, but she is sooooo determined to go!

cheers
Tracey

An introduction

Well I am finally succumbing to blogging!

My name is Tracey Browning & I live on a cereal farm with my DH & 3 kids 14, 12 & nearly 9yrs old. We crop approx 3000acres of cereals each year & sharefarm up to 800 sheep as well.

For a number of years (too many to count) I have been an obsessed patchworker & quilter. I have always been enamoured by the quilting designs just a little more than the piecing/applique design process and gradually realised that this is the way I wanted to go....

Back in 2000 I had the opportunity to purchase my first longarm machine second hand. It arrived early in Dec & 4 days later I wrote my car off & hurt myself enough so that I could not touch/move my machine for about 6 weeks. I nearly gave up on my dream as it hurt so much every time I tried to practice. I lost my self confidence in this period & if it wasn't for my very first customer (my middle child's kindy teacher) who threw a quilt at me & said 'just stipple it!' then that machine may have simply been sold.

That was certainly the start of my love affair with machine quilting & longarm machines. I now have my third longarm machine - the A1Elite. I tried this machine out at MQX in 2005 when invited over there to teach other longarmers about using templates/rulers with these machines. There were none in Australia at that time....long story short LOL! DH wanted to buy a new header(combine) and keep the old one. I was dithering & dreaming about the A1 machine all this time with him saying that I couldn't drive 2 machines at the same time etc etc. Once he purchased this VERY expensive bit of farm machinery & kept the old one (they only get used 6 weeks of the year as well) then well I just got tough & said if he could have 2 machines then so could I!! I have now gone one better as I can now use both my machines AT THE SAME TIME as I have installed an Intelliquilter computerised system on my APQS Millennium and can be running that whilst doing custom work on my preferred machine the A1 Elite.

I am now a dealer for A1 Quilting machines and the Intelliquilter as well as one of the largest suppliers of machine quilting books, DVD's , rulers & notions for machine quilting in Australia. I have also been publishing patterns in magazines both here in Australia, Canada, USA, France & Japan for nearly 9 years.

My latest, most exciting venture is with my sister, Helen Stubbings of www.hugsnkisses.net
being a new business called Wysistas that produces Quizzles(R) - Interactive quilt patterns on CDRom. These have recently been reviewed on The Quilt Show by Ricky Tims and Alex Anderson and are available in the USA from www.onwordboundbooks.com

Life is exciting and moving maybe a little too fast at the moment. But I'll try to keep my head above water so I can appreciate all that is happening right now with both my family & my business.....
cheers
Tracey