This year's southern hemisphere summer is drawing to a close, and it's been a bit underwhelming. Usually we get weeks on end of long, hot days when all you want to do is lie under a tree and take a nap, but this year there has been rain, and days when the weather has blown in a big chill from the Antarctic.

Officially we are now in Autumn (New Zealand classes its seasons in complete months - in England it wouldn't change until the equinox). However, this weekend we had blissful summer weather - not too hot to go outside, it was just calling me to make the most of the warm weather.

The quilt taking an outing this weekend was Candy Drops. I designed this quilt for our Shop Hop last year, and the pattern was published this week in the digital magazine Make Modern, Issue 15.

It's surprisingly easy to squish a quilt into your backpack - this is quite a small pack that my Mum bought me for a significant birthday. It holds all the necessities - emergency kit, spare layers, lunch, tea...

The #totallytrianglequiltalong has started! It is so much fun to see the blocks that are being made. I hope you will join in. This is my first block, the Triangle Nine Patch.

You can see other blocks in the triangle quilters facebook group - anyone can join even if you just want to take a look for now. You can also see them on Instagram.

I will be posting more blocks on here as well as some tips for sewing with triangles as we get further into the quiltalong.

It can be a bit scary trying something new, but everyone who has tried these blocks seems to get into them really quickly and enjoy making them. You can get the pattern from Quilters' Lane, or from my Craftsy store. Why not have a go?

Though you may feel a bit like I did when I got back into going for walks in the bush last year, and was faced with walking across this swingbridge for the first time....

....just take a deep breath, be brave, and you never know what fun is to be had on the other side.

Here's my Lonestar...

2017 is going to be my year of the Triangle! Will it be yours too?

Triangle patchwork blocks are so much fun to cut and sew - they come together really quickly and are a lot easier than they look!

I'm also excited that the Sampler quilt has been accepted into Quiltcon, so if you are going to Savannah in February do look out for it.

To celebrate the launch of my pattern, I am running a Quiltalong on Instagram starting on January 7th 2017. See further down this entry for details.

The pattern for the Modern Triangle Sampler is now available in my Craftsy store here and also from Quilters' Lane at www.quilterslane.co.nz. I will have physical copies available in the shop also.

The pattern is about 80 pages long and includes detailed instructions on how to cut all the shapes in the blocks, 25 block patterns and also finishing instructions for putting together a sampler quilt.

Welcome to the Totally Triangle Quiltalong!

 Join me on January 7^th 2017 for the start of...

This year I went to Quiltmarket in Houston for the first time ever. Wow, what an amazing event - there are so many designers, manufacturers, exciting stalls and new fabrics.. it was hard to know where to begin.

Quiltmarket is an event for shop owners, designers and people in the business of quilting. It goes on for three days (plus a day of 'schoolhouses' at the beginning), and then the whole area is cleared out to make way for Quilt Festival, which everyone can attend.

I was just in seventh heaven, going to presentations by designers I have become familiar with over the years of running the shop, seeing all the new designs and meeting lovely people.

One of the main reasons for attending this year was to meet Kim Moos, founder and CEO of Cotton Cuts. Kim and I have been talking for a while about taking my Mystery Quilt programme to the USA, and it was so much fun to meet up with her in person. Kim is doing a great job, working with a disabled workshop in St Louis to cut the fabrics...

It was time to go for a walk .....

The last couple of months have been so busy, I needed to take time out and stretch my legs. My quilt companion is Shifting Strata, a small quilt I made based on Wendy Williams' Crossing Paths pattern back in 2012. I named it after the Christchurch earthquakes. Here's my quilt

And here is Wendy's original

Given the recent shifting of the earth under our feet, it felt like Shifting Strata was a very topical quilt to bring. This was one of my first 'improv' style quilts, and also my first attempt at big stitch hand quilting. It was also one of the first to win me a ribbon, at the Capital Quilters exhibition later that year :)

Having done very little walking over the winter, I took it fairly easy this time. From Kiriwhakapapa campsite there is a loop walk that passes through a grove of redwood trees - these were planted way back before we realized that messing with mother nature is not necessarily a good idea. Now they make a beautiful...

Since the 2016 Mystery Reveal I have had a lovely break away, doing a little traveling around New Zealand.

You may have heard the news about the large earthquake that hit the South Island. There are lots of photos in the news of the damage to the roads and infrastructure there. Although we only felt relatively little shaking here in Masterton, a lot of damage happened on the other side of the mountain ranges in the Wellington area.

source: stuff.co.nz

This is the Queensgate mall  which was closed for a couple of weeks and is now only partially open. I travel past here when going to my Capital Quilters meetings, and when I went last Saturday it was eerily quiet - usually at this time of year it would take ages to drive through the town. Buildings are being demolished and there is a lot of work going on to get things back to normal.

Meanwhile back in Masterton, I am preparing lots of exciting things for next year.

MYSTERY 2017

We had so much fun making the 2016 Mystery quilt. I'm...

Hi there! What an exciting day - it's the Big Reveal of my 2016 Puzzle Mystery Quilt.

If you have been quilting along, this blog post contains photos of putting the quilt together. You will need the month ten instructions - either from your Mystery pack or by downloading from my Craftsy store.

If you are new to this quilt, the clues are all available on Craftsy. Start by downloading the free information which will tell you about the quilt and how much fabric you need.

So without further ado, let's take a look at the quilts.  My samples are in two of the colourways that we offered through the shop. We had fourteen different colourways altogether, and I will show you some photos of other colourways after the reveal day.

The single quilt is shown here in the Tokyo Garden colourway.

And here is the double in the Pewter and Linen colourway

Did you guess the layout?

So now it is time to show you how to put all the pieces together:

Here are the photos that follow the...

This morning we broadcast live on Facebook from the Mystery reveal. Follow this link to watch the video!

https://www.facebook.com/sheila.christensen.71/videos/10202207741552887/

Hi everyone

Here I am at Quiltmarket and feeling frustrated that I can't give you photos that are the right way round - I promise to post lots when I get back!

It has been an incredible few days and I have lots of news ahead, so stay tuned, and don't forget to look out for the Big Reveal of the 2016 Mystery this Saturday 5th November!

A few years ago we had a great range of fabric in the shop by Nancy Halvorsen, called Curiosities and Mischief. Curiosities had a lovely combination of pink, lilac, strawberry and yellow. Mischief was full of green, brown, orange and teal. Both had cute little pictures on some of the fabrics. We got through metres of that fabric!

One of the projects we made was a railfence quilt based on a mini jelly roll of twenty strips. Since we have now sold out of the fabric I really need to get round to making another sample quilt in a new range, and the sample we had in the shop has been unloved for a while. When I was looking for a quilt to take for a walk this week it seemed like the perfect opportunity to give Mischief a little love.

In a few weeks I am going on a long (73km) walk with my sister, so to get in a bit of training I decided to hike up to Rocky Lookout. It's a 350m (over 1000 feet) climb in just over 3 kilometres, so quite a challenge for me if not for the super fit Kiwis who...