I made this little square (8") for the spinning group I belong to, (Connacht Spinners and Weavers) We were asked to provide squares that represented, in some way, our area.
I happened to have the Torchon bobbin lace, made of one-ply wool. I had abandoned it during the making, because so many of the threads had broken. I quilted the 'mountain', that is very reminiscent of Croagh Patrick, our local conical mountain near Westport. The peat workings below, I hand spun from natural black fleece, and appliqued single and two ply strands to represent the peat diggings. The rest is free machine embroidery done in a zig-zag stitch to represent winter trees.
This little square is off to be put on display at the Knitting and Stitching Show in Dublin in November.
Some of the other squares were variously made using techiniques such as weaving, feltmaking, knitting, crochet, and rugmaking.
After months of searching our quilting group finally found a suitable venue for this year's exhibition. Sadly, for the third year running, we were only able to have it for one day, which was a great shame, as a lot of work goes into setting it up, and taking it down again. This year, we restricted ourselves to all the quilts we had made for Project Linus. In all, we had 65 quilts on dislay, roughly half made by our group, and half made by the Octagon Quilters in Westport, County Mayo. We were able to make donations to the Neo Natal Unit at Sligo General Hospital, the Women's Refuge in Castlebar, Co. Mayo, and the Rainbow Group in Sligo. This last organisation helps children to come to terms with bereavement.
