I ♥ my quilter

My Strawberry Fields quilt is back, and as usual Belinda (Eucalypt Ridge Quilting) has magically transformed it. She adds a beauty to my designs that is impossible for me to achieve.

As I was picking up my quilt, we got to talking about the concept of losing ownership of a quilt if you outsource the quilting. I confess to once feeling that I was 'cheating' to get someone else to quilt my work. I'm over it. Life's too short. These days, it is an enormous relief to hand my quilt tops over to Belinda, in complete trust that she will do something beautiful with them. If not for her, I would have completed the top, and it would have languished in the corner incomplete because quilting with my domestic machine frustrates me. I still quilt small pieces myself, but at 93" square, this baby was way too big to wrestle with.

We decided to use Anne Bright's 'Strawberries' design for my quilt, to link with the strawberry theme of the Fig Tree fabrics.

Can I take a moment to sing Belinda's praises? You won't hear it from her as she's not a 'blow-your-own-trumpet' sorta gal! She turned my quilt around in 10 days, despite my telling her that there was no particular hurry for it! My quilts don't challenge Belinda much because they are usually edge-to-edge designs, but I can tell you, this woman is an unbelievable quilter. She has won awards at major quilting festivals, both national and international, for her spectacular work. I have pinched these examples from her blog, to prove my point:

The precision and detail in her exhibition quilts are extraordinary. And when I get to occasionally see them in real life they take my breath away!

Belinda is also regularly called upon to quilt collaborative charity projects for Australian Homespun.

There are countless more examples of Belinda's exquisite quilting on her blog and at her website gallery.

As for my simple little quilt, all that remains to do is the bind. Pure pleasure!