On a lighter note...

The news can be quite depressing at times, and you really have to hunt for the good news some days.  When I saw the headline that Ed Sheeran was going to be playing in Thomand Park next May, (home of Munster Rugby) in Limerick, (my home town) I knew that was going to be the headline I'd pick for inspiration for a quilt.  Something happy and fun.

My sketch of a guitar in fabric scraps.

Limerick sits on the Shannon, founded by the Vikings and has a city charter older than London.  Limerick also has a population of about 100,000 people so we don't get the big gigs that often.  Most people go to Dublin. 

Ed Sheeran is also really popular and tickets sold out really quickly.  One of my very best friends from childhood has a birthday the week in May that he's playing so I took a chance and bought 3 tickets when I saw the extra tour date go up.  I kept my fingers crossed my friends are ok & happy to go - they are! We are all so excited to have something to look forward to.  After so much lock down in the past 18 months it feels a bit strange.  

So once I had decided the headline, I knew I wanted to make a guitar themed quilt.  I got as far as 3rd grade classical guitar in school and don't play very often but acoustic guitar is my favourite kind of music.

 Two weeks ago, I was asked to teach the ticker tape workshop I had put together a good number of years ago and one of the samples I had put together in an unsewn state was an abstract guitar.  This sample was showing how you can create shapes and create emphasis with scraps of different colours or values.  

I decided to finish it off and pulled out all my orange scraps.  I quilted it with straight lines echoing around the curves of the guitar and some extra lines on the guitar strings to make them look like they were after being plucked.  Ticker tape is a quilt as you go method and in this piece I didn't sew around the scraps just quilted over them in a raw edge state.   

I used an Ikea frame and modified the mat to make it bigger to frame the guitar and hang it on the wall.  The whole family loves it and its wonkiness.  It makes me smile when I walk into the living room and it definitely brightens up the space.  Ticker tape quilts are a lot of fun and sometimes you just need to play.  It's good for the soul!