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"I made 'Stellar' to improve on my FPP and appliqué skills on a smaller scale. Designing every single aspect of this quilt required a lot of thought and this has been the most technically challenging quilt I’ve made to date. One of the many challenges I faced was that my first attempts at the Mariner’s Compasses were ever so slightly inaccurate, but resulted in all of them growing in size and the larger ones were all wavy and didn’t lie flat. I binned them all and started over! Perseverance did its trick and the end result was exactly how I had envisaged it.
I bought my first sewing machine during Covid time around mid-2020 to try to make face masks. Afterwards I tried to make simple garments for my daughter Dhinta, but the results weren’t very good and she asked me to make her a ‘blanket’ instead. Never had any interest in art before I signed up to an online beginner’s class and made my very first small square blocks quilt in December 2020. I was hooked and never looked back. Dhinta got her ‘blanket’ in mid-2021 and I started entering UK competitions that same year with great results.
I belong to a few quilting groups on Facebook, and in 2025, a couple of my peers suggested I enter Stellar to the Paducah show. I was a bit daunted by the quality of the field at first, but decided to give it a go. I was over the moon to be announced as a semi-finalist with my first entry, but then for Stellar to be awarded the Best Miniature at the 2026 show, and now to have her living in the National Quilt Museum is out of this world and a great honour!"