Update

Sorry for being AWOL in the last week, things have been very busy here! I did manage to finish the quilt for Beneath the Southern Sky - here is a sneak peek. The quilt is hanging in our dining room at the moment and we all like it very much, so if it does not get selected we won't mind!

On Monday and Tuesday I was in Cairns to collect data on multi-drug resistant TB for my PhD. There was unfortunately no time for sightseeing but I did have a lovely view over Cairns and the mountains from my hotel room.



Tomorrow we are going to Straddie (North Stradbroke Island) for a weekend camping with two other Dutch families. Looking forward to that! Next week I hope to do some screen printing again. I need new prints for my Blue Jacaranda shop on Etsy where things are starting to happen... (23 sales in the first two months!!) And I have bought supplies for printing on paper with my thermofax screens (high-quality printing paper etc) - I can't wait to give that a try!



And last but not least: Cycle of Life is a finalist in the Fall Expo at the Infinity Art Gallery. Out of 70 entrants, 32 pieces works of art were selected, so I am quite happy :-).

Good news

Coming back from our holiday I was very happy to find an email telling me that my Tuberculosis quilt is a finalist in the Political and Social Art Exhibit at the Infinite Art Gallery. It will be displayed on the website for the remainder of the year. You can read more about my quilt here and here.



We had a lovely holiday at our caravan at Wooyung Beach, but came home one day early because it rained so much. The photo above was taken yesterday afternoon at Hastings Point, a few kilometres north of Wooyung, on our way home. You can see the rain more or less above our caravan!



This is my favourite photo from this holiday. I am reading The Photographer's Eye by Michael Freeman, a great book about composition and design. I'm trying to apply what I read to my photography. More photos will be posted on my photography blog in the next few days.

Tuberculosis

I have entered my Tuberculosis piece into the Political and Social Art exhibition at the Infinity Art Gallery, an online art gallery. You can view it, and read my artist statement, in Gallery 2.
I encourage you to take a look at both galleries; there are some very interesting art works.

I have finished my diving quilt and called it Synchronicity. It's hanging on the wall in our living room now - I love it! But I'm not showing it here yet, as I am thinking of entering it into a show... Sorry!

More Callies

The Kookaburra and the Giraffe:



And here's the whole Calli Family so far (remember the Kelly Family, back in the 70s/80s?)



I'll probably make some more and take them to market on Sunday...

I'm looking forward to the markets but will also be glad when they are over and I will be able to do other things again! Life is a bit busy at the moment, with the markets coming up and my PhD Confirmation next week... Here's the invitation:



Thankfully we have two days off on Wednesday and Thursday next week - looking forward to going to our new caravan and hanging up my new curtains!

Progress

DH took the boys to a park today so I could work in peace and quiet on my new ice skating quilt. I made some good progress and hope to finish the quilt in the next few weeks.



On my new website I used a photo of the Tuberculosis quilt I made in 2009 as a journal quilt with the Australian and New Zealand Art Quilters group. I cropped it so the stitched writing wasn't visible and realised that I actually like the quilt better this way. So today I chopped off that part and finished the new edge with a satin stitch.

Speaking about my website: I am going to rename this blog www.lindarobertus.blogspot.com and use the domain name www.lindarobertus.com for the website (with the blog integrated in it). I hope that this will work and that you, dear reader, will be able to find me again! It may take a little time for the url to work again though...



PS For thise of you who were wondering: my gymnast son won a ribbon for 5th place on high bar at the Queensland Gymnastics Championships yesterday! On Tuesday he will compete again in the Regional Team Challenge, as the number one of Brisbane North in Level 3 Under 9.

Woohoo!

What a week... I'm reeling! On Tuesday I heard that my abstract was accepted for the TB conference in Hong Kong in July - and today I heard that there is funding for my travel expenses. Yay!

Today I also heard that my quilt Cycle of Life has been juried into the State of the Art quilt 11 exhibition, which will be displayed at the Textile Art Festival in Brisbane in June. Woohoo! I was asked not to show the full quilt on my blog yet, but to post the detail pic I sent in with my submission. So here it is!

And as if that wasn't enough good news for one day - I came home to find that my Dutch Houses postcard was featured in today's MadeIt newsletter, and that I had sold a number of items in my Blue Jacaranda shop! So I need to make some new ones quickly - but not tonight, I am presenting my research findings tomorrow at our World TB Day symposium and shouldn't even be blogging now, but rehearsing my presentation!

QTBCC Quilt

My workplace, the Queensland Tuberculosis Control Centre, was 60 years old last year. This wall quilt was made to commemorate this fact and unveiled today, just in time for World Tuberculosis Day 2011; this Thursday March 24th (on that day the clinical staff is at a symposium in another location, which is why it was unveiled today).

All staff members received a square of fabric to sign and embellish (if desired). The quilters among the staff assembled the quilt. Here they are: Bev, yours truly, Carmel and Louise.

A good day

My youngest is at Preschool this year, on Mondays, Tuesdays and alternate Wednesdays. I am at work on Mondays and Tuesdays, but not on Wednesdays... and today was my first 'free' day! Woohoo! After doing the shopping and other domestic chores that had to be done I had a few hours left to play, and I managed to quilt these three gymnasts. I had intended this piece for SAQA's 2011-2012 Travelling Trunk Show, but it was too big, so now I am thinking I may send it in for this year's Benefit Auction. Once it is finished, of course.



This is a project from the book I showed you earlier, Playing with Books. Using an old paperback novel I made this business card holder. Adding the letter tags was my own idea. I absolutely love it, don't you? Here is the view from the side:



And last but not least, some NQR (not quilting related) news: today the first paper written for my PhD thesis was published, in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health! I am very, very excited about that! (if you are interested in 'Tuberculosis in the Australian Indigenous population: history, current situation and future challenges' you can find the article here. It is not very 'technical' I think, but maybe I'm wrong there?)

I am going to have a celebratory glass of wine with DH, who has just heard that he will be promoted to Senior Research Fellow at the University of Queensland :-).

Good times

This last week I have been working hard on my bicycle quilt and so far it is looking good, even on the back side!

Apart from that I have nothing to show here (I have an idea for the self portrait quilt for AQATW, but am waiting for the supplies I ordered), so here is a pic of the bag I bought in Berlin:




Is it scrumptious or is it scrumptious??? (I love that word!)



PS Remember how I whined a while ago when my TB paper and my quilt were both rejected in the same week? This week my paper was accepted in another journal and I also had a very exciting email about my quilts... but I'll tell you more about that at a later stage!

Second Art and Craft Display

Remember the Art and Craft Display we had at my workplace, the Queensland Tuberculosis Control Centre, last year? This week we had the second edition of that event. My selvedge quilt had a prominent place (kept in place by some heavy medical textbooks!):



My colleagues loved the Tuberculosis journal quilt:



And I loved this throw knitted by one of them:



At home, I suddenly realised there are mandalas hidden in the woodwork!



I'm still adding seed stitches to the gymnasts quilt. It's getting a bit boring... But it has to be finished before the end of this month to try to enter it in the State of the Art Quilt 2010 exhibition.

Tomorrow the boys' grandparents are coming! They will be staying in Brisbane for 1 week, before travelling to the Whitsundays, so I think I won't be doing much quilting in the next few days. But it will be lovely to have some family here for a while.

Dutch Quilters Guild

Yesterday I received the latest issue of Quiltnieuws ('Quilt news'), the magazine of the Dutch Quilters Guild. I joined the Guild shortly after I started quilting in 2006 and I still am a member, even though I have been living in Australia for 2.5 years now. I love reading this colourful magazine (that's Joseph's Technicolour Dreamcoat on the front page, I would love to see that musical!) and recognizing names mentioned in it.

Since last month there is a link to this blog on the Guild's website and I have noticed that quite a few guests have come to visit through that link. Welcome to you all! I hope you enjoy my blog and will come back sometime.

On a not-quilty note: as of today I am an official PhD candidate at the University of Queensland! Although it will probably mean less time for quilting I am very excited about this. The title of my proposed research project is 'The epidemiology of tuberculosis in Queensland as it relates to strategies to prevent transmission, particularly in the indigenous population'.

Exciting times

Forty-six blocks done! It is a bit hard now to photograph all the blocks laid out (have to remove the furniture first), so I'll just show you some of the blocks I have made so far. I am trying to achieve a colourwash effect, from red to purple with all of the colours of the rainbow in between. Apart from that there are some theme blocks, like an Australian fabric block, a few children's fabric blocks, a Halloween block and a Christmas block. (click on the photos for a larger view)





For the backing of the blocks I have mainly used plain fabrics (most of them handdyed) and tried to match it with the colours used on the front. It looks like this:



I hope to make the last 2 blocks tonight, and to start sewing them all together tomorrow. If all goes well I intend to have the quilt finished before the end of the month.

Why the hurry? Because Down Under Quilts is going to have an article on selvedge itmes in its November issue and they would like to include this quilt! So it has to be in Sydney on August 10th... Well, it's good for me to have a deadline.

It's not as if I did not have enough excitement at the moment - I am in the process of applying for a PhD candidature at the University of Queensland. My subject is the transmission of tuberculosis in Queensland and especially in the Indigenous population, and I will continue to work part time as a data manager at the Queensland TB Control Centre as well. (and contine to make quilts, I hope!)

Journal Quilt April

Here is my journal quilt for April 2009. The suggested theme was Human Figure. I first thought of doing a self portrait or a portrait of one of my boys, but after my trip to the Torres Strait Islands, where I observed the tuberculosis outreach clinics, I decided to use an X-ray of a TB patient.

(In case you are not familiar with a chest X-ray: the white part in the middle is the heart. The lungs should be black (because they are filled with air) and all the white bits that I have quilted are parts of the lungs that are affected by tuberculosis. This is actually an X-ray showing extensive disease in both lungs)

Tuberculosis is a very old disease (evidence of TB has been found in Egyptian mummies) that is still a major cause of morbidity and mortality in large parts of the world. When it is caused by non-drug resistant bacteria it is easy to treat, although treatment must be continued for at least 6 months. Multi-drug resistant TB (MDR-TB) is a growing problem in many countries that needs to be addressed urgently. In the Torres Strait patients from Papua New Guinea, many of them with MDR-TB, are treated by an outreach team from Cairns. For a posting about my trip, go here (in Dutch, but with lots of photos) or watch this ABC news report (July 2008).

Video

I just found this ABC news report from July 2008 about the TB-clinics in the Torres Strait, that perfectly shows where I have been last week. Do click on the video-link for a 10-minute video, to see the islands, the patients and the TB-team at work.