The Travelling PicStitch Bloghop - A day at The Pinnacles

Hello Everyone,

You may have noticed that I'm not a prolific blogger, one of the main reasons for that is because I really struggle to upload pics from my iPad (good app suggestions please?) into my blog.  Today I have borrowed my hubby's mac for the purpose - which is even more alien to me.  Fortunately he returned earlier than expected from a camping trip, after suffering through a bad storm which had hit Perth earlier in the day.  And when I say bad, it was hail stones, wind, rain, a real winter storm.  A little ironic, given that summer is officially just around the corner.

So, back to the PicStitching....

Yesterday was a meeting day for our Perth Modern Quilt Guild.  We had a last minute relocation from our proposed venue (a quilt picnic at Kings Park) to my house (an indoor quilt picnic!) - I am so glad there were storms forecast , otherwise the awesome PMQG ladies wouldn't have been here to show a complete EPP newbie how to do it :-)

During the last holidays, our family went for a day trip to the Pinnacles, limestone formations which are relatively new geologically.  They are fantastic and only a few hours north of our home.  Over time, the Pinnacles have been hidden and revealed by sand cover / erosion.  I think that the visitor centre indicated that the most recent revelation was only about 10,000 years ago.  The funny part was an area where there were Pinnacles only about 10 centimetres in height.  My girls said they were baby ones, only just growing out of the sand! That tickled me.

Can you spot Mr Gallah?  My husband spotted a Gallah in amongst the rocks and snapped this pic.  I borrowed it and used the iPad app Colour Picker to find a colour palette for my block.

I picked out Mr Gallah - for some reason, his usual pinkiness was found to be a purple by colour picker!!  I was struggling to get the app to do quite what I wanted, so I upgraded to the paid version for AU$1.99 - then it let me do what I needed (I'd recommend trying the free version first - it may just have been me using the app!!)  I also picked some blues from the sky and a sandy colour from the dessert.

Then a few of the girls and I trotted off to look for fabrics in my stash.  Purples were easy to locate, as I'd been playing with them to make rainbow binding for the PMQG banner.  Blues and sandy colours were more problematic.. quite a few blues were rejected.  I suggested using my kangaroo print fabric, which is light brown kangas on a sandy background, but my pickers rejected it - it just wasn't "right". So, having raided the fat quarters with no success, I found my charm packs.  We found some blues which looked good and a sandy coloured spot.

The block shape was easy, as I had picked out a design a few weeks ago.  I used a fabric glue stick to attach my fabric to the paper pieces (otherwise I'd probably still be tacking the papers into place now!) and then started....

My centre-piece - a spotty, sandy hexagon

All my pieces and fabric, ready to go!

All stuck down and ready to sew

And finally, it's finished!

 Not too bad for a first attempt at paper piecing, if I say so myself!  Now I'm thinking that I'd like to make my block into something... maybe applique it onto a cushion cover?  I think it's a lovely souvenir of our day trip, getting sand-blasted up at The Pinnacles!

Thanks for reading, I hope you have enjoyed following us in The Travelling PicStitch bloghop.  Don't forget, you can join us for the linky party at the end of the month, details will be on the Travelling PicStitch page....  Click here to visit The Travelling PicStitch page