Geltwood 1876 – where to start?

The town of Millicent in the South East of South Australia (near to Penola) put a call out late last year for quilters to help commemorate the 150th anniversary of the sinking of the Geltwood with the loss of all 31 souls on board.

The only stipulation was that it include the Storm At Sea Block. A wonderful quilt block that gives the impression of curves without actually using any!

As much as I like this block, I wanted to do something a little different, so I am going to add in a Snail Trail block into the centre instead of the square in a square block.

So the Storm at Sea is around the outside, the Snail Trail is in the middle and depending on the colouring, it will look like waves across the quilt!

And….. because of course I couldn’t just make a quilt easy, could I?! I have decided I am going to use crumb quilting to give even more texture to the quilt and to make the ‘sea’ and ‘waves’ look chaotic.

Reports from 1876 about the wreck said that the conditions that day were like a hurricane and was the biggest storm in living memory, so I wanted to try and convey that in my quilt.

Have you ever done any crumb quilting? I actually love doing it, though I am not sure how big my quilt is going to be…. it might be determined by how many scraps I have in the right colours!

First I collected all my navy, mid blue and mint scraps and fabrics. The two ‘waves’ are going to be in navy and mid blue and the ‘background’ is going to be in the mint.

Starting with the navy, I had some fun sewing up the small scraps, with like sizes together. Pressing, then finding another piece that could be sewn together along one side. Press. Rinse and Repeat.

It is a fun process. Finding pieces that fit together. Making some pieces that fit together. Cutting pieces so they fit together! All just trying to get some larger pieces of fabric to be able to cut out my block pieces.

Watch a video on how I made up my crumb quilting

As some of my pieces were very small, I didn’t have to make great big slabs of crumb quilting fabric, so it didn’t even take that long before I could start making up a few parts of my first block!

I’m pretty happy with it! I think once I have a block done I will be able to get more of an idea of how large I want to make the quilt (and see how many of my scraps I have used up already!).

This was my original thoughts on the size and number of blocks.

The exhibition is in May, so I better get working!