 Persian Carpet Flower (Edithcolea grandis) |
This superb little blossom on a local succulent merits its name - Edithcolea grandis. With a surface that feels like velvet, these “Persian carpet” flowers appear seasonally and measure up to about 3″ in width. I wanted to share this one with those who are interested in flowers as sources of inspiration for quilts. Debra Danko, are you with me? 
On Saturday, we were invited for lunch at Samatian Island in Lake Baringo. Samatian Island is owned and operated by Ross and Caro Withey, who also manage Roberts Camp on the mainland. A delightful young couple with two small children, Ross and Caro work tirelessly to ensure that your visit to Samatian will be a memorable one for all the right reasons!
 Ross and Caro Withey |
An isolated up-market tented camp, picturesque and very private, Samatian is a self or arranged catering hideaway for anyone who simply wants to get away from it all. With accommodations for up to 10 or so (depending on number of children), a small swimming pool set against the lake backdrop, facilities for safaris to the other islands as well as the mainland on both sides of the lake, breakfasts at the hot springs, water sports and other wonderful options, Samatian Island is a choice location for a private family holiday.
 Local fisherman on Lake Baringo, Kenya |
This was a sight which greeted us as we set off from the mainland - a local fisherman in an ambatch (balsa wood) canoe. These tiny boats have been used for perhaps thousands of years and can still be seen functioning today. The fishermen use paddles about the same size and shape as ping-pong paddles as they navigate all around the lake, wary of hippos and crocs. Not my idea of a nice way to go fishing, but . . .
Notice the color of the water? It’s like coffee with cream. Put your hand two inches under the surface and you won’t be able to see it from above. Local history has it that as the area was/is volcanic, there’s an electrical charge to the water that keeps silt from river run-off in suspension. Perhaps it is only that the silt is so fine it remains evenly distributed through the water at all levels.
After a lovely boatride lasting about 15-20 minutes, we pulled up at the Samatian Island dock, to find Samatian staff on hand to greet us with the traditional “Jambo!” and to assist with any baggage. The dock floats so that it does not have to be raised and lowered as the Lake goes up and down, which it does with some regularity!
 Samatian Island staff at the dock |
 View from the main banda at Samatian Island, Lake Baringo, Kenya |
The swimming pool beckons, there’s plenty of shade and cooling breezes, and ample wildlife to enjoy. Ross carried over with us a baby python, only about 2 feet long, that he had come across on the mainland, intending to take it to a deserted nearby island in hopes it will survive. There’s a nearly tame Verreaux’s Eagle Owl residing in a nearby acacia tree, and the local flock of guinea fowl, or kangas as we know them here, paid us a call, so tame they foraged right off the main sitting/dining room banda near enough to touch.
You can glimpse that building directly above the dock in the photo above. With everything built to blend into the landscape you may find it hard to see. It’s simply a huge thatched roof on stone pillars.
 Guinea fowl at the edge of the banda |
Samatian Island Camp is a collection of bandas, traditional round houses with thatched roofs, stone floors and partially open sides. One side of the bandas nestle against a hillside for protection from weather and for privacy, while other sides are wide open for the best views and plenty of fresh air. Additional small banda structures house modern plumbing for showers, basins and the necessary. Beds are equipped with good mosquito netting but you are encouraged to use insect repellent whenever necessary.
Our invitation to Samatian for lunch held a special treat for me. Staying on the Island was one of my students, Donna from Seattle. She and her husband were on holiday in Kenya. Having been to Kenya before, they knew the Roberts (Caro’s) family and they had planned to visit Baringo anyway. Donna had taken my Quilt University classes Structured Fabrics and Math for Quilters, but we had never before met face to face. We all met and had a delightful lunch carefully laid on by Caro and her staff, and had a thoroughly good time getting to know each other.
 Boat ride back from Samatian Island, Lake Baringo, Kenya |
We had a very pleasant afternoon, made some new friends and then were taken back to the mainland. We had been invited to stay overnight, but we preferred sleeping at home. Good thing, too! Later that night there was a huge storm, and we had over an inch of rain. We were very happy to be safely at home. For Samatian Island and its visitors, it was just another part of the African experience - a stay at Samatian Island is like a camping trip to Paradise!!!
I have just posted yet another free patchwork quilt design tutorial on Quilting by Tacking. This one is a simple sewing technique shared because I have used it in a recent and still unfinished (as of the time of this writing) work of quilt art. I hope you will enjoy seeing the photo of my work in progress and reading the story that accompanies it.
Happy tacking!
A few days ago, I wrote a new patchwork quilting tutorial and posted it here as a page. If you have not seen it yet, take a look: Quilting Backwards. If you want to revisit the tutorial at any time in the future, you will find it either by clicking on the Tutorials button above, or in the sidebar at right.
Forwards and backwards quilting
I hope you will find this tutorial on Quilting Backwards useful, and that you will tell your quilting friends about it.
Please post any remarks or questions you have about the methods explained there as Comments below this post. I love hearing from my readers and I will be happy to answer you!
Threads magazine, published by Taunton Press, has for many years been one of my favorites. I subscribe to their e-newsletter, and received a recent issue of that the other day. In it was this link to a new online shopper’s guide. It appears to be a pretty good beginning for what must likely be thousands of fabric and notions retailers.
While you’re there, be sure to check out the items listed in the sidebar at the left including Online Extras. I particularly enjoyed Mary Ray’s Slideshow: An Assembly of Aprons. I grew up in a household where aprons were appreciated and well-used, and my first sewing project in 4-H was to make an apron. I still remember how I did it, too!
And find some articles on quilting in the Feature Library - Quilting including a video on Boutis Provençal, Free Patterns: Mini-Quilt Templates in a Jiffy and many more!
Before you leave the Threads site, go to the very topmost left hand corner and find there a link to Taunton Publishers to see all the other wonderful publications they produce. You may find something in the cooking, gardening, or crafts links that will be of interest to you.
And finally, be sure to sign up for the Threads Eletter; that link is right below the Threads title top left of the page. That way, you won’t have to depend on me to tell you what’s new at Threads!
I have published a page called Fabric Shopping in Nairobi, Kenya. It is a page that will always be under construction, so bookmark it now and check back often if you are planning a trip to Nairobi or if you already live there.
The page contains a list of shops that carry fabrics, textile notions and sewing supplies. Either my readers or I have visited each shop, so you will find some worthwhile commentary about what you might expect to find at each location. Included are shop location and contact details.
Be sure to telephone each shop ahead to find out their open hours. Some places close during the lunch hour from 1 - 2 pm every day, and hours on weekends can be extremely variable due to different cultural and religious practices within the community.
If you are coming to Kenya and want to do some quilting or apparel fabric and embellishment shopping in Nairobi, print the page and bring it with you for your convenience. Happy shopping!
My software of choice for designing quilts and illustrating my classes at Quilt University is EazyDraw by Dekorra Optics. As illustration software goes, EazyDraw compares favorably with Adobe Illustrator and CorelDraw, with a “right” price of about US$ 100, and features about it I like better than the other two products I mentioned. For one thing, it works beautifully on a Mac without any third party Windows integration!
EazyDraw has lots of useful features, like the little visible tape measures I discovered only this morning that can help you measure your patches. What has got me really excited is that I recently found out how to make swatches of my fabrics appear in the Patterns feature. Now I can “color” my quilt designs with photos of my fabrics!! This is really helpful for me, because packaged libraries of manufacturer’s fabric swatches published by other software producers are of little use to me: I cannot source those materials easily in Kenya!
So, if you are a quilter like me, and you want the total control of a graphic design software program built specifically for your Mac, and you want to photograph and use YOUR fabrics as tilings to generate realistic looking illustrations of your quilt designs, first get yourself a copy of EazyDraw. Then - here’s how you do it:
Take a digital photo of your fabric (at low resolution if you will not be printing the image). You will have to play around a bit with how large the photo should be and get some idea of the scale of the print or texture, or you can wait until I’ve had time to do that myself when I will post further details here on my blog. One way or another, save the photo as a bitmap.
Then, on EazyDraw, simply drag the bitmap into a new document or whatever one you are presently using. Then click on the bitmap in the file window and drag it to the Patterns window! Bingo!!! That’s all there is to it!
Be sure to SAVE your new image by giving it an appropriate name. Then apply the image to whatever shape you wish. It will appear as a tiling.
Presumably, if you captured enough of the fabric so the scale was right, you could fill the entire sketched shape with one photo of a single fabric instead of this tiled effect, but for right now, I’m satisfied this tool will serve me well!
Oh - and one other point: Support for EazyDraw is fantastic! I wrote them one message, then figured out how to do this task by myself, so I wrote a second message asking them to disregard the first message. A reply came back congratulating me on having figured it out!! Now, I ask you - how often does that happen?!?
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