According to the Christchurch City Council website the stroll along the promenade and return is 1.25km long - not quite far enough to burn off the ice-cream calories. Luckily I didn't have one due to the blustery easterly wind blowing in off the sea. It seemed more coffee than ice-cream weather.
I wore a recently completed jacket for our walk along the prom. It is made from a bargello quilt which was always intended to be a garment it just took over fifteen years to finish. We took photos for the blog using the mosaic taniwha as a prop but the blog post never happened.
The outfit
It is worn with an Icebreaker merino tee, French Dressing Jeans and United Nude Jacky Lo Black, Blue and Silver ankle boots. The FDJ Olivia straight leg jeans were altered by me many moons ago to be a slim leg.
Sumner
Sumner is a coastal seaside suburb of Christchurch, New Zealand and was surveyed and named in 1849 in honour of John Bird Sumner, the then newly appointed Archbishop of Canterbury and president of the Canterbury Association. The Māori name for the area is Ohikaparuparu ("o" means place of; "hika" means rubbing, kindling, or planting; "paruparu" means dirt, deeply laden, or a preparation of fermented cockles).
Trip Advisor rates Sumner as number 20 of 249 things to do in Christchurch.
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| Aptly named Beach Bar which thoughtfully provides a lap rug if you sit outside on a blustery day |
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| Looking along the beach to Scarborough head |
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| Majestic Norfolk pines |
Sumner is also a haunt for surfers - maybe you can spot a few in these pictures. There were some out on the water honest.
Cave rock, a small tidal cave, can be explored at low tide and scrambling to the top is a favourite past-time for kids. There is a plaque on the tower at the top which remembers the (ship) pilot Joseph Day who saved many lives between 1867 and 1880. There is also a Māori legend associated with Cave Rock.
Tuawera is the Māori name for this large rock. Tuawere figuratively means cut down as if by fire and refers to the many people who died from eating the flesh of a great whale that was stranded on the shore. It is said that the rock represents the carcass of that deadly whale which was beached by means of black magic.
The Story of Tuawera - Tūrakipō, a chief of Ōpawāho sought Hineao, a daughter of Te Ake of Akaroa for a wife. She spurned his advances so Tūrakipō cast a spell of death upon her. In revenge Te Ake her father went to the hill overlooking Sumner and sent forth mighty karakia against Tūrakipō and his people. In answer to his prayers a whale was stranded on the shore which the people of Tūrakipō eagerly cut up and feasted upon. Those who ate the whale fell asleep and subsequently died. Tūrakipō, feeling that the stranded whale was the result of makutu (black magic), did not partake with his people. However, later, having few followers left to help him he was duly slain by Te Ake’s party.
The Earthquake - On 22 February 2011, the 6.3 magnitude Christchurch earthquake destroyed or made uninhabitable a large number of the local houses and commercial buildings. This was followed my many smaller earthquakes including another 6.3 magnitude earthquake on 13 June 2011. These two earthquakes caused many of Sumner's iconic cliffs to collapse, and many areas to be cordoned off using fencing and shipping containers. Since these earthquakes a lot of the cliffs have been further dismantled to make them safe. The shipping containers have finally been removed and vegetation planted so overtime the large scars in the cliff face blend back into the natural environment.
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| Sumner container wall c.2015 |
Summit Road - As the weather was nice we decided to drive along Summit Road between the Gondola and Godley Head, for the first time post earthquake, to be reminded of the amazing views.
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| Sumner |
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| Heathcote Valley |
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| The Estuary |
The making
The idea was to finish the quilted jacket in time for Symposium in October but that plan didn't quite work out. Now that the garment is finished I can't see it having a life in regular wardrobe rotation. It would have fitted in really well at the quilt symposium but not sure it does anywhere else.When I signed up for the bargello quilt class at Bernina Dress Sundries in the early 2000s I knew that I wanted a brightly coloured quilt based on the colours in a bundle of Laurel Burch Fantastic Felines fabrics sent to me by Cath. The strata of my quilt ended up being the colours of a rainbow (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet) and these five Laurel Burch fabrics just blended into that theme.
I started making this jacket quite quickly after finishing the quilt using a kimono quilt pattern from a book. All these years later I have no idea what the book was or even where the pattern I traced is. It never made it to completion for two reasons: (1) the kimono sleeves resulted in a lot of fabric under the arm which looked ugly and was uncomfortable; (2) I was obsessed with making double sided garments and I could never decide what the second side should be. So the original jacket was reverse sewn and the pieces put away in a draw for maturation.
Roll on 2017 and I looked at a number of different jacket patterns but was really limited by the fact that I didn't want to chop up the quilt more than I had to and the shape of the previous kimono jacket. After much head scratching I remembered a Laura Lee Fitz garment quilt pattern "Fruit Garden" bought at either my first or second trip to Houston International Quilt Festival back in 2008 or 2010. This worked perfectly having more shape whilst still blending well with the original garment. I created my own facing and lining pieces and used pattern 1007 Kimono Jacket and Vest by Purrfection Artistic Wearables (now called Dana Marie Design) for the kimono style collar band.
The quilt is quilted really simply, going corner to corner diagonally across each segment of fabric, using invisible thread. It is quilted onto a heavy cotton flannel. This was before I discovered heirloom cotton quilting flannel which is fantastic for garment quilts. This heavy flannel makes the jacket quite heavy (but warm).
As the quilted fabric was thick I used herringbone stitch (embroidery stitch name due to old age mental blank on its sewing name) to catch all of the seams down.
One of the challenges with completing a project so many years after it was started is having enough fabric. I had stitched the embroidery designs on a Jinny Beyer fabric and always intended to use the same fabric for the kimono collar. Now of course I wanted to use it for the facings as well. Even the quilt shop that used to stock all of the Jinny Beyer Palette Collection is no more. So I popped into Bernina in the hope that they still had some left and yay they had a lonely fat quarter remaining. With this fat quarter and the other remnants from my original purchase I managed to cut all the bits I needed with some judicious piecing using left over bits of the bargello patchwork.
The lining came from The Fabric Store, a lovely silk satin. I did try to find a cheaper fabric but none of the other lining suitable silks worked nearly as well as the snakeskin print.
The machine embroidery was the other feature of the garment. All of these designs were from the OESD Laurel Burch Fantastic Felines Collection. This took ages to sew out on my previous Bernina Embroidery machine (Artista 180). The biggest hoop I had was 200 x 155mm (roughly 8 x 6 inches). So the fabric had to be hooped many times and everything carefully positioned to line up with the previous stitching, to get a strip of fabric long enough to go around my hips.
As an art garment I love the look of the finished item. From a sewing perspective there are a number of imperfections and I would give myself a "could do better" rating. It will be interesting to see if it gets worn as an everyday garment when the cooler weather comes.
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