You’re all invited ! but I don’t expect to see too many of you here next sunday when Petra Eberl and I are showing our latest works in an all day exhibition. It will be open from 2pm to midnight – a marathon – and it’s sure to be hot. The theory is that as our rental begins from 8-30am, we will be there on the dot to get my 8-10 quilts hung, lighting positioned, her domed plinths in place and everything else set up in 4-4/12 hours, before going home to change and appear all fresh and breezy to greet our first visitors ! Petra’s wonderful handmade 18ct jewellery can be seen on her website, www.petraeberl.com The invitation design was a joint effort; I am not sure who came up with the notion of sewing gold stitching across (the ends are left hanging free, but don’t show in this pic) but it seemed like the perfect ‘fusion’ of our very different works of art. We had 1000 printed, and it took about 12 hours and about 500m (half onew of those big Aus$18 cones of gold thread to sew the wavy lines across each one. The wastage, less than 5%, was smaller than I feared. Of course, if you make a mistake on paper the needle holes are there, period. But many of the false starts were worth re-doing, and I got pretty skilled and quick at retracing my steps and going over each hole again. The most common reason for needing to do this was the occasional thread problem, either snapping or suddenly bunching up underneath. A few however were not retrievable, but it was a better result than I feared even though I had practised and done samples for different effects on other cards before I received the printed ones. I took a few invites to friends in Aus – the common reaction was ‘wow’.