A Quilters' Gathering Show

Yesterday, I drove to Nashua, NH for A Quilters' Gathering. It's smaller, juried only, quilt show of mostly regional quilts. I say mostly because there were a few from well known quilters that are not from anywhere near here too. In August, I signed up for an invisible machine applique class from Harriet Hargrave. The only invisible machine applique I had done ("dabbled in") was for attaching the pieces of sea glass in my quilt shown below, and despite thinking this method yielded ok results, I felt I needed more education. At the time, the quilt had not yet gone to any shows and I did not have any judges feedback about how the appliques looked. I thought the stitches were darn near invisible though! The quilt went to MQX and back without so much as a comment about the applique.
My quilt was fortunate enough to receive one of the ribbons - 3rd in machine quilting excellence. It's pretty hard to do better when this was the quilt that received 2nd! There were some nice quilts at this show. The show had particularly bad lighting though. I like the many different farmers-wifeish blocks and their setting on this quilt.

This is a nice landscape.

Elements of this quilt are nice. I think it received one of the color compatibility ribbons for its soothing look.

The machine quilting of the 9-patches is particularly interesting. My guess is it is computerized, but it's cohesive with the theme of the quilt. I'll add it to my bag of interesting tricks to try sometime.

And the center block is something I'd like to applique.

Speaking of applique...the class was about 5-8 too large so the overall pace of it was not really to my liking. Lousy liting in the room too. But nobody can deny that Harriet is a pioneer in our industry. She's taken tomatoes and eggs in the face so that we might now succeed in our craft. She noted that in 1983 she was in Houston at Market and brought a machine quilted quilt for the 1st time. The thought of this gentile quilting society and their reaction of her when the machine quilting storm started is just unimaginable. I guess it is the same thought as this. What if someone sent a quilt to a show today that was only constructed with glue. Fast forward 30 years and they are all made with glue. She's honed techniques for machine makers to make our lives easier, and faster. She's also a steadfast believer in the fact that anything polyester will ruin the world so never mention that you longarm with poly thread. You go to her black list almost immediately. Kind of an inside joke here, but only kind of since I couldn't find her beloved cotton thread in a store Friday and showed up with something not cotton (gasp!!). Even if the class more of less reiterated things I have read elsewhere, I think it is always educational to have someone with as much weathering in this business talk to you for 6 hours. You cannot help but learn something. Even if it is largely just respect and gratitude. Expect to see more applique work from me. I have honed in on my skills and can do it better and faster now.

Back to the show... I always like interesting geometries, even if this style of quilt seems overmade of recent years. The black and white color scheme was appealing and different. The Delft blue color scheme was lovely, as were all the pieced stars which I know first-hand are a PIA to piece. This person won a couple ribbons for her nice quilts.

There is an appealing simplicity here. Guess the judges saw it too.

The quilting has areas which I like - She's obviously tried the dual-curve cross-hatching ruler from Ronda Beyer (which I have and am awaiting the perfect spot to use!).

Lori-Lyn King had 3 small quilts in the show. I have seen this somewhere this year. It's trapuntoed to brilliance. The colorations are from placing a pieced (or moreoften a single) and immensely bold color underneath the top trapunto layer. And then apply kick-ass quilting.

Some color gradations are subtle, but look closely. I learned in my trupunto class at MQX to respect those that do this technique. It is hard, especially when there is another color to show through.

Another ribbon winner, and a very large hand quilted Jacobian applique piece...

It's pretty, but the center almost seems like it needs more of something. The quilting was in colored thread. Lots (LOTS) of radiating lines.

And the grandma of them all...again! Linda Roy. Master hand quilter. How on earth does she find time to make all of these very detailed and hand quilted pieces?? Does she have a secret machine that makes if look hand quilted?? Nice thought. Seeing this has made me add a quilt to my "Must make before I die" list. The solid color is amazingly dramatic. I'd avoid white like the plague, but I love the concept of allowing the white trapunto and applique to show the details.

Just look at the sashings...That is a modified cathedral window technique. Way cool. Linda's quilts rarely dissapoint. As a former hand quilter, I still love the notion that they are still made, and there are some out there that beat the pants off of a machine quilted quilt too!

Breaking all My Rules

I have been back on this quilt the last couple of days. I am moving kind of slow on account of a cold, but I figure it is better to futz up my own work in that state than someone else's. I have most of the Dresdens hand appliqued. There are 4 left which go in the corners of the tan. It's easily as bright and bold as I envisioned. The 4 borders are taking forever to get on. So far, 3 of the 4 sides have 3 borders. The miters will be done once the last border is attatched. But after getting 3 done, I just felt like it was more grounded, almost to the point of being boring. And I don't do boring.
So, I contemplated how I might infuse some of the bright fuscia into the outer borders. Maybe a piping... Maybe a bias-bar design of some sort. And then I realized that I had left a couple of the extra Dresden plates beside the not-yet-attached green border, so that the points stuck out like prairie points. Hmmm...Interesting! Now I really do despise prairie points and I think that they just look too prairie-like and hum-drum. OK, the word I am searching for is really "Ugly!". I hate them, so I have been pondering for a few hours between nose blows how to incorporate the idea of pointy bright fabrics in my design, without actually using those overly-folded things that make quilting the quilt challenging. You can see that I tried a number of thoughts (in different fabrics)...

Initially I wanted to micro-pipe the edges of the points in the fuscia fabric. That was way too hard to make look good. Then I thought maybe I would paper piece them and just stitch the narrow fuscia border. But I loathe paper piecing when not truly necessary. I tested different sizes. Then I tested just stitching a machine embroidered design on the edge of them in a fuscia thread. That actually worked, and didn't surpass my required levels of frustration. It is simple, yet it brings the punch of color that I am after. I may also test embroidering every other one and alternating them with darker points. These will probably also be blind stitched down so that they cannot flap. But basically, I am happy with the look, and I will save the fuscia fabric to micro-pipe by the binding.

Then I spent an hour cutting 2-1/4" x 4-1/2" pieces of all my various greens for the points...

Tula Pink (I think) & Pinkalicious

Here's a client's quilt. It's a 92" square large quilt with a rather lot of piecing. She wanted more than a typical pantograph so I devised this pattern to create simple secondary designs. With the very heavily patterned fabrics, it is nearly impossible to quilt it to show a detailed design, but the infinity quilting shows nicely on the simpler aqua squares, and the secondary designs are evident amidst all of the color and patterns.

It's all freehanded; no rulers, computers or gizmos. It's a modern-ish quilt so I opted to not use straight lines (plus there was not adequate backing on the edges to do so), but rather I did squiggly lines to add texture. The client chose a wonderful Hobbs Tuscany wool batting, so the quilting appears lighter and airier. Believe it or not, I think that wool batted quilts are much more comfortable year round. They are lighter than the cotton ones. We use our's with wool batting in the summer (in a bedroom that is airconditioned only some of the time). The wool will show the details of the quilting so much better than a cotton ever will.

The quilt is stitched with Superior's Bottomline bobbin and an aqua So Fine thread on the top. The matching threads help to make the quilting only show up as texture. With so much patterning and fabric colors, it's hard to select a thread that will actually show, so this is a fine choice.

The back of the quilt, though pieced, is simpler and really shows the patterns of the quilting.

This week, we have also had the excitement of Halloween. My 3 ghouls (Pinkalicious, JailBird Zombie and some Transformer dude) seemed to brave the late October cold without incident to bring home pumpkins full of candy. Only poor mom got to freeze.

Ya see, the day before, we somehow managed to get 8" of snow dumped on us! Look, the grass is still green (it needed mowing!), and there are still green leaves on the trees! It's insane, I tell ya!

Snow Flakes

Despite today being only Halloween, Mother Nature gave us a good helping of whoop-ass on Saturday night. I have lived in Maine (albeit, Southern Maine too) over 15 years, and I have only seen a few flakes of snow in October. We got socked with 6-8" of very wet snow. The leaves are not yet off of the bushes. They were all laying on the ground on Sunday morning. The remnants of my flowers were burried. And tonight I get to drag by kids (ok, they get to drag Mom) to the houses trick-or-treating in snow clothes. The temps hit the 50's today, but it barely made a dent on the snow on the yards. Sidewalks are guaranteed to be a little slickery tonight for the ghouls and gobblins.
The melting snow turned out to be a not-so-good place for a picture of my star blocks (& block pieces). The batiks started to absorb the water as soon as I layed them down. So much for neatly starched blocks...

There is still much planned that is not evident here, but the bits and pieces are beginning to come together.

To all of the readers that left kind words from the last post (Bloggers Quilt Festival), thank you dearly. It means more than you know. Have a great Halloween with plenty of chocolate :-))

Bloggers Quilt Festival

I am sure you are aware that the Blogger's Quilt Festival is this week. It is brought to us by Amy, who has done this for a few years now. I hope you have the time to look at the many quilts that will be posted at the Festival's link this week!

My entry for this fall's festival is a small-ish wall quilt named "Intertwined". Despite it being only 40" square, it is paked with details, and is made of my all-time favorite fabrics - Hoffman 1895 hand-dye batiks. It is shown below with me and my usually eager to be in a picture daughter (not so much this time!) at the Maine Quilt Show this past summer. Happily, it was one of 4 quilts to receive a 1st place ribbon!

The 14" center block was started a year before in a Karen Kay Buckley hand applique class. I should note that I am comletely addicted to hand applique, so if you have never tried, you might really enjoy it. Karen's applique pieces were challenging at first, being that they have a ton of inner points, and because they are small (grapes are under 1/2" diameter), but it is a relaxing form of stitching, and I like that I was able to drag it along with me to dance and soccer, etc. One other thing to say is that the batik fabrics are a tigher weave than most cottons, and the behave so much better for this type applique in that they are not prone to reveling when the turned under seam allowance is slightly under 1/4".

So, thanks Karen, for a wonderful inspiration for my quilt. I did design the remainder of the quilt myself to compliment the center block. The 4 cathedral windows were paper-pieced, and were intended to bring a little variety to the applique. I hand appliqued the two-tone ribbon on the twice before I was satisfied with how it looked. And then I decided that it just needed a punch of something different. That's when I pulled out my lime green batik and the orange & gold fabrics and made the intertwining vines of nasturtium (and hence the name for the quilt). I designed them to be like morning glories in shape, but somehow because they were orange, then needed to be a different flower!

I must confess, I am a longarm quiter, and I am most definitely my all-time worst client iterms of pickyness. I spent over 20 hours on this rather small quilt. The quilting features some ghost flowers in the background, and sections of feathers and other fills. Though I love doing the applique, I am a quilter at heart, and need for the quilting to take a "top" to another level. The quilting designs are as important as the piecing & applique.

The quilt received some Swarovski crystals when it was finished - white ones for the centers of the flowers and several hundred others on the quilt (even though they are not visible in the pictures whatsoever). Under show lights, the quilt twinkles beautifully. I also bound the quilt with a piped binding, which is a great finishing touch.

I hope you have enjoyed these pictures, and others you will see at the Bloggers Festival. If you find yourself ever in the need of a longarm quiter, please feel free to contact me. My business website is here.
(one last picture of "Intertwined"'s back!)

Tuesdays are Just For Me

Or they should be!

I thought I'd show this since I am slightly more than just a quilter (only slightly!). I on occasion make heirloom dresses too!

I was able to get more time this past weekend to work on a customer quilt, so I finished it a day earlier than scheduled. This allowed me time to get onto another "chore"...finishing (ahem, starting) my daughter's holiday dress. I completed the simple smocking last night, and how have parts of the outer dress assembled. It has a ruffled underskirt (lining) which hangs below this dress. The ruffles will waste (require) much time assembling! It also has sleeves since it's nearing winter, and this adds some complexity. It's a sweet modern spring-ish print, not so Christmassy. But who wants to wear red & green or Santas in February anyhow.
The smocking may eventually get some bullion knots or roses or beading eventually, but I really just needed to get moving so I did it simply. One thing I used for the 1st time is rayon thread. It has a lovely silky shine, but the threads were more of a nuisance to smock with, and I doubt I'll opt for them again. They give the bodice a shimmery, more formal look though.
I will waste plenty of time this week marking my next personal quilt (only after I go get a couple more blue marking pens). I have some designs that are easier to mark before loading the quilt, plus it is forcing me to think about how to fill the spaces. I am seriously contemplating about quilting it in gold thread. It's a gutsy move for me, considering I am most comfortable quilting in matching thread (to more easily disguize my goofs). But I have this most awesome cone of military gold Glide thread that I am dying to use on a quilt... Not metallic, but nearly as good as that.

As the week ends

As the week comes to an end, I myself can look back and be rather pleased with my level of productivity. It was worlds better than the past 3-4 weeks. I like the feeling of accomplishment. Heck, I even did a couple loads of laundry this week, entertained the renovation contractor while he was here yesterday (he was, mind you, taking care of a few lingering issues!), and I plan to actually roast a whole chicken in a little bit. I love to sew and quilt on most any day, but all that domestic crap needs the stars in alignment to get done!

So while my last couple quilts are whirling enroute to one final show for the year, the 3rd of 4 for the month, I have put my next show quilt back onto the frame to work on a few of the things I left undone. I'd hoped it would be off yesterday, but I have opted for another day to do one last thing. Most of my finishing work is to my liking. My micro-quilting to make those small green diamonds pop, however, leaves me high up on that fence still. I may leave it. I may do some bobbin work to outline them. I'm digging deep for an alternative to taking out Invisifil stitched densely at 16 stitches per inch! It would take a very long time.
I also micro filled the curved cross-hatching with my favorite silk thread. It looks basically just like the Invisifil, and is nearly as fine, but I knew that the silk would not shred. Turns out, the Invisifil only shredded once on all the other work. Who'd have known. Planets must have aligned today as well. I have wanted to "checker board" the CC before but never got the guts to do it - it's kind of a point of no return once you do it. Nothing short of a torch gets those little stitches out. It is just the effect I was after, thankfully. I have said before how I really don't love the tan (OK, I kinda loathe this taupe background, which I think is a Kona or Bella solid - don't know, as it was in my stash and I opted not to buy any fabric for this quilt). It needed to have whimsical quilting to draw one's attention from the blandness of it. I think I am getting there.

I also dug out a nice green Rainbows thread for feathering the green borders. I sort of have a love-hate relationship with Rainbows. Some days is stitches amazingly; others, it shreds and gives me grief. I always love how it looks, with a pretty sheen and very subtle variagation. I decided to give it a go today, not wanting everything on this quilt to blend into the fabrics. Despite the picture, the feathering shows vividly in the Rainbows. My cave lighting keeps you from seeing that though. I turn off all the lights except for a spotlight so that the texture is more evident!

And lastly, and what is probably one of my all-time favorite quilt additions...the butterflies got their antennae! The quilt was almost completed when I chose to applique 8 butterflies onto it. They are so integral to the finished whimsical look of the quilt that I can hardly believe I nearly didn't do it. The top part of the flowers will get "flattened" tomorrow, and I will ponder a couple more things. But for one week, all is good!

Into my groove

The debaucles of last week with my feathered star measurements are behind me. I have 4 of them done. Not trimmed yet to confirm how close to the desired size I came, but laying flat, with 40 crisp points each, no enormous blaring errors. I am happy. Now onto the layout and the more eclectic applique that will accompany these. I love a traditional quilt, but this is looking too generic. It needs to be infused with some creativity!
I have recently come across a more than biased article, whose source will remain nameless. This article has a highly opinionated view of machine quilting - the author would likely drown on a rainy day like today because her nose is pretty high up there. Simply put, the writer cannot stand machine quilting whatsoever. She cannot find merit in a bit of it. It's a little hard to swallow, given what I do each day, but I know that the biases towards one type of quilting or another can be very strong, as I have been there too once.

I remember 15 years ago going to the Maine Quilt Show with my mom. I was home visiting on vacation. At that point I was an avid sewer, but had only made a handful of quilts, all hand quilted. My great-grandmothers crafted things with their hands like crocheted and embroidered items, and I took great pride being able to follow in their footsteps at a time when none of my other friends did such things. I have always been a bit old fashioned at heart. I remember seeing the many quilts that day and just scowling at the machine quilted ones. I found it hard to even appreciate the piecing for how much I truly hated to see the machine quilting. Now keep in mind that machine quilting has moved forward with leaps & bounds in the last 10 years. Gone is the era of "mattress pad" quilting, and even the number of purely stippled quilts at shows is all but at a minimum. If this is all anybody had ever seen for machine quilting, then a hatred of it is well deserved. But that is not the case.

I don't really know at what point I started really having an interest in it -- probably 4 or so years go. The advent of blogging has made pictures of nearly anything easily accessible. The patterns of stitching were becoming more decorative, and pretty, actually enhancing the piecing, rather than just covering it. Early machine quilting was boring, but it has definitely become a much more artistic medium. I spent a couple years trying hard to machine quilt smaller quilts on my domestic machine. It was frustrating, pulling quilts through such a small space. I also continued to hand quilt at least 5 more quilts in that period. At some point I rationalized that I really did like the machine quilting, and that I wanted to get a longarm. I have hardly looked back since. I remember seeing the work of Ronda Beyer that year (2009) at the quilt show, and thinking how very far machine quilting has become. It was creative, artistic, and lovely. We shouldn't necessarily compare the number of hours it takes to hand quilt versus machine quilting. We all know that machine pieced quilts are infinitely faster than their hand pieced cousins, so the same should be true for the quilting. The value of a quilt is not won or lost on the number of hours spent on the quilting. I spent 75 hours on one of my show quilts. Did it not win because there were others that required 76 hours??

Enough of my closedmindedness daily ranting. It could go on for another 5 pages. My point is that we should all be more open to changes. Embrace different things because it is entirely possible that we don't really have all the facts. I have hand quilted and I have longarmed. Longarm quilting is harder, and requires a significantly greater amount of creativity in the design of the quilting. Taking out mistakes is more time-consuming. Stitch-in-the-ditch is necessary to outline the features of the quilt so that they DO show. I don't like to put these 2 forms of quilting up for a side-by-side comparison as they really are quite different. I like and appreciate each for it's own merits. You should consider this too.

I will leave you with the veining and flowering that I am doing for a couple days as I work out designs for a couple of client quilts that are next up for quilting. The majority of the quilting on this quilt is complete. My primary goal is to add veins on 100 leaves, and do the detail work on the 20 flowers.

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edited...I just got the call from the Georgia Quilt Show!!! My Postcards from Venice quilt won 2nd place in the large wall-hanging division. She then told me my other quilt (Intertwined) was very lovely too. About 2 minutes later, she called back to tell me she'd not done her homework closely, and Intertwined won a 3rd place in small-wall hanging division!~ I am SOOO tickled. This is great news, and they both have $$$$ too :-))

Rainbow Stars

One down, three to go. These are 20", and are taking me a ridulously long time to piece. For the most part, I am able to not tip off my triangle points. The Y-seams are getting old though. I have waffled horribly on whether to piece this quilt or to applique this one. A great comment was that the two designs should marry (or at least date!). I pondered way too long on how to infuse the seemingly Southwestern feathered stars with the more eclectic and art nouveau applique. My other desire was to use background and colored fabrics that I already have. I do have a plan
to infuse this with interesting and unique applique, but the first step is to get these 2 blocks wrapped up. Putting them aside will only make it harder to finish without errors (and trust me, I've made enough!). I cut out the HSTs an inch larger than they were supposed to be, but didn't discover it until I had 128 of them stitched into rows ready to put onto the star pieces. Woops! Pick out, trim down, restitch, repeat.

Here's my ponder for you this week...Have you seen a feathered star design that did NOT have a distinct southwestern feel? I need to see some because I really do not want the quilt to look that way. Send me a link if you do!

Interesting Stories

I have been in the "news" lately. Here are two recent posts semi-featuring my quilting.

The Maine House is an absolutely beautiful blog that features lovely photos of my state, delicious food, and other pretty houseware things (ie. quilts). It's written by a woman who coincidently lives near me also. She shows one of my first longarmed quilts - the one that I won Rookie of the Year at MQX last year with.

A few weeks ago, the sister to a client of mine sent one of her stories about her daughter, a new quilter, to Quilt Story. It's a wonderful story about a relatively new quilter that wanted to make 13 quilts for her wedding, which was fortunately more than a year away (at least it was when I first started quilting for her!). Over the summer I was fortunate enough to quilt at least half a dozen of her quilts, as well as the "Beth" quilt that is shown on that post, which her mother Sandy won a 3rd place ribbon for at the Lowell Quilt Festival. I have previously shown pictures of this lovely quilt, but Sandy was most humble about posting her win until just recently. So check this out...it's a heart-warming story.

Sea Glass wins 2nd at MQX West!

I happily got the word this morning from some of my viewers in Oregon that my Sea Glass quilt has earned a 2nd place ribbon and a Teacher's ribbon! I know I may have shown a few of these pictures in the past posts, but heck, who cares. I will be able to take a better full quilt shot in a few weeks when I see it at another show. This one is bad, I know, because it is suspended from my balcony, and has horrible backwash light.
Some of my closer up pictures do, however show the quilting details. This one was before the bindig escapades.

I did add somewhere around 2500 crystals to the quilt. I bet it just twinkles...

For those interested, it is 63"x78", all batiks or hand-dyes top and back. I used Hobbs 80/20 with Tuscany wool on the top of that. The thread is Bottomline, a little So Fine and some Rainbows on the waves.

The binding looks nice (maybe not the best first attempt at a scallop border, but hey). The color changes of the binding match those of the outer border. And I added a tawny batik piping, which helps it lay nice and smooth. Added pain & suffering, yes, but it is worth it in the end.

I love my juxtiposed semi-traditional border of curved cross-hatching with the very free-form quilting of the interior of the quilt. A first for me to be so unstructured...

If you want to see more pictures, look here, and here , and here, and here. Or get yourself to Portland, OR this weekend to see it at MQX!~