Posts tagged ‘Quilt Odyssey’
Little Happy Dances!
Wow, it feels great to get things finished! Even though none of these projects were on my “official” list of UFOs, they were still taking up both physical and psychological space, and it’s wonderful to have them out from underfoot, so to speak. Plus, as I wait for labor to start, finishing quilt projects is apparently as close to “nesting” as I get.
Noah’s Ark panel:
I picked up Mary Mashuta‘s “Foolproof Machine Quilting” for $10 on sale at Quilt Beginnings in Columbus, OH on our way out to Indianapolis in August. I have long been a fan of hers, first upon seeing her gorgeous quilts and wonderfully inspiring books (her book, “Confetti Quilts” would be on my desert island list) and second upon learning that she manages to amicably share a sewing space with her twin sister, Roberta Horton. However, for all that this book contained some great ideas, it was mostly centered around making walking foot quilting accessible to new quilters who’d been put off by free motion. Since that’s not where I am at this stage, I passed the book along to a friend.
But one of the ideas she’d stressed was using heavy threads and decorative stitches to make quilting show up on busy prints (for which she and I share a passion.) I didn’t want to do very intricate quilting on this piece, first of all because it’s just a panel that I tweaked by piecing in the lattice, but also because I didn’t want to detract from the graphic impact of the panel. The viewer’s brain already has to make the visual “jumps” across the lattice; I didn’t want to further confuse things by introducing a busy quilting design. So I marked a simple 2″ grid to echo, rather than compete with, the lattice, then used the walking foot with a serpentine stitch and orange Brytes by Superior Threads, a nice heavy 30/3 polyester with a bit of a sheen to it. I used the Pellon Legacy wool batting I’d bought at AQS Lancaster, which gave it a nice puffy loft. (I hesitate to say it, but I think I might actually prefer the Pellon to the Quilter’s Dream wool I used for Convergence Birds and have set aside for Ruby Wedding!)
Serpentine stitch grid
I switched to my fancy new free motion foot, its first real test drive since I bought it at Quilt Odyssey, but left the Brytes in to do a no-mark, freehand Patsy Thompson-style feather in the top and bottom borders. I’ve been a huge fan of her Freemotion Fun with Feathers DVD series, but hadn’t had much opportunity to use her techniques in actual quilts rather than just on doodle cloths, and I’m very pleased with how it turned out. I quilted these feathers before I took her class at Quilting with Machines in September, and it acted as an excellent warmup. I wasn’t sure whether the feathers would show up in that busy print border, but apparently the combination of the puffy wool batting and the thick thread did the trick. I will have to remember that.
Freemotion feather border
For the binding, I used the same fabric I’d used for the lattice strips, and Suzanne Michelle Hyland’s Sew Fast, Sew Precise Machine Binding technique that was so maligned by the show judges on my quilts this spring and summer — remember, “a hand-sewn binding adds refinement” — but that gets my quilts finished rather than languishing in limbo. Plus, I don’t think my baby boy will be so discriminating.
Mom’s Halloween Attic Windows:
I had three big decisions to make when quilting this little quilt:
1) How to handle the border, which is decently wide and of a solid batik that would nicely show off the quilting
2) How to quilt the focus fabric squares without distracting from the fabric itself
3) How to use the glow-in-the-dark thread to best advantage.
It’s always tricky to quilt something for someone else. Even considering that my “client” in this case is my mother, whose tastes I have far more experience with and insight into than the average person’s, there’s still that worry that what pleases me might not please her. I know she doesn’t like extremely dense quilting, especially in contrasting threads. At the same time, I have this wonderful opportunity to use glow-in-the-dark thread on a Halloween quilt, and the NiteLite colors are all very light; I used the Purple, but against the deep plum border even it looks almost white. I used the Pellon Legacy soy blend batting, which only needs to be quilted every 8″, so dense quilting wouldn’t be necessary. I started with simple ditch quilting with the walking foot and fine, matching threads to anchor the center. That way, I could come back to the center once I’d figured out what to do with it.
I knew I wanted to do something spectacular in that border, yet that would still fit the whimsical theme of the piece. That was when I remembered the antique Easter quilt I’d seen in Fons & Porter, with an appliqued border of stylized bats that just looked like fancy swags at first glance:
"Easter Quilt," by Bertha Amelia Meckstroth, 1933 (from Fons & Porter's Love of Quilting Magazine, July/August 2010)
That idea was way too much fun to leave alone, so I modified a simple bat design from an online coloring page (great resources for simple shapes and line drawings!), sized it to fit, and then used another technique from Mary Mashuta’s book to mark them: I cut them out of freezer paper and ironed them onto the quilt top, then did my freemotion quilting just outside the edge of the paper. This also allowed me to fudge the measurements where I needed to, and obviated the need to do a lot of marking on a dark fabric. I hadn’t originally intended to add the button eyes, but I wanted to make the shapes more clearly recognizable as individual bats, and especially with the “spooky eyes” fabric as the sashing, I think it maintained the mood.
Bat border closeup
I wish I could post a picture of what it looks like glowing in the dark, but I do not have the right camera equipment for that. In fact, I have a phone, which is not going to cut it. But let me assure you, it’s pretty impressive. So I decided to just use the NiteLite for all the visible quilting, even though it’s higher contrast than I would have otherwise dared. That also solved my dilemma for the Attic Windows sashing, as I didn’t really want to have to change threads between the purple and orange segments. I chose the design partly as a quilting pun: it’s a variation on the old Pumpkin Seed design, which I thought was both thematic and pretty. Add some diagonal lines to tame the focus fabric, and it’s done! This also got the machine binding treatment: it’s a wallhanging, for goodness sakes! I did hand sew the hanging sleeve, though. Isn’t that batik adorable?
Batik back & sleeve for Mom's Halloween Attic Windows
Matt and Alyssa’s quilt gets its own happy dance post, after all the trials and tribulations of what was supposed to be a simple project. So here’s my preliminary happy dance for the two smaller projects, and I’ll indulge in a grander one in the next post:
Fabric Miracle in Indianapolis? Part 1 of 2
(I wrote several posts while on vacation, but I’m spacing them out over the next couple weeks. I’m not going to go back and edit them to make the present tense past and so forth, so there may be some temporal anomalies. I trust you all to manage them gracefully. Thanks! – Sarah)
We’re on vacation, and I imagine having an antique Lone Star quilt on the wall above the bed in our room is an excellent omen as far as good quilt-y things happening.
We’ve been coming out to Indianapolis every year for GenCon since 2003, and staying at the same bed & breakfast, the Nestle Inn. We always try to get the quilt room. Although GenCon is primarily a games convention, I make it a point each year to not only attend some crafty events there — this year, including a costuming workshop held by two sisters who make prizewinning costumes, and a workshop to learn a new chainmaille pattern — but to also take the time away from the convention to explore the local shops and guilds. In addition, I have in the past attended a show of antique quilts held in an historic home, and even gotten my husband to accompany me on a pilgrimage up to Marion, IN to visit the Quilters Hall of Fame!
Last year, I had the inspiration to investigate the Indianapolis quilt guild, and discovered their meeting fell within our visit, thus allowing me to hear Bonnie Hunter speak for the first time. This year, the convention fell a week too early to coincide, but I found a wonderfully helpful webpage listing all the Indiana guilds and their meeting times, allowing me to discover a local chapter of The Applique Society which met Wednesday. A very nice, informal group of skilled appliquers (appliquists?), they welcomed me as a guest and held an informative program about quilt labels in which all the attendees participated. They also had excellent show and tell, as well as providing a friendly, cool place to sit and do handwork for a while (it’s been in the 90s and very humid.) They meet at Back Door Quilts, a shop in Greenwood, IN, just southeast of Indianapolis. It’s a lovely shop, with an interesting dichotomy of strengths: 19th cent. reproduction fabrics and batiks. I don’t always get to their shop, as all the other Indy-area shops are to the north of the city, so I was happy to have an excuse.
And there I found… THE FABRIC!!!
I have to back up a little here and explain. Every quilter knows the pain of having passed up a great fabric, only to never see it again, or of finding the perfect fabric for a project and not getting enough of it. The Quilter’s Corner in Chadds Ford, PA has brass plaques mounted on their cutting tables that say something along the lines of, “Remember, If You Try To Come Back For It, It Will Be Gone.” While this normally doesn’t happen to me, as I tend to work very scrappy — if I run out of a fabric, it’s just an opportunity to use an additional fabric — sometimes, you just need a fabric miracle. This has occurred in my life three separate times in the roughly ten years that I’ve been quilting as an adult.
The first time was when I offered to make a quilt for Kathy, several years before she started sewing. We had visited her local quilt shop while attending a craft fair that sets up along the main street in Haddonfield, NJ, and I had floated the idea that I would make her a quilt if she picked out the fabrics. As we walked past the crafters’ booths, a woman was selling adorable toddler- and preschooler-sized raincoats with matching pants. The raincoats were all made of shiny vinyl in bright colors, but were then lined with various juvenile and conversation print quilt fabrics, of which the matching pants were also made. I was admiring these, and lamenting the fact that my family didn’t currently include any children of the appropriate size, when Kathy pointed at one set and said, “That’s what I want my quilt made out of.” The fabric in question was a delightful watercolor-style large print in pale green, aqua, and bubblegum pink, depicting two little Chinese girls in traditional dress.
My heart sank, and I did my best to explain the quilting facts of life to Kathy: I had no idea how long ago that fabric had been produced. The crafter may have had that fabric in her stash for years before making that raincoat. And even if it were a relatively new fabric, there was no way to be sure that I would run across it anywhere, as not every shop stocks every brand or every line of fabric, especially a large specialty print such as this one. (This was before I found out you could shop for fabric on the internet! Such a long-ago, simpler time!) We would find another fabric that she liked just as much. She took it well, and we moved on.
Nearly a year later, Diane and I were at Quilt Odyssey (back when it was still held at the Eisenhower in Gettysburg, shudder shudder) and as we walked towards the booth for The Fieldstone House, I saw — Kathy’s fabric! I think Diane thought I was having a seizure or something, until I regained enough composure to explain my reaction. I bought five yards, which I NEVER do, and made Kathy’s quilt from that. I have never seen that fabric on the bolt anywhere else. Fabric miracle.
Kathy's Quilt, 2005
To be continued…
Quilt Odyssey 2010, Part I: The Quilts
Detail, "Floral Fantasy" by Molly Hamilton-McNally & Cindy Seitz-Krug
The ostensible purpose behind Diane’s visit the weekend of July 23-25 was to attend Quilt Odyssey at the Hershey Lodge and Convention Center, but the show wound up being the last aspect of the weekend I wrote about. I can’t really define that as odd or inappropriate, as certainly the time we spent quilting was more fun, meaningful, and productive than attending yet another quilt show. Also, I was surprisingly underwhelmed by the show this year, and it’s taken me about a week of mental digestion to figure out why.
The main conclusion I’ve reached is that despite some notable exceptions, it was a great big rerun. Quilt Odyssey is an amazing, highly selective national show that attracts the top echelon of quilts from all over. And in its own way, that’s the problem. It’s ironic that looking at one nearly-perfect quilt after another gets a little… boring? Not to mention that most of the top shows allow a quilt to be exhibited for two years after it’s completed, so I had seen, either in person or in magazines, most of the ribbon winners before — in some cases, I’d seen them at multiple shows already.
Detail, "Big Bird Blues" by Marilyn Badger and Claudia Clark Myers
So, Best of Show was Filigree by Marilyn Badger, just like at AQS Lancaster. We also saw Hell Freezes Over, by Marilyn Badger and Claudia Clark Myers (which won a blue ribbon at PNQE 2009) as well as Big Bird Blues, by Marilyn Badger and Claudia Clark Myers. Sensing a theme?
"Wings and Feathers" by Mark Sherman
The blue ribbon for Large Quilt/Mixed Techniques went to Saffron Spring by Barbara Lies, which won Best of Show at the 2009 Mid-Atlantic Quilt Festival (displayed at the 2009 Quilt Fest of New Jersey) and second place in Other Techniques at the 2009 Quilters’ Heritage Celebration. That means it beat out one of my favorite quilts ever, Circles of Life by Linda French, which wound up with the red ribbon despite the Best of Show it won at the 2010 Mid-Atlantic Quilt Festival. Another surprise upset was seeing Sieglinde Schoen Smith’s masterpiece, Once Upon A Christmas Night, take second place to Heron Happiness by Kathy McNeil in the Appliqued Wall Quilt category. But overall, many, many of the quilts on display, and almost all the ribbon winners, were quilts we’d seen before. In fact, I couldn’t figure out where I’d seen Mark Sherman’s blue-ribbon-winner, Wings and Feathers, until I looked at the latest American Quilter magazine and there it was on the cover.
"Heron Happiness" by Kathy McNeil
I’m very conflicted about this reaction. It’s not that I expect the cream of the show quilt crop to limit the number of shows each quilt is entered in. If I ever make a quilt on that level, I can guarantee it’ll be touring until the clock strikes twelve on its eligibility. And I was actually grateful to see the domestic- and longarm-machine quilting award winners from AQS Lancaster both on display again at Quilt Odyssey, since the lighting was so poor where they’d been displayed at Lancaster that I hadn’t been able to see the quilting.
Detail, "Darwin's Diamonds and Flowers" by Rhonda K. Beyer
In general, the display space at Quilt Odyssey is one of the best in the area, between the overall better lighting and the show organizers’ decision to barricade the quilts with a clear tape X that allows the viewer a few feet into the “cubicle,” rather than a chain at the front that keeps you 8′ or more from the furthest-most quilt as in Lancaster. I have heard some showgoers grumble about the busy carpet pattern in the Hershey ballroom, but I don’t find it distracting; perhaps they’ve seen Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas one time too many? The location as a whole is a far cry from the bad old days when Quilt Odyssey was held at the Eisenhower Hotel and Conference Center in Gettysburg — the less said about that place, the better! Plus, Quilt Odyssey is the only show I’ve attended at which the quilt display space and the merchant mall are completely separate from one another. It creates almost a gallery atmosphere in the quilt exhibit, without the hectic distraction of the vendor booths. It’s quite nice.
"Explosion of Sunflowers" by Barbara H. Cline would have been my vote for Viewer's Choice.
It’s not that I’m sorry I went, just that I have such high expectations of this show that I was surprised not to be more bowled over by it. And if I didn’t go to so many quilt shows, I wouldn’t have the jaded, “been there, done that” attitude that I’m concerned may be coming across here: I can only imagine what my reaction would have been to seeing all those top quilts I’ve just enumerated, for the first time, all in one place! My brain might have exploded, and that sounds messy. Does that Grandma’s Secret Spot Remover get gray matter out of cotton? Better not to find out.
