Mad About Quilts

 One of the local quilt guilds we belong to, the Silver City Quilt Guild,  just had their biennial quilt show on Sept 17^th+18^th. Whew! A year in the planning, the show was a great success, and I continue to be impressed with the talent and imagination of our guild members!

This show has a judged division, which allows members to have their quilts judged/critiqued by a real quilt judge who then awards ribbons in the various categories. Mary Ann and I were on the judging team, which consisted of about 15 guild member volunteers, plus the judge, Holice Turnbow. If you have never helped out with the judging for a quilt show, you don’t know what you’re missing! It’s a great learning experience watching how each quilt is displayed for the judge and how he carefully and thoroughly examines it. The judge's comments are always intersting and constructive, and we learned a great deal from seeing each quilt through his eyes.

Well, it’s very interesting, that is till he gets to your quilts! Being present as your own quilt is being judged is a little tricky-you can’t react in any way or make any noise during the judging to begin with, and it’s so much harder when your own quilt comes up!

Now imagine that he’s looking at your quilt, and he’s not saying anything. Every quilt gets an evaluation by the judge-he dictates his comments and the scribes write down what he says on the comment sheets. Usually as each quilt comes up, he starts speaking right away. But with one of mine, he didn’t say a word…for a full 2 minutes! Then he asked to set it aside and he’d come back to it after he went thru the rest in the category. What could possibly be so wrong with my quilt that he had to put it aside? I couldn’t tell if he liked it or not, because he didn’t indicate one way or the other. Not one comment yet! I just had to zip my lip and try not to squirm as I waited for him to get back to my quilt.

     When he finally looked at my quilt, Summer Days, again, it was not clear right away from his comments that he liked what he saw. This quilt was a joy to make because I used bold vibrant colors and a large floral print in the border, and I was sure that he would say the quilt was too bright or busy. Plus, I used a bright pink variegated thread to quilt it, which I was sure he would dislike as well.

Much to my relief, he liked the quilt! It was my choice of the large floral patterned fabric in the border, plus the bold quilt colors overall that had left him speechless! I guess they were not the norm for him, but in the end, it set the quilt apart and earned a 2^nd place ribbon in the small bed quilts category!

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One of our good customers, Sally, has been very busy this summer.  We haven't seen her for a while and thought she was too busy to quilt. All the time she was just busy quilting.  This morning Sally brought in another one of her beautiful art quilts to quilt on our longarm.  Sally is very determined when she comes in to quilt.  She starts at 9:00 in the morning and doesn't leave until she is done.  Today it was 4:00p. Quilting the whole time except for a short lunch break. Her imagination and color coordination are very inspiring to both Dora and I.   
This quilt is called "Time"  

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Round Robin quilts are a great activity to do with a quilt guild or group. Mary Ann and I both participated in a Round Robin during the past guild year and had a great experience! If you're not sure what a Round Robin is, you create a block for the center of the quilt, then pass it off to the other members of your group. They each add a round, and pass it along, and you don't see the finished product till the end. It was great fun!

Here's the block I created to start:

This was made with some of the yummy fabrics I've been working with lately, so I was very excited to see what everyone would do.

There were 4 people in our group, and I sent this center off with a bunch of wonderful fabrics I wanted everyone to use. Such anticipation!

Here's the quilt after the first round was added by Elaine:

Love her strips-the colors just blend so well and framed the star perfectly!

Next came Sue's round:

Love her choice to use the same friendship block as the center of the star, but in a smaller scale! Very creative!

Finally, my best friend and partner Mary Ann's round:

All I can say is Wow! Mary Ann knows how much I like stars and flying geese, and of course she had to work them in! Beautiful paper pieced stars in the corner and flying geese floating in the borders-Perfection!

It was like Christmas when we got our quilts back at the June pot luck meeting!! I couldn't have dreamed up this quilt by myself, and am thrilled at the collaboration and result! It's just amazing and my next challenge will be to quilt it.  I'm thinking lots of detail quilting for sure, I'm taking my time with this one, maybe feathers in the open areas.... I'll post more when the quilting gets under way.

Just remember when you have the chance to participate in a group project like a Round Robin, the results can be wonderful because there are so many talented quilters out there, so give it a try and enjoy the process!!

Category: Quilts As We Go | Leave A Comment

We recently had an order to make a full-size quilt for a 2-year old girl by her grandmother, Rachel, who wanted something to fit the ‘big girl’ bed she’d be moving to shortly. The only constraints were that the main colors be green and yellow--her granddaughter is not a ‘pink’ girl, but she wanted something lively like her grandchild.

Working with green and yellow for a little girl was not as comfortable as using pinks and pastels; you can run the risk of it being too boyish. Our first task was to isolate what type of green and yellow we would be working with, so we had Rachel select from a variety of both colors to identify her preferences. She was definitely leaning towards the bright green/lime side, so we headed to our fabric warehouse to put everything together.

The yellow print fabric above was chosen next-what a find! The perfect sunny yellow with butterflies and funky flowers in wonderful bright blues, pinks, oranges, purples, greens and more! And what super greens-you can see the energy!

Next came the design concept, and we decided to mimic the flower and butterfly shapes in the fabric as guides for appliqué shapes in the quilt. A simple Log-Cabin design was chosen for the base layer of the quilt, with lots of bright colors matching the focal fabric, in a non-traditional design layout:

This became the base layer on which all our fun flower and butterfly shapes were appliqued.

We had already planned on appliquéing the name ‘Salma’ in a central area of the quilt, and everything began to take shape.

The final touch was a wonderful sun, wearing-of course-sunglasses!

Add borders, and custom quilting and voila! A quilt full of energy and fun, just like Salma! Perfect! To see more images of this quilt, click here to go to Our Gallery, and enjoy!

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 Saturday was our most recent Basic Longarming Techniques Class and it was a big success! We had very enthusiastic quilters eager to try practicing free-motion quilting designs from the front of the longarm machines.  Good company and lots to do made the two hour class fly by.  If you are interested in taking this class email us at contact@madaboutquilts.com for our upcoming schedule.

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