Thursday, March 24, 2011

The Dallas show

Tea and baskets

When last we left the Dallas show results, the Bunnies Running Amok were into farmer Brown's crops. Sally had two other award-winning quilts in the show, Join Me for Tea and Baskets in Flight.

In the tea quilt, I relied quite a bit on continuous curve quilting in the piecing for simplicity and to keep the focus on the blocks. Behind the embroidery, I tried to set the scene. In one example, I created the impression of a beadboard wall with double straight lines and a zigzag meander surface to hold the jar and infuser. Cute. In the frame around the blocks, I did a flower and leaf meander.

Swirls add femininity and dimension to the teapot and hanky block. I ditch quilted between the block and its frame and edgestitched around all embroidery lines. I'm convinced this is the best approach. I've seen blocks like these either indiscriminately crosshatched or else the background is densely quilted and the embroidery left untouched, which makes it sag -- and sad. This quilt won honorable mention.

Sally's basket quilt is another example of her fine handwork. This quilt was time-consuming and required a lot of attention to detail.

I used clear thread on top and white in the bobbin to get the details outlined inside the baskets and to achieve a wholecloth effect on the back.

Graceful S echoes form backdrops for the baskets. In a quilt like this in which white fabric meets more white fabric, a key decision is whether to treat it all as background or as blocks, sashing and borders. We opted for separate elements, so to play up the sashing, I ditch quilted between sashing and blocks and quilted rows of straight lines with tiny dimensional quilting in the centers.

I freehanded flowers, feathers, butterflies and echoing in the ample borders. I quilted circles on the green swag and tiny dimensional quilting between the swag and the pink embroidered flowers.

There is no one way to quilt a quilt -- there are many. If I had to do this one over again, I might do it quite differently. This quilt is much like a wholecloth in effect, so trapunto would have been a great choice, but washing the quilt wasn't an option.

This quilt won third place and a judge's choice ribbon.

Wednesday, March 16, 2011

The Dallas quilt show

The bunny quilt

The Dallas quilt show was full of surprises and wonderful work, as usual. Three of my clients entered six quilts, three of which won four ribbons.

Let's start with Sally Brown's bunny quilt, which won a ribbon. It's becoming famous, people love it, and I get requests to ``make my quilt special like you did the bunny quilt.'' Here's how it got to be that way:


First, Sally's impeccable workmanship --applique, piecing, pressing, cutting and on and on. The pattern came from a book, but she added unique touches of her own, such as the border. She says the border piecing was so not easy to do, but it appears effortless to me. Her marching orders for me were ``do your thing.'' Had I done that, it would have turned out differently.


My instinct was to balance the sweet, feminine aspects with straight lines. Contrast is the name of the game in quilting -- or you end up with boring sameness. I chose channel quilting -- the straight single and double diagonal lines in the piecing and backgrounds. We agreed on feathers in the border. Around the feathers, the white spaces on either side struck me as two different elements, so I quilted a ribbon candy design (from Linda Taylor's Fancy That book) on the inside and a straight-line meander on the perimeter. The curls in the sashing are a great foil for the straight lines. Of course, I outlined and detailed the applique and ditch-quilted between the blocks and sashing.


The undecided part was what to do in the remaining light sides of the log cabin blocks, where the quilting would really show up. I set off in search of a triangular motif that would look great turned in any direction. At last, I found a sophisticated, abstract design I thought would be perfect. But Sally wanted something whimsical. The only other idea I had was to put in rabbits in a garden, an idea she loved.


Which leads me to a book recommendation, well, two: 250 Continuous-Line Quilting Designs for Hand, Machine & Long-Arm Quilters, and 250 More Continuous-Line Quilting Designs by Laura Lee Fritz, C&T Publishing. These are wonderful resources for flora, fauna and many other representational designs. Her instructions on how to set a scene and tell a story are indispensable, especially for those of use who didn't attend art school.


With a King Tut variegated (Superior Thread) in shades of beige and cream, I lasered in the rascally rabbits, carrots, tomatoes, berries. peas and an artichoke. Everyone thinks it's cabbage, but Laura Lee labeled it an artichoke. Who knew vegetables were good for quilting, not just for eating. Finally, I did another little straight-line meander in the background. I like how it adds continuity with the border.


Part of the allure of the quilting is the batting choice: Hobbs wool, which is lofty, so it creates a trapunto effect and the quilted bunnies and veggies puff out. Well worth it.


More on Sally's stuff and the show to come ...

Monday, March 7, 2011

Quilt of the Week #3

Bound for Dallas

I just love going to quilt shows, drawing inspiration, refilling the creative well, seeing what other creative people have whipped up, buying more thread. Yes, I know fabric is the addictive substance of choice for most people, but some of us are different. So with the Dallas quilt show just days away, here is a preview of what one of my customers has entered in the show. I'm not sure how much of my work will be in the show; that's always a surprise for me.

This quilt is big, too big for the details I feel like sharing to fit all in one photo, so to see the whole thing you'll have to head to Market Hall. My client, David, likes Civil War-era quilts and his usual color palette includes blue and brown. This one is a star medallion featuring an American eagle fabric, which provided the design inspiration for the quilting.

This top has myriad white spaces in which I had planned to quilt all manner of patriotic motifs, but getting them to fit proved difficult. I narrowed them down to various eagles, starbursts, laurel leaves, trumpets, a liberty bell and straight lines -- all proclaiming freedom. Each eagle, modified versions of a Linda Taylor design and one in the book Civil War Women by Barbara Brackman, C&T Publishing, had to be simplified and sometimes redesigned to fit a particular shape around the center star and outside the blue log cabin path surrounding the star. (I have a knack for trying to do something simple but ending up a complex endeavor.) I got the trumpet from a Dover copyright-free book and I drew the bell from photos found on the Internet. I freehanded the laurel leaves.

I opted for background quilting to make the motifs pop like sculpture: radiating lines, tiny arcs and a little stippling here and there. And I added rows of straight lines where dense quilting wasn't needed.

Is anyone else out there a technosaur like me? I can handle hard-to-quilt projects, I can design, I can freehand, I can spell, I can conjugate many verbs, but I can't seem to get the hang of posting photos on this blog. I have more photos to show, but I've run out of computer savvy for the moment. There may be more later. Fingers crossed. See you at the show!