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.