Tuesday, August 5, 2008

On Cloud Nine

At the Kuna Quilt Show this year I took 4 ribbons for my quilts. Needless to say, I was on cloud nine most of the day. The majority of the ribbons are given after voting from the show goers...some businesses give out ribbons for special areas. The quilt on the left, which I called Tutti Fruiti, took first place for the Theme catagory of "When Life Gives You Scraps" I bought the pattern, Montana Roundup, when I still lived in Alaska, but didn't start it until November of 2007. I put the label on the quilt 5 days before the show on Aug 2-3. I estimated there is about 350 to 400 different fabrics in the top, about 500-600 hours in making it and I used over 2000 yards of thread to quilt it. It was quilted on my home Bernina sewing machine. The quilt is 106" by 106" . A fun quilt to do, the curves were a little harder than I expected, especially by the time that I had that last seam to do with 4 rows on one side and 3 on the other. In winning first place I was given a certificate to have a quilt done by a long arm quilter. And she does fantastic work. In addition, a Boise quilt shop, the Quilt Crossing, awarded me their ribbon for "non-professional quilting excellence".


This is the detail of the quilting that I did all over the quilt. It was called Mums in one of my books. Depending on where I was in the quilt it had 3 or 4 rows of "petals" before I went on to the next "flower". It's a great alternative to stippling or meandering.

Something new that I did on the quilt was face it rather than use binding on the scalloped edges. I do believe that it won't be my last time for binding edges. It was fast, the edges lie flat and I didn't have to hand sew the miters on every scallop.


The Snail's Trail block(next) is one of the blocks that I entered in this years Block Challenge. The challenge fabric was the red with pink/lilac tulips on it. We were given a piece 9 x 11 and needed to make a 12 inch block. It took first place. So I was given first chance to pick 11 more blocks, which I am expected to put into a quilt by the next year's show. I have been eyeing a way to put together a sampler quilt in a book by Diana Leone...so think I will use it as a starting point for this quilt. It should be fun to do, but will cut into my time of working on my UFO's.
















The last quilt, which took a first place ribbon in Machine wall Hangings, is a qult I made after taking a class from the author of Circle Play during my last week in Alaska. It is 58" x 67". This class gave me a new perspective on how to use fabrics together, mixing textures, scale, shapes and density. I feel that it was a BIG step in my quilting growth and has made my quilts and blocks far more interestng. This was the 4th quilt I made from this technique. It was certainly the hardest since all the blocks were from bright Hawaiian fabrics. It was much more difficult to get waves of color or dark and light areas with all the varied colors in the quilt.



Below is the detail from the quilt. I quilted the "flower" in each of the blocks, extending it for the few triangles that extend into the border. Then the border has the same flowers but in a slightly different size.

I have one quilt made from the backgrounds that I cut out after appliquing the circles onto the blocks. Reynola calls them Generation 2 quilts. I don't know if I'll ever get to all of them but I have saved all the generation 2 circles and one set of generation 3. We'll see.




Hope you have enjoyed my winning quilts.
Lois

Labels: , ,

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]

<< Home