Quilt Show

The Quilter

It's getting (sort of) close to time for the Quilt Festival - maybe I should start putting up the occasional "quilt show" picture again. I wanted to put this one up anyway, because it's in one of the current issues of QNM (September, I think) and it's made by one member of my guild and pictures another one.

Made by Beth Johnson.

Mom's batik quilt

Mom - rainbow batik quilt

Here is the finished "rainbow" quilt, made out of squares from a trade of 5" batik squares. (Except for the black and black-dotted blocks, which aren't batik. The black and white border fabric is, though.)

Japanese quilt

Patchwork Quilt Tsushin

What do you call this, a Storm at Sea variation? I like it, whatever it is.

(The magazine is available here, if you're interested.)

(My Faceted Amethysts quilt looks sort of similar to this, with the curve illusion thing going on, but it doesn't seem to be put together the same at all. It does seem to have a 54-40 or Fight variation incorporated into it like mine does, though.)

Quilt-Along

zipper quilt (on cover of book)

I'm in. I'm making the zipper quilt in pink, orange, and yellow. Unless I hate the colors after I get started, that is - but I don't think I will.

Open vs. closed seams

I found an e-mail Carolyn sent me ages ago that I meant to use as a jumping-off point for an entry - and I am, just a couple of months late! (Typical.) It was answers to a survey that somebody had sent her, I guess, and one of the things it talked about was open vs. closed seams. Here's what "the funquilts guy" (Bill Kerr?) told her on the subject:

his arguments are that 1) pressed open, the seam wears unevenly (the bulge wears out faster), 2) it's not as precise in piecing (8 pointed stars for example) -- points are easier to match amd 4) more even to quilt (no bulges to quilt over)

I'm a recent convert to open seams. It wasn't the Funquilts people who converted me, though, it was some speaker at our quilt guild months ago - I've forgotten who it was, exactly. It took me a while to get around to changing my pressing habits - which is how come I forgot who it was who talked about it in their lecture, in the interim - and I don't press all my seams open, still, but I have been doing it with the majority of them. It's the way everything lays nice and flat that has kept me doing it. And it really does help a lot when you have a bunch of seams coming together, too.

I persuaded Karen to go with open seams when we were assembling the Ohio Star, and we both thought that turned out really well. (Of course, I was especially persuasive there since I was the one doing most of the ironing!)

You can't really press the seams open when you're paper-piecing, of course - and the other time I haven't been using it is for something like 9-patches where it's easier to match the seams up if you alternate. I like being able to go by feel there, and you can't do that with open seams. So I've been doing a good many things partly open and partly closed. (The leaf quilt, for example - the blocks themselves aren't pressed open, being paper-pieced, but the seams between the blocks are.)

Floral quilts

I said I was going to talk about my favorite quilt books at some point, but right now I'm going to talk about my mom's. A lot of our favorite books are the same, really, but our tastes are a good bit different when it comes to specific quilts. My mom really, really loves florals. I like florals, but not the way she does. She adores them. She went through a watercolor phase which she seems to be mostly over (watercolor quilts are a pain to make so I don't blame her!) but she has found different ways to work with florals. And one of her favorite books is Blended Quilts from In the Beginning:



(There are a couple of sequels to this book, incidentally. Blended Quilts II is pretty good, by all accounts, but nobody seems to be too crazy about Blended Wall Quilts, for some reason.)

Anyway, I do like this book, myself. The quilts are low-contrast and sort of old-fashioned looking, but in a good way. I haven't made a blended quilt myself, so far, but I might sometime.


It's sort of a shame I've already gotten my mom's birthday present, because Focus on Florals looks like it would be right up her alley:



I haven't seen inside it, but the cover quilt is really pretty. I'll have to take a look at it the next time I go in a quilt shop.

Donation block

This is a block for a comfort quilt. They wanted 8" blocks (any pattern) in cheery colors. I have always really liked this red floral, so that's what I used.

I made that last week, actually, but I just didn't get around to posting the picture. I hurt my back again this week so I haven't been terribly productive. I did get another one of those red-&-blue Ohio Stars done, though.

(I keep saying it's my lower back that hurts, but it seems to actually be the top of my hips that's the real problem. And my doctor seems to think it's the beginnings of arthritis, which I really don't want to hear. Yuck. I'm too young to have arthritis, dammit!)

About those Amazon links...

Is anybody else occasionally seeing a big flashy orange Amazon ad instead of the picture of the book on those Amazon links below? Just wondering, because I am. Grrr. I am going to try to make sure I post a text link to the book as well as the fancy ones, just in case.

Here's the text links for the three from this week:
Hometown Quilts
Denyse Schmidt Quilts
The Modern Quilt Workshop

(Actually I think this happened the first time I used one of those links, too, but I waited so long before using another one that I forgot about it. But I have gotten the itch to do some kind of a "favorite books" post soon, so I better remember it this time.)


Update: if you do see the big orange Amazon ad, hitting reload seems to fix it. Maybe that's what they put up when the book image won't load for some reason, I don't know.

A couple of books

This is the book I bought at the auction (for $3, mind you):



And it's in perfect condition, too. Apparently it's out of print - which doesn't really surprise me because it's five years old. (Quilt books seem not to stay in print too terribly long, except for the few top-sellers, have y'all noticed that?) Anyway, it's full of paper-pieced building patterns - houses and skyscrapers and a lighthouse and all kinds of things. I didn't really have any intention of making a house quilt (or if I did I didn't know it!) but I like the book. Maybe I'll make a city-skyline quilt, or a townhouse quilt. Something like that.


Also, I have been following links between quilt weblogs today, and I found another quilt-along, in case anybody's interested. It's using this book:



Hip to Piece Squares is running this one. I don't think I'll be joining, since I've already got the book for the other one, but this book interests me just the same.


Cute quilt I stumbled across: Oscar's Baby Clothes.

Auction goodies

my auction haul

I forgot to post the picture of the stuff I brought home from the auction Monday night. I spent $27, I think, and that included a book which is not pictured, so I think I got a bargain. (The book's retail price is probably $27 by itself, never mind the fabric.)

And there are twenty-something of those nine-patches. I have no idea what I'll do with them, but I thought they were cute.

The Modern Quilt Workshop

I finally got this book today. I really like the quilts so I might be joining the Modern Quilt-Along after all. Have I mentioned that I have been stewing over the idea of doing a pink, orange and yellow quilt? I got the idea a couple of weeks ago, and I'm thinking that this might be the place to use that. The Zipper quilt (the one on the cover) is my initial favorite, but we'll see how I feel in a few days.

(I scrolled down to see what I had said about this before, and it turned out to be nothing, publicly - I had written an entry and never published it. Duh.)

Also - here is somebody else's zipper quilt, in fairly similar colors to what I'm talking about. Not entirely the same, though. (It's very cute.)


(Later: that last link had changed since I posted this. So if you've tried to look at it and gotten a 404 error, it should work now.)

Friendship Bee auction quilt

Friendship Bee quilt

Another auction quilt - my mother made the sort of golden-looking floral star at the left center, near the top.

I really like this quilt a lot. It went for $425, though, so it was definitely out of my league, financially speaking.

Que Bee's auction quilt

Que Bee's quilt

This is the quilt top that the Que Bee ("Que" is pronounced "Kay" as in applique) put in the guild auction yesterday. I think it sold for about $400.

Last fall batik block

fall batik block #2
Originally uploaded by Mellicious.

This is batik block #12 - which looks exactly like batik blocks 4-11, or as exactly alike as batik blocks ever look, at least. All I did was switch the fabrics around; it has the same exact fabrics as the one below. I like this version much better, though.

First fall batik block

fall batik block #1

I don't know why I never took pictures of these before. This is the way I started out making the blocks for the fall batik exchange. I made three like this before I changed them. I decided I didn't like having so much of that orange freckled fabric - it was just too bright.

Ohio Star sampler

more Ohio Star blocks

Here are the Ohio Star blocks I started last winter. This was a block-of-the-month that I inherited, so I didn't get to pick the colors. I am personally not big on red-white-&-blue, but I am planning on giving this as a gift to someone who I think will like it - at least I hope so!

Not a great picture, but you can get the idea, at least. (And here is my EQ mock-up I did of how I'm planning to set it.)

Quilt-Along

Karen asked me today if I was doing the Modern Quilt-Along, and I had no idea what that was. (I really need to keep up with my internet stuff better, apparently!) Turns out she had posted an entry about it on Friday, which I hadn't seen yet because I am - guess what - behind on my e-mail. Dioramarama has a page up for this - basically, they are trying to make all of the quilts in this book, collectively. Seems to me that I have looked at that (that is, the book authors') website before - yup, here it is - and I liked their quilts, so I ordered the book. I'm certainly not making any promises about making a quilt, though.

Applique nine-patch

Mom - flowery nine-patch

This is the latest of the comfort quilts that Mom was given - another one of her bees made these blocks. She put the top together herself, and Denise Green quilted it.

I feel like I didn't do much this weekend, although I did get the 10th and 11th swap blocks put together. Only one more to go!

More Friendship Bee blocks

Mom's Friendship Bee blocks

Mom is just finishing up one Friendship Bee quilt (scroll down to July for that one) and she's already got another set of blocks coming in. I think this was a block-of-the-month that she hadn't got around to doing, so she just passed it around to them to do.

Another Quiltmaker's Puzzle block

Another Quiltmaker's Puzzle block
Originally uploaded by Mellicious.

I was trying to approximate how Mom's new set of swap blocks was coming out - it's hard to believe they're the same pattern as the other ones.

Bali Jane

quilt
Originally uploaded by martha2.

And now for something other than Ohio Stars - somebody's else's quilt, from flickr. I already had this one marked as a "favorite" but I found it again when I was looking at flickr's new "interesting" feature, which as near as I can figure out uses some formula that takes into consideration how many people have commented on a picture and marked it as a favorite and so on. (Some of my pictures do pop up on there, starting on the 4th or 5th page, I think.)

Anyway, I love the idea of doing a Dear Jane in batiks, and I love the trip-around-the-world effect she's got going on it, too. Really nice quilt.

Detail

detail of fish quilt

Here's a detail shot where you can see the batik that I was talking about yesterday, and also one of the message squares.

Also, I forgot to say that Karen got her entry about the quilt up yesterday morning, and it's here.

Centers

Ohio Star centers

Here are nine of the centers for the Ohio Stars. (After these, I did another pinwheel and two Puss in the Corner's. Simplicity was a big factor by that point in the process.) Actually, I suppose you can't technically call these sampler blocks since there are two of each pattern, but that's nitpicking, right? I really like the Yankee Puzzle block a lot - the one in the center - but I wonder if it'd look nearly as striking if you did a whole quilt full of them!

The fish quilt

The finished quilt!
Originally uploaded by Mellicious.

Finally! we can post pictures!

This is the gift quilt I have been carrying on about for ages and ages. We actually borrowed the design from that Ohio Star sampler I was working on months ago. (It's a sampler because the centers are mini-sampler blocks. You can see that in the picture above - at least a little bit - but I didn't put it in when I did that EQ design.) We were told that the newlyweds have a lot of neutrals in their house, and Karen also figured out from somewhere that they like red. All of that started coming together when we found a beautiful black and tan batik at eQuilter. Plus, they recently moved to Ohio, so what could be more appropriate than Ohio Stars?

(More later.)