I don’t get to go to many quilt shows. There is a big one a little over an hour from my house that I look forward to all year. To be honest, I’ve been down in the dumps off and on the last month. So my usual enthusiasm for the show was down a little. Here are some pictures from it. The first one I took because I could not find my car last year for the l-o-n-g-e-s-t time. I was so excited to get there (and I was alone). Once I came back out, the huge parking lot was packed, and I could not remember where I parked. I figure the cars around me in the photo would come and go, but those trees in the background weren’t going anywhere! I was parked catty-cornered from the bright blue car.
As has been the case for the past couple of years, there were lots of what I call art quilts. Where they look like a picture instead of traditional piecing. It is not that I dislike them, but the pictures usually don’t connect with my life. I find that I’m liking modern quilts (but not necessarily modern colors) more and more. They are so much faster to make for one thing. Here are a few I did like. They are all patterns by Bonnie Hunter. I sent them to her since I thought she would get a charge out of seeing her patterns in public.
I also took pictures as reminders of machine quilting or patterns that I like. I have had a red and cream feathered star for many years in my project drawer. After I pieced it (as the beginning of a queen-sized quilt), I decided I didn’t even want to make a second block. I might use a couple borders from this and make it into a wall hanging for our foyer.
I have seen this Gypsy Wife Quilt online and asked a woman on IG if I could buy her pattern because I did not want to pay full price. She just sent it to me for free. I would pick different colors, but I like this.
This picture was taken to give me some ideas for how to machine quilt my Grandmother’s Flower Garden quilt. Mine has been all hand-cut and hand-pieced so far.
There was an area of older fabrics, books, etc. I think it was called “Gone, But Not Forgotten”. I bought all the 4” I Spy hexagons they had. I plan to sew vertical rows by machine, then hand piece the edges on an upcoming road trip. Here is mine laid out. 182 hexagons. I am going to move a few around before stitching them together. All these cost me $5. I was so surprised that I only had ONE of the prints out of the unique 182 in my stash. The black horizontal thing on the right is the arm of our treadmill. My design wall is behind it.
In the last week, I also machine quilted Oakish Leaves on this large Churn Dash quilt. It measures about 72” x 82”. This is the most dense pattern I have used in a while, and it seemed like it took forever. I used a light gray thread that matched the linen-like background fabric very well. The quilting shows up best in the last picture. Notice that the gray is alternately the background on one block, then the Churn Dash on the next.
