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Tuesday, July 16, 2013

Sisters Outdoor Quilt Show

While I haven't been able to do any quilting lately due to my move, I did go to the Sisters Outdoor Quilt Show this past weekend with my family.


The show was great! So much to say...it was fun to be able to wander through town to see the quilts, the weather was beautiful and all that natural daylight made my photos come out much better than normal!

Two very interesting things we took note of during the show:
  • The quilts here were very different from the quilts in the Pacific International Quilt Festival, the only other large show we've gone to. Much more traditional in the sense that I didn't see a lot of fabric painting, weird materials, or quilts in funky shapes. There was a pretty strong modern quilting contingent in the show though.
  • About 1/3 of the quilts in the show were on sale...and the prices really were all over the place. We were fascinated to see what different quilts were listed for...most of the time I thought the prices were far too low for such lovely pieces. There was definitely not an accepted norm, for the same price I saw some really quick quilts but also some incredibly detailed quilts that must have taken a long time. The cheapest quilt I saw was about $125 and the most expensive I saw was $1500.
It was also fun to see multiple different quilts in the same pattern. Always neat to see what a difference color can make in a quilt.

Here are some highlights:

Us with the quilted car!

This was a fascinating exhibit where a number of different wallhangings all connected to form a single river mural. Do you see how the river flows in an out of all of them? It was so cool to see the different styles each person used on their portion.

This wall of quilts was especially impressive. They were all designed around the theme "Streams of Color."

I got to see the famed Ron Swanson quilt!

This one was a special favorite...it is a fishing fly, but in such beautiful and unexpected colors!

My photo didn't come out too great, but I liked the steampunk style and embellishments on this "Hugo"-themed quilt.

The use of color on this one was very clever!




Wednesday, July 3, 2013

Wishing I Were Quilting

Thanks to all for your advice on my mom's quilt! She has already sewed together many units so she is thinking of either continuing so the whole thing is shrunk by the same amount, or ripping the whole thing apart and doing raw edge applique like everyone suggested. She is going to ponder it for a few days.

All of my quilting stuff is packed up and now that I am finally finding myself with some staycation time I am really wishing I had a project to work on! I am very jealous reading so many quilting blogs and thinking of the projects I would like to be doing.

Before I packed up my quilting supplies, my last act was to sort all of the scraps I have been hoarding.  What started as this:

...Eventually turned into this!


I followed the method suggested in this Martingale blog post (if you don't subscribe to their "Stitch This!" newsletter, you should!) that recommends sorting scraps based on width instead of color. So I cut all of my scraps into the widest width possible (didn't worry about length) and stuffed them all into separate baggies.

While I can't quilt anymore, I have been toodling around organizing all of the free patterns I have downloaded onto my computer and dreaming about projects. I am really ready for my next landscape art quilt! I recently procured an extensive clipart collection that I would like to use for elements of the landscape quilts, however I'm not sure about the rules on them. It is a "MasterClips" collection from the late 90's. I looked on the packaging and couldn't find any usage info, I believe since they are a purchased collection I should be able to use them in whatever I want (but probably wouldn't be able to sell a pattern based on one of their cliparts? What do you think?) These copyright and fair use rules always confuse me and I do want to make sure to do the right thing.

I also have a needlepoint to work on that I am really quite far behind schedule with so I suppose I should go start stitching on that now!