Kitsap Quilters’ Guild Show, May 2019 (3)

Our 33rd Kitsap Quilter’s Guild Annual Quilt Show at the beginning of May was a great success with over 200 quilts on display. Selecting a small number of my favorites to share from the wide selection is always difficult. Brilliant Beauties of Joy pieced and quilted by Debi Snyder was absolutely stunning and glowed. Debi made this from a Jacqueline de Jonge pattern. This quilt won first place in the Individual Large Pieced category.

Debbie Flood made Montana Stars from a pattern by Bette Faries, and beautifully quilted by Marybeth O’Halloran.

Debi purchased the pattern in a quilt shop in Bozeman, Montana and made most of the stars on yearly trips to Montana. There are 315 stars! The pink border with the delicate sawtooth triangles offset the center perfectly. The detailed shot shows Marybeth’s exquisite quilting.

While I tend to gravitate towards the more traditionally based pieced quilts, I loved this pictorial dog quilt, Ty’s a girl, made by Wanda Rains, using the photo pinned to the bottom right. Wanda so realistically captivated the spirit of her dog Ty. She did a five day class with instructor Susan Carlson in 2017 to learn collage and it took almost two years to complete the rendition. Everyone thinks Ty is a boy, hence the quilt title and pink nail polish.

Farewell, Retro-Radiation

I recently gave this bed quilt, Retro-Radiation, away to a friend who lost most of her belongings when her apartment caught fire a few weeks ago.

I gave her a choice of two quilts and I accurately predicted that this would be her pick. She loves the colors and since she is a piano tuner, the piano keys borders seemed most appropriate. Here you can see four of the 16 Op-Art Kaleidoscope blocks. These blocks are made using my template-free technique (see my video) which is very easy and fun. I have patterns available at my on-line store. Look closely to see the awesome long-arm quilting by Wanda Rains.

Below, the border is illustrated. The wavy line which looks like rickrack is a fussy-cut fabric. The piano keys border features all of the fabrics from the center field of the quilt. In the lower left corner, you can see the small Kaleidoscope block which is in the mid-point of the side. This looks like a radiation warning sign.

Kitsap Quilters’ Guild Show, May 2019 (2)

Our rescheduled 33rd annual Kitsap Quilters’ Guild show the first weekend in May was a great success. We had a wonderful array of 200+ quilts and guild member, Vicki Adams was our featured artist. Here’s Vicki in her lovely display area.

Vicki’s immersion in fiber arts began at an early age. Her mother and grandmothers sewed, did embroidery and other handwork and Vicki took to it naturally completing her first embroidered piece at the age of five. She loves knitting, counted cross-stitch, clothing construction, and all kinds of embroidery. She began quilting in 1976 after she spotted a quilt at the local county fair and replicated her own version of it using all her fabric from her bottom dresser drawer. Since then her fabric stash has grown and she’s always finding new techniques to try.

Vicki writes, ” I love sharing my love of quilting and skills with others. One of my greatest joys is sewing baby and doll quilts for our guild’s charity projects.”

The two purses are knitted and then felted, including the large flower. Below is a gorgeous embroidered peacock, which was a project that Vicki inherited when is was barely begun. The detail is exquisite and her choice of frame is perfect for the piece.

Kitsap Quilters’ Guild Show, May 2019 (1)

Our rescheduled Kitsap Quilters’ Guild 33rd Annual Quilt Show was very successful with good attendance and all of the logistics running smoothly. My only entry, Lauret’s Stars, was awarded first place by our peer judges in the Large Pieced Group category. Group quilts are those made by more than one person. For my entry, I did the designing and piecing and the quilt was exquisitely long-arm quilted by Wanda Rains. This quilt was commissioned and I was fortunate that my client allowed me to borrow it from her for the show.

The quilt is king-sized, 105″ x 105″, which is very large. Our guild has a few extra tall quilt stands for the really big quilts and it was great to be able to see it in its entirety. I spent more than 200 hours piecing the quilt over a period of 18 months. My client was extremely patient when life got in the way and my time was eaten up helping to care for my twin grandchildren as well as traveling to teach. I had a push to finish it by February for the show, which was then rescheduled to May because of the snow. Here’s a detailed shot showing the lovely machine quilting and the blue ribbon.