Santa Fe Quilts

What does a quilt magazine editor/certified quilt judge do on vacation? Participate in quilt-related activities, of course! I was invited by the Northern New Mexico Quilt Guild to judge their every-two-years Quilt Fiesta in Santa Fe, an invitation I accepted with pleasure. And what a wonderful show it will be! The talent runs deep in this group, from lovely hand stitching to exquisite machine quilting to wildly imaginative narrative and innovative designs and techniques — eye candy for anyone who appreciates textile arts.

As in most groups, there is a corps of dedicated volunteers organizing this show, including guild president and show chair Lynne Horpedahl, shown above with her quilt entry named Our House. The show runs from Oct. 1-3 at the Santa Fe County Fairgrounds, and you can find more details at http://www.nnmqg.org/. If you happen to be in the Santa Fe or Albuquerque area later this week, don’t miss this great show.

And if the quilt show, art galleries, folk art museum, and fabulous food weren’t enough to draw you to Santa Fe, you won't want to miss Santa Fe Quilting, 3018-A Cielo Court. This is truly one of the most well-stocked, diverse, and colorful shops I have ever explored – and I’ve seen more than a few in my time. Whether your quilt preferences are contemporary, traditional, or somewhere in between, you’ll find fabric, thread, patterns, embellishments, kits, and an abundance of beautiful finished quilts on display. Owner Mary McCusker (photo below) and her staff are knowledgeable and helpful.

The judging is over for this show, but the quilt fun continues. I’m getting on another plane tomorrow en route to Charlotte, North Carolina. My horoscope (I'm a Capricorn) predicts more quilts and fabric in my immediate future…

Aligning sashed rows

(Submitted by Marje Rhine, pattern editor for American Quilter magazine)
One of the most obvious and frequent mistakes made by beginning quilters when joining rows of blocks is poor alignment. This is especially true when working with sashed blocks and rows that don’t have cornerstones (the squares usually found between block sashing), causing the rows to look crooked (fig. 1).

To prevent this from happening, as you line up your sashed rows for sewing be careful to match the sashing seams between blocks on the two rows (fig. 2). To check before sewing, fold down the top row to make sure sashing pieces are aligned (fig. 3) then pin to secure.

International wedding story

Weddings seem to be on my mind lately, no doubt due to my new status as a future mother of the bride. Helle-May Cheney, a talented quilt designer who will be featured in a future issue of American Quilter, recently sent me this charming wedding story.

“I am a first-generation Estonian-American with nearly all my family still living in Estonia. After 50 years of Soviet occupation, Estonia regained its independence in 1991, finally allowing me the opportunity to visit and get to know my relatives. This summer our visit had a very special purpose—to attend the wedding of my cousin Liina and her Norwegian fiancé, Harald.
Of course this meant a wedding quilt was in order! I wanted it to reflect both homelands also be a memento of the occasion. For the center, I made a patchwork version of the traditional striped woven wool skirt that my cousin would wear at the wedding. The border reflected the colors of the Estonian flag (blue, black, and white) and the Norwegian flag (blue, red, and white). A blue ribbon weaving through a white chain represented the joining of two cultures, families, and the multitude of friends.
The wedding ceremony took place on a picture-perfect summer day at a church built in 1534. The 100 guests, about half from Norway, were invited to wear the traditional dress of their native country and region, which made for a colorful wedding!
From the church, the guests joined the wedding party in a motorcade to Liina’s mother’s house where both bride and groom had to demonstrate their readiness for married life by chopping wood (groom), darning a sock (bride), and donning a two-person apron to jointly peel a potato! Once the tasks were performed to the satisfaction of the Norwegian and Estonian grandmothers, we were on our way to the reception.

After a champagne toast, I presented my quilt to the couple and invited all guests to sign the quilt in the white chain. As is the custom, Liina changed into her national dress at midnight and was presented with her married woman’s apron and hat by her mother and mother-in-law. The band played on well into the night with a combination of Norwegian and Estonian pop favorites, and all language barriers were broken with dance and laughter.

The wedding was a beautiful merging of cultures, traditions, and ages. I was so happy to have been a part of it all!”

Read more about Helle-May and see her quilt designs at www.HelleMayDesigns.com.

Quilt Tzedakah

The Jewish New Year, which begins at sundown this coming Wednesday, is a time for introspection. A busy Jewish quilter in Ann Arbor, Michigan, who prefers to remain anonymous, sent me this message to share with others as we approach the High Holy Days:
"When I became a Jewish woman in 1996, I learned two phrases in Hebrew: tzedakah, which translates as justice and refers to charitable giving; and tikkun olam, which translates literally as “to repair the world” and means social action in English. It was not until ten years later, when I began quilting, that I found a way of making these words truly my own.

Every third or fourth quilt I make now is what I call a tzedakah quilt (one is shown here). Through my guild, many other quilters and I have donated quilts to our community’s women’s shelter. Learning about this program also inspired me to start donating quilts to a local children’s hospital, where there is an ongoing need for twin-size and baby quilts for the children admitted. I have also donated quilts for benefits, such as for our hospice care facility, and of course, I have given away many quilts just to family and friends.

These are my ways of giving back (tzedakah) and repairing a broken world (tikkun olam). The gift of a quilt has always been a gift of practicality and beauty, given with the hope of brightening a person’s surroundings and providing a pleasing, meaningful memory.

All forms of tzedakah and tikkun olam are important. It’s just nice to find a way of doing it that expresses all the love and care that a quilt does. I’m grateful to have discovered this tradition."

Upcycled Wearable Art

At the recent Association of Pacific West Quilters http://apwq.org/ Symposium, held August 12-15, 2010 in Olympia, Washington, quilt designer and author Lorraine Torrence http://www.lorrainetorrence.com/ and Jane Moxey coordinated an evening event called the Upcycled Challenge. Contestants were challenged to make garments out of something they already owned that they were not planning to use, such as ready-made clothing, embellishments, found objects, threads, trims, or other “impulse-driven, still-unused crafting purchases sitting in their sewing space which will be so happy to be used for this challenge!” To make it even more interesting, there was a suggested time limit of one hour for garment construction. Any construction technique was acceptable—gluing, tearing, stitching by hand or machine, hammering, stapling, or pinning.

Since Jane and Lorraine were the event’s hosts, they had to make and wear their own upcycled garments that evening. And what do most quilters have in the back of their closet? Those souvenir quilt show canvas tote bags, of course, and Lorraine used hers to make this adorable jacket.
The contest was fun for all, and completed projects ranged from fun and goofy to beautiful and very wearable garments. Sounds like a great guild or bee activity!

Last-minute mystery ideas

Anyone with some quilting and piecing experience under his/her belt can still whip up the Part 1 blocks in our Beyond the Block Mystery Quilt and enter the mystery quilt contest. Deadline for entries is Tuesday, August 31—all the contest details are on page 66 of the September 2010 issue of American Quilter magazine. (And be sure to read my blog posting of July 23, August 5, or August 24 for an important cutting correction to the Part 1 instructions.)
But you don’t have to enter the contest to enjoy the fun. Here are some of the amazing focus blocks our readers have created.

Deborah Dunten of Houston, Texas, used flower photos (above) she digitally kaleidoscoped and printed on fabric. “They were originally going to be put into a Row Robin quilt but became orphans. This is a perfect use for them. I’m loving it! Can’t wait to get the next installment,” she writes.

Christy Turner of Poplar Bluff, Missouri, celebrated her “darling daughter” in these excellent photos-on-fabric focus blocks. Christy, what an amazing tribute quilt this will be!

“Since I was very young, I have been fascinated by fences,” writes Janet Springfield of Pendleton, Indiana. “The designs, types, materials, and uses for them have no end. So when I read about the mystery quilt focus blocks and asked myself what truly fascinates me, the answer was fences.” Such artistic blocks, Janet. Your quilt will be spectacular.

“My focus fabric is fussy cut from ‘Savannah’ by Michael Miller Fabrics,” says Marlene Oddie of College Place, Washington. “It reminds me of an award-winning painting by my high school friend, Stacy Barter. The magazine description of a non-traditional setting with a great visual impact sold me on using my fabric to make this mystery!”

Cynthia Felts of Rolla, Missouri, decided to make this quilt for her soon-to-be-five granddaughter. “I drew the outline of three different butterfly shapes with the help of clip art from the Internet. The shapes are machine appliquéd to the background squares using a satin stitch. I added some details with thread-painting. I really enjoyed working on this. Thanks for the excellent directions.” What a gorgeous quilt this lucky little girl will receive!

Carol Weber used a lovely autumn color scheme for her blocks. The leaf print focus fabric is presented beautifully in a circle-in-a square setting.

Even if you don’t enter our contest, perhaps you can take some inspiration from these photos and all the others I’ve posted the past couple months. Though the final block settings revealed in Part 3 will be similar for all these quilts, the colors, prints, themes, visual impact, and “voices” will be distinctly different, reflecting the personality of each quilt maker or recipient.

One week left to enter mystery quilt contest

There's still time...but you need to get those sewing machines revved up if you want to enter our Beyond the Block Mystery Quilt contest. Deadline for entries is Tuesday, August 31. All the details are on page 66 of the September 2010 issue of American Quilter magazine. (The digital version of this issue is available for AQS members at http://www.americanquilter.com/.)

Just after we went to press with this issue, our testers found an error in the cutting diagrams for templates E and H. Please be sure to follow the diagrams above instead of those printed in the magazine.
And if you are using directional focus blocks (with a distinct up and down), please use the figure 9 shown below to complete Star block #2.

I continue to get contest entries from dozens of U.S. states and several countries. Below are the completed blocks made by Yvette Maynard of Stone Mountain, Georgia. The masks are appliquéd from a pattern collection by Sindy Rodemeyer, while the animals are cut from a panel. Yvette had some animal print fabric bought on a whim and she says this contest gave her the opportunity to use it.

Martien Bakker from The Netherlands writes that this is her first-ever mystery quilt. She used fabrics purchased in Norway while on spring holiday along with suitable fabrics pulled from her stash (photo below).

And Janice Matsen of Portland, Oregon, fussy cut and pieced her eyecatching focus blocks.