Off to Paducah!

  

Well, at least my quilt is... I received a very welcome email from AQS that my quilt "Silk Fantasy A La Diane" has been accepted into the American Quilters Society Quiltweek show in Paducah, so it is off to Quilt City next month to be shown in April. Whether I'll go along too is still up for decision, but I've never been to Paducah and it's only two hours by car from Nashville where our son lives, so it's a real temptation.

I'm happy that AQS has forgiven me. Several years ago a quilt of mine was accepted, but I had made the stupid newbie mistake of mistakenly entering a quilt in two shows where the dates overlapped and both accepted it.  It's a cardinal sin in the quilt world to have to turn down a show once accepted and I feared that AQS would blackball me forever. They never answered my groveling "please forgive me but....' email so I feared the worst. I'm happy to hear that apparently bygones are bygones and "Silk Fantasy" has made the grade. It is a simple 9 patch block constructed in dupioni silk and features free motion quilting based on designs taught by the great Diane Gaudynski.

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A Little Time Out...

For the last ten days or so I've taken a little time off from my normal fiber work to make two small crib size charity quilts for the St. Joseph Center Pre School program in Venice, California. Every once in a while I find it amazingly therapeutic to abandon the art quilt aesthetic - the color choices, the complicated techniques required to get my ideas on to fabric, the choices of materials and embellishments, the paints, dyes, fusibles, etc. - in favor of some old fashioned piecing. It clears out the cobwebs, simplifies things and makes me feel like a real "quilter".


A buying spree of some packs of 5" charm squares and layer cakes of fun bright modern cottons at a local quilt show gave me the raw materials and I was off. A quick way to sew and slice 10" squares into half square triangles given to me by a friend resulted in a fairly "Modern" chevron quilt and a package of Moda charm squares with simple sashing became a sweet pastel cuddly thing for a little girl.

 

  
I found some great modern border and backing fabrics on the sale rack at Sew Modern in West LA for 40% off. I love their bright modern prints and I'm not always able to use them in my other work. My one problem was adapting my usual very tight compact decorative quilting with fine silk thread technique into large overall quilting with strong heavy thread that would stand up to pre-K abuse. The great part is that quilting that way finished the thread work on each piece in one day! I also used a great technique from the AQS magazine American Quilter for an attractive, but durable faux piped machine binding.

 

 
They are both done and ready for delivery, leaving me cleansed and ready for some art quilt projects that have been dancing in my head.