Guild Meeting – Christa Quilts

I currently am involved with two quilt guilds in my city – The Las Vegas Modern Quilt Guild and Desert Quilters of Nevada. Both satisfy different parts of my quilting personality and I love to be involved with both.

Finishing Stitchers Circle, DQN Guild Mtg.

I recently attended a sewing circle of DQN – a smaller subset of the larger group that meets monthly. This “circle” is called Finishing Stitchers and they focus on, what else – finishing your quilts! It’s a fun group and is divided up about 50/50 between domestic quilters like myself and those who quilt using a long arm machine. (At first I tried to call them longarmers but that just didn’t come across well in print, LOL!)

FMQ Demo – Practice Sketching

I presented a little demo on how I practice my free motion quilting, drawing my designs first on paper then quilting lots of practice samples before I finish my quilt. It was basically a recap of my recent FMQ tutorial that I shared on my blog.

Binding Demo by Linda

We introduced new members, had a wonderful binding demonstration, and had a bit of show and tell.

A recent finish from a Laura Wasilowski Fusing Workshop.

It is fun to see how artistic and modern some of the gals are starting to become.

A new member and her modern-inspired quilt.

In fact, one of our members who helped found the guild more than 25 years ago is thinking of starting up a modern circle as part of the guild. I would join that in a heartbeat. 🙂

Ann’s gorgeous piece.

It just goes to show that if there are good ideas out there, quilters will embrace them, no matter what names you attach to them. 🙂

I haven’t done a “soap box” post in awhile but I was at a (traditional) quilt guild meeting yesterday which sparked a bit of discussion about modern quilting. One of the members brought in an antique machine quilted quilt that I just fell in love with.

Antique Quilt – Look at all that negative space!

She purchased it a long long time ago and said it was made and quilted by machine in the 30’s. Can you believe it? Just like we like to shun the quilt police nowadays, back then, this quiltmaker did her own thing and broke convention by finishing it on her machine.

Antique Top with “Modern” Quilting

The most interesting thing to me about this quilt is that it had some quilt designs that we would now define as modern. Look closely and you can see some loops and a few swirls.

The quilter probably did not have a lot of space to work with and even though it’s a little hard to tell from the photos, she quilted it in rows. There is a gap in between each row of quilting which I think adds to the charm.

Loops and Swirls Quilting

Another of our members said she just didn’t quite understand modern quilting and I told her, just like this antique quilt, much of modern quilting is rooted in tradition. The best definition I’ve heard was from Heather Grant when she spoke at QuiltCon earlier this year. She said, “Modern Quilts are to Art Quilts like Graphic Art is to Fine Art.” Very evocative and descriptive!

Traditional Quilt Guild Meeting – Look at that quilt on the wall, it’s “almost” modern!

I recently read a comment on one of the blogs I follow where a commenter was complaining that Modern Quilters act like all of this stuff is brand new. (No we don’t!) The blogger’s reply was, “what is old to some is new to us!” Well said! 🙂