DQN Quilt Show 2013 Behind The Scenes

April 26, 20136 Comments

Today I will be heading out to my traditional guild’s quilt show to check out all of the gorgeous quilts. Be sure to check back later this weekend when I post pictures of some of the ribbon winners, including a couple of mine. 🙂

For now I thought it would be fun to show a little behind the scenes, since I was involved in the setup. It’s a lot of work to put on a show!

Monday was check in day for the 200+ quilts, wallhangings, wearables, dolls and more that will be seen this weekend. Our guild is an “educational organization” which promotes the art of quilting and therefore run by all volunteers. These ladies work tirelessly to put on a good event!

Tuesday was photography and most of the quilt judging. Each quilt was loaded onto a quilt rack or pinned to the wall before being judged.

An NQA certified judge, Edie Richmond Dyke, carefully evaluated each and every quilt.

The volunteer quilt handlers would take a stack of quits per category, lay them out onto a table so the judge could go over them in detail. Those of us in the room were not to breathe a word or let her know in anyway if she happened to be looking at our quilts, or those of anyone we knew.

It was such a wonderful experience to listen to her thoughtful comments on how to improve and even more exciting when she liked one of my quilts! Volunteer scribes would right down her comments on an evaluation form for the owner to read later.

Wednesday and Thursday were set up and quilt hanging. Most of the large quilts were hung on pvc pipe frames that were assembled mostly by volunteer husbands and sons.

My son Ryan was earning some community service ours for a scouting merit badge so they were happy to have some extra help!

Probably the thing I liked best about helping out was being able to see many of the quilts up close and personal. This weekend I will take my time, look at all of the quilts in detail, read the artists’ statements and bask in the fun of it all!

If you are in the Las Vegas area this weekend, see the flyer below for complete quilt show details:

Las Vegas Quilt Show This Weekend!

April 23, 201311 Comments

If you are in the Las Vegas area this weekend, please come check out the Desert Quilters of Nevada‘s annual quilt show at the Henderson Convention Center. See the flyer below for complete details:

I am very excited for this show. My guild just celebrated their 26th anniversary and they’ve been putting on a quilt show for nearly as long.

I’ve entered my 5 quilts below as part of the show. Quilting really is such good therapy for me so I’m excited to be a part of this, especially this week!

Detail of my Hugs ‘n Kisses quilt. It’s finished, but in my haste to get it delivered by the check-in deadline, I forgot to snap a completed picture. I’ll take one later this week at the show. (Read more about the quilting during tomorrow’s quilt along lesson). This one is going to my daughter after the show and she’s very excited about that.

French Roses for Katelyn is going to my sister for her brand new little baby girl that she just adopted in February. Now she has 3 kids like me, so when we go to Utah for a visit next month, it will be quite the noisy (but fun) house!

My Charming Chevrons Quilt will be included in my guild’s first-ever modern quilt category. I can’t wait to see the other entries in this category!

Baby Bricks in Pink was one of my early a quilt alongs and is still a favorite of mine.

I like the low volume look of Baby Bricks in Blue. It’s fun to see how a pattern can look so completely different depending on the fabrics.

Whenever I enter anything in a show I never set any expectations of winning. It’s just fun for me to hear what the judges have to say, and learn from them on how to improve my techniques. Plus it’s pretty awesome to stand back and watch the reactions of others as they view my quilts in person. 🙂

Sew and Tell Baby French Roses #6 – Quilting

April 19, 2013April 17, 201332 Comments

I am really pleased with how my Baby French Roses quilt is turning out. All I have left to finish is the binding. If I can knock that out this week, I can enter into my guild’s annual quilt show next week. 🙂

It took me awhile to figure out how I wanted to quilt it. You can read about some of my previous FMQ auditions here.

I knew I wanted to quilt small pebbles surrounding the roses, and larger circles in the sashing, so that’s where I began. I quilted a concentric circle around each flower to give it more texture while allowing the raw edges to show. You can see the difference that the quilting in the yellow rose makes compared to the un-quilted pink one. It really defines it!

It was a big stretch for me to quilt all of those circles free-hand with no marking or measuring. I eyeballed it the whole way. In fact, none of the quilting was marked, it was all free-form, a very big step for me!

I had a hard time coming up with an idea for the frames around the flowers until I settled on simple straight lines. I used the edge of my walking foot as a guide and quilted two straight rows around each block. One quilted, the frames had sort of a wood-grain texture, reminding me of planter boxes that the roses could grow in.

I then repeated the straight line quilting in the inner borders to unify the design.

Finally I added a sort of floral motif for the borders that roughly matched the quilting in the petals. I used Glide thread in the top and bobbin for most of the quilting and switched out thread colors to match the fabrics.

It took me pages and pages of practice drawing with pen and paper until I got the feel for how to form wobbly concentric rose petals continuously.

I’ve been keeping track of how long it takes me to machine quilt to get an idea of the complexity. It took me 13.5 hours to quilt this over a 3 day time-span.

After it’s trimmed and bound I’ll wash the quilt few times (with color catcher sheets) to fray up the edges, and then she’s good to go!

French Roses kits are available in my store for a limited time. You can see my progress and read my previous post here.

Utah Quilt Fest

September 24, 2012March 19, 20133 Comments

While my friend Stacy and I attended our weekend quilting retreat in Mesquite, Nevada, the timing coincided with the Utah Quilt Guild Show, so of course we had to check it out! Here are just a few of the fabulous quilts we were drooling over: