UQSM Quilt Show - Utah Quilt and Sewing Marketplace

The annual UQSM show was held from May 2-4, plus on May 1 for some of the classes. As usual, Cousin Kim and I attended on Saturday. As well, I took a class on Tuesday the 2nd and then spent several hours there again going through the marketplace and looking leisurely at quilts.

The teacher of my class is Emily Taylor, who some of you may remember from her fabric designs for Riley Blake Company (Zombie Apocalypse and Zombie Love, Chillingsworth, Chatsworth, Verona, Pirate Mateys, and more). She was also the founder of Pattern Jam, a free online quilt design site, although not affiliated with it any longer. These days she’s a popular collage quilter, instructor and pattern designer. Her website is here. She’s got some beautiful quilts and patterns that I can recommend without reservation! Her process (there are two methods to choose from) is clever, and I wish I had taken a class from her before I made Groovy Guitars.

The class I took was Aviary Collage. This is Emily’s Aviary quilt, which was one of several of her collage quilts on exhibit. It was a fun class and I did learn a lot; Emily is a good teacher. I didn’t make much progress because I didn’t have the fabrics in the colors I wanted (although several fat quarters of batiks may have been purchased at the show. Heck, when they are 12/$20, how can you pass it by? I plan to do mine in shades of aqua, red-violet, purple, green, and possibly orange-gold. But that may change. I want to make it bright because our living room done in neutrals can take a punch of changing color in the wallhangings.
And then I bought another of Emily’s kits, because you know me and cactus quilts, LOL....

And now, would you like to see some of the quilts from the show? Of course you would, what a silly question! I'm going to show the credits/ribbons for each quilt after the quilt itself, unless there is a detail shot. Then I’ll put the credits between the two pictures. (Credits pix removed when I prepared 2019 blog posts for printing into personal blog book). I’ll make an occasional comment, but mostly you can just see them for yourself. The pictures are presented in no particular order, and the pictures should all be clickable to enlarge.

How cute is this???

Louise, this one is for you!

This next one, Ladies of the Sea, was my favorite. All the rigging lines are hand embroidered.

This quilt won first place in the Youth (18 and under) category.

That’ll do it for now - I hope you enjoyed them as much as I did. I’ll do a second post with some more quilts in a day or two.

Tomorrow I’m meeting with Emily Bailey from Quilty Hugs (one of the Hands2Help charities) to hand off some donation quilts. I’ll also be doing a separate blog post about that this week, as well as my first quilt finish of May.

Collage and Cake

Most of the things that I’d made to sell in the Rosebud Country Store at Wheeler Farm where I work have sold, so it’s been time to do some re-stocking.   I still have several children’s upcycled denim-bibbed aprons to make (they all sold), but I wanted to start with something fall-ish, nostalgic and easy.  What I didn’t expect is how much fun they’d be and what instant gratification!  Although my first love is crazy quilting, CQ is definitely not quick!   

On a recent walk one evening, Bruce and I headed over to the Farm instead of our usual 3-mile route through the neighborhood.  There I gathered twigs (for hanging collages) and some assorted grasses (foxtails, cattails).  Bruce ate wild grapes.  :-)    I gathered up my old laces - just the bits and bobs that were either leftovers or in pieces too small to sell.  Some vintage rayon seam binding got a coffee bath to stain it slightly.  After I wrung it out and it dried, I loved the scrunched look and decided to leave it that way.

The next step was to find a good picture of the farmhouse and play with it.  I decided on sepia with a black matte.  I had to print it on paper a couple times to get it right - at first it was too dark, even for my original intentions of making sinister, Halloween-y themes.  I decided instead to keep these rather light-hearted in feel, with a nostalgic, historic look.   There are other plans for the more macabre images I’ve collected, LOL.

So these are the first two I came up with.  The picture were before I added the twine for hanging.  I was rather pleased, although I’m still questioning the foxtails (or whatever they are) in the one above.  I think I’ll leave them out of the others and just use them instead for fall decorations around my house or office.

So, I have a question, which do yo think looks better - the black or the brown lettering?  Or is either OK?   Other sentiments I’ve come up with are “Yesteryear”, “Times Past”,  and the like.   But using the “Wheeler” ties it in to our farm and makes it a travel souvenir for the many visitors we get from all over the world, so I’ll probably do some of each type.

My plan for the weekend (after a visit to Farmer’s Market this morning) is to pick grapes (some of our varieties are ready) and then to make a dozen more of these.  Then I start on some sachets (the pumpkin-scented potpourri is ready) and perhaps a couple macabre altered bottles.  Then some aprons and..... MY BATHROBE!!  Yikes!  It’s been cold in the mornings, and I don’t like wearing Bruce’s ugly man-plaid!
And then another Art Nouveau block to stitch and preparations for the CQI Retreat in 2 1/2 weeks!

Oh, real quick..... here is a picture of a Day of the Dead pillow I made, too.  Had some fabric left over and figured this was a good time and way to use it.

And finally, here is a picture of London eating some of her birthday cake last weekend. Again, I was too busy with family to really take more than a couple pictures, and for some reason I’m the only designated photographer.  Why is that??  Anyway, she appears to have leftover strawberries on her arm, too, LOL.

 
Have a nice weekend and enjoy this glorious autumn weather!