Green Everywhere!

I love green. The month of May is always green here in the Salt Lake Valley, and it’s just about my favorite month (along with October). Here’s a view of our street decked out in green. 

Besides the green outside, we are sewing green scraps in May for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge. More on that a bit later in the post. 

Bruce and I also decided that when we repaint the master bedroom next month (meaning, when we have it and the living room repainted by professionals), we’re having the bedroom done in a light sage green. The light through the bedroom windows is filtered through trees and there is no escaping the green cast it gives the now-cream walls. So, we’ll just embrace it! We are also getting new window coverings along the back of the house (4 windows). That’s the extent of the major house redecorating projects this year. Except the courtyard. I hired a local couple to come in and help me remove the old topsoil, straighten out the stone edgings on the beds, dig out two old shrubs and spread the new topsoil. So, later today I’ll finally get to visit the garden store to buy flowers for my pots and purchase some more perennial and annual flowers to fill the beds. Maybe I’ll finally have some garden pictures next week! 

But let’s set the Time Machine back to last Saturday when Cousin Kim, Ruby and I went to the Sewing and Quilt Expo. This time the Expo was not very large - I think the major quilt show promoters have long since abandoned this market. But it was OK. The quilts displayed were all from the Utah Quilt Guild. There were scores, if not a couple hundred, quilts from huge king-sized quilts down to small wall hangings. Some were sewn for fun, others for challenges, the whole gamut. I snapped photos of my favorites, and here’s a small sampling. 

My favorite was this Bird Houses quilt. It wasn’t until I was uploading the pictures from my phone to my iPad (from which I write my blogposts) that I read the information tag for this quilt and realized it was sewn and quilted by my friend Bernadette Turner from Quilts for Kids! 

I was so enchanted by the pattern, the critters in the windows, and the rainbow scrap nature of this lovely quilt. Now I want to make one! 

This next quilt was truly stunning. It was not a Halloween quilt per se, but definitely an Autumn Forest, moody quilt. The affixed crystals gave it a magnificent, sparkly presence. 

This little collaged orange tree captured my heart.

And talk about color! This next quilt was just a riot of color pattern and, well, its title says it all - FUN!

And of course I had to take a picture of a kitty quilt! See the mice scampering around the border?

And this bookcase quilt reminded me of the one I did many years ago (see HERE). But the maker cleverly embroidered actual book titles on hers, whereas my book titles were from selvages.

So that was it for the quilt expo. The only thing I bought was 3 yards of a pale pink Kona cotton for the upcoming attempt at sewing a Storm at Sea quilt. 

But with my green scraps, I not only attempted but actually completed 15 green crumb blocks, which will finish at 6”. These, like my string blocks, are going to Quilts for Kids for their kit-making. 

Next I sewed up four Weathervane blocks. 

And then I began putting together the next Rainbow Candies quilt from some old RSC blocks. 

I had enough of the fun multi-colored fabric to cut for the backing of both quilts, plus the sashings. However on this second top, I’ll have to add the green solid as the outer border. But that’s just fine with me. Once I get this top sewn up, hopefully over the long Memorial Day weekend, I plan to baste both the rainbow candy quilt tops and the green column quilt I showed partially constructed last week. 

I would have gotten more sewing done this week, but we spent 2 days at the Huntsman Cancer Center while Bruce had a six-hour infusion done on Wednesday and again on Thursday. Next week and the week after we’ll only have to go one day per week for about 3 hours. The infusions help kill the excess white blood cells produced by his CLL (chronic leukemia) plus fortify him with goodies (my technical medical term) that will help give him some more energy. Unfortunately, during the course of the treatments, he is more susceptible to infections, notably Covid and shingles. Yes, shingles - even though he’s had the vaccinations. They don’t really know yet why those two particular diseases are more troublesome, but hopefully forewarned is forearmed. Bruce always masks up whenever he leaves the house and avoids large groups of people. 

Thanks for dropping by! For those who observe, I hope you have a safe and fun Memorial Day weekend. And for those who don’t observe it, I hope you have a safe and fun weekend as well! 

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.

Quilt Show - Part 2

This is the second part of the pictures of the quilt show that I attended last week. Part I is HERE.  I’m going to show more pictures and do minimal writing this time. In most cases, the pictures I snapped of the name placards did not turn out, so there’s no point in posting them. Where they are somewhat readable, I’ve included them.  Enjoy!

Have you heard of the 70,293 Project? In the words of the founder of the project, it’s a worldwide effort to commemorate the lives of the 70,293 lives of the physically and mentally disabled people murdered by the Nazis in 1940-1941. Needleworkers of all types have been invited to participate, and there was a large display of the quilts at the show. Read about the 70,293 project HERE.

An exhibition of mini quilts honoring women included many first ladies, and traditional female icons (Amelia Earhart, Rosie the Riveter, Rosa Parks). I was bummed that Ruth Bader Ginsburg wasn’t there, but decided this one was my favorite:

Who doesn’t love Betty White??

What amazing use of colors for the shadowy effects!!

Detail shot

detail

There were at least a half dozen ABC quilts, which captured my attention given the baby quilt I’m currently working on. This was my favorite.

Exquisite hand and machine embroidery, plus lots of overdying. Amazingly detailed, it focused on the entomological aspects (study of insects).

I’m a sucker for riotous color!

And finally, there was a display section from a local quilt shop, Elaine’s Quilt Block. The teacher focuses every year on Kaffe Fasset fabrics with a Block-of-the-Month-type challenge. You can use other fabrics, of course, but the class was in answer to a call from quilters for ideas in working with Kaffe fabrics.

So every month, a block was given. Students were encouraged to substitute other blocks, but to keep the size the same.  You’ll notice these three quilts all have that diagonal stripe.
Most of them had the Sawtooth Stars.

They could add checkerboards, pinwheels, and other basic blocks as the months went on, or use a substitute block (of the same size). The same sized blocks were encouraged to keep the assembly from becoming a nightmare. And as the challenge went along, everyone got to play with color and create a unique quilt.

I’m going to definitely explore the Kaffe BOM class at that quilt shop in 2019!

And that’s it for this post. I took dozens more pictures, but they’re mostly for my own reference for ideas - colors, subjects, layouts, etc. Also, I did buy some fabric at the vendor area (it’s hard to pass up when FQs are only $2 each!). The main thing I was looking for were some cute embroidery blocks that I could take on the flights to Africa this summer. I’ll share those in another post sometime later.