Quilt Show 2013

This past April my local quilt guild held their quilt show, which they hold every other year.  It is not a juried show, so if you want to submit a quilt, you can.  There were prizes for the "best" of each category as judged by those attending the show.

I imagine most of the women take their time over the two years between shows to create their masterpieces.

I submitted my form saying that I was going to make three quilts in February.  I hadn't made any of these proposed quilts yet.

I didn't think this was a problem until I told people and they all looked at me with their mouths open.  This should have been a good indication to me that I had a few frazzled months ahead of me!

The first quilt I made was "Herd of Turtles in a Mudstorm"which is my Dad's favourite saying.  I had designed the quilt myself because I wanted to make a patchwork block that looked like a turtle, and I found this variation on the traditional quilt block "Drunkard's Path", but couldn't find a pattern for it.  I designed the quilt after only ever having made one other quilt in a beginner class.  I bought the fabric bac when I was living in Victoria and started cutting out the pieces and sewing them together when I worked as a nanny for my cousin's son.  So i really just had half of the turtles left to make when I got back to it five years later!

I had planned on getting it quilted professionally, but then the girl who was going to quilt it ended up having knee surgery.  So with two weeks left before the show, I basted and quilted it at work one weekend because I don't have enough floor space at my apartment.  It was only the second thing I had ever quilted.

This is the best picture I could get, but you get the idea.  Its twin bed sized, and just perfect for my Dad's nap blanket.  He loves it, even if it is six years late!

The second quilt I made was one that I had been wanting to try for awhile, Anna Maria Horner's pattern, Feather Bed Quilt.  I am glad I kept to the baby quilt size to try it out, because it was pretty fiddly, but I still want to make it in a bed quilt size some day.  I still have a few feather pieces to give me a head start on the next quilt.  It was a good thing I had extras, because those two half feathers were not in the pattern, but it just looked weird and lopsided without them.  I used all my pretty fabrics that had birds on them, so called it "Birds of a Feather".

The background fabric is a really bright blue, that apparently doesn't photograph very well, but really makes the feathers pop.  At the show, it was hung right under a spot light, so all you could really see of the quilt were the quilting lines.  Oh well!  This is now finally winging its way across the country to a sweet wee girl, and will hopefully get there before her first birthday!  I am so late with these things!

The final quilt I made for the show was a little wall hanging made using Elizabeth Hartman's Barn Bats Block Tutorial.  I thought it made such a cute Halloween decoration that wasn't too country kitchen looking like most seasonal wall hangings, and I even remembered to hang it this year!  I got to use up lots of little pieces of black, orange and yellow fabrics left over from other projects, but I did order one little piece of fabric, a test swatch, with the Batman symbol on it from Spoonflower.  It was just big enough to cut my pieces from.  I called the quilt "Black Night".

It was a lot of fun to be a part of the show, and I got a lot of complements on my quilts, especially my turtle quilt, some of the ladies still talk about it.  It was also nice to be able to help out with the show as a volunteer, it was a great way to get to know some of the ladies in the guild better.