See Me and My Trunk Show in Person!

Tooting my own horn

The Vancouver Modern Quilt Guild was contacted by TAGOR, Textile Arts Guild of Richmond, to see if anyone could give a talk about this "Modern Quilting" movement that's been going around.  I eagerly agreed and here's the updated announcement:

If anyone is in the lower mainland (for you non-BC residents, that means if you're in the Vancouver area.) feel free to come.  Well I guess not free, but do come.

While, I'm on a tangent, you know how Washington state talks about the Pacific Northwest? Does that make this part of Canada the Pacific Southwest?  Does it feel a bit like the US doesn't know anything exists above their border?  Any-how, lower mainland is pretty much all the communities along the mouth of the Fraser River up to Abbotsford, I guess.  That would be Vancouver, North Van, West Van, Burnaby, Port Moody, Coquitlam, PoCo, New Westminster, Maple Ridge, Mission, Richmond, Delta, Surrey, Langley, Abbotsford and White Rock. When I looked it up, I see Chilliwack isn't included and that's my hometown!  and if you go much further, you're beyond Hope.  Oops, Google says it includes Chilliwack and Hope too and actually contains 59% of BCs population!  You are all welcome to come.

I've started collecting quilts I made for others back for the talk, and of course will show lots of unfinished quilts, as that's pretty much my thing.  You know, make the quilt top, then put it away.  I was thinking of trying to get a couple more finished for the show, but, why?  I don't want to pressure myself when there's so much else happening and of course so many more quilt tops to start on too!

Do come as I'll be talking about some of the traits of modern quilts and how they are really variations of what we all do as traditional quilters.  If you are a traditional quilter, you may see a quilt of mine that you'd like to try for yourself.  The fun of alot of modern quilts is you don't need a pattern.  Just sketch out a sort of layout or plan, and then go for it.

There's going to be a lot of this if I don't get some "holders":

Check out the Vancouver Modern Quilt Guild on Flickr for pictures of our members quilts

And there's a great group to help and encourage you - the Vancouver Modern Quilt Guild and the Fraser Valley Modern Quilt Guild.

Trunk Show Part 5 - Small Quilts

Here's some odds and ends - small quilts that were tests of techniques or trial runs.

Face Quilts

I made a couple face quilts.  I had seen some like this on the internet and loved the simplicity and the big bold slabs of colour.

 I pieced in the lettering and love the "pokerface" expression.

This blue guy was without a back for a long time.  I made the back when we had a challenge to make a quilt that represents you - so I did my current hairstyle.

30's reproduction boxes

I love Kona solids.   Here I paired them up with 30's reproductions to make really simple blocks.  I like how the drop shadows give a great dimension to these ordinary blocks.  I made about 50 of these blocks, some with the solid on the outside, some with the solid on the inside.

 

Here's one for Katherine and a pillow for her sister Mollie.  They were next door neighbours.

And here one for Marissa, my Cousin's little girl

Notice I was still using tone on tone backgrounds here.  I hadn't fully embraced solids yet.

These are mini versions of a design by Weeks Ringle and Bill Kerr

I tried it in orange on white, all blues and this one, blue on yellow.  When the next niece or nephew comes along, I'll put a back on it and give it away.  The blues are all Kaffe Fassett prints and so are all but one of the orange fabrics.

 

I was working with my colour wheel trying out complementary, analogous and triads for the bars between the orange fabrics.  It turns out there are no rules - everything works.   I had fun with the backs, using up the rest of the Kaffe Fassett prints.

 Japanese Quilt

This is a little test I made with some Japanese prints.  My friend Hisayo told me I shouldn't have mixed the seasons - there are plum and cherry blossoms, which are fine, but I shouldn't have included the chrysanthemums.  They are from a different season.  I'm finding out that the mustard-gold colour goes great with everything.  The colour is Curry from the Kona solids line.  Terry Ashe from the VMQG has used it in several quilts she has shown at the guild meetings, I have to thank her for introducing me to it.

Beach Ball Quilt

 I decided I was going to master insetting circles, so I made some circles and tried several tutorials and found out you just have to cut accurately and sew an accurate 1/4 inch seem and it works fine.  Most wrinkles can get ironed out and quilted out.

I put together wedges, then cut them into an off centered circle.  Then cut a hole in the background fabric exactly 1in. in diameter less than the circle.  When you sew it together with a 1/4 in. seam it will fit.  Since the circles looked like beach balls, I made the back like a towel we had that we used at the beach.  The "wrinkles" are on purpose.  If there's ever a niece or nephew needing a quilt, I'll finish this one.

Music of the Planets quilt

This little quilt is inspired by one of Dan of the Bay Area Modern Quilt Guild. A friend of mine found recordings made by the Voyager Space Craft as it passed by the planets.  It's not just static, there's chords, sustained tones, pops, booms, cool rhythms and unexpected changes.  I quilted vibrating lines between the planet's paths on this quilt.  One day I'll figure out what colour to bind it in and will get it finished.  One day...

The blue planets are made of squares from my box of left-overs from other quilts.  The big circle was too big for the front, so I put half on front and half on the back.  I inset the blue circles into the orange circles, then inset those into the background.  I still haven't decided how to quilt the blue areas. 

Trunk Show Part 4 - First Steps into Modern

Wonky Squares Quilts

I'm in a community band.  When I mentioned that I quilt, three of my band mates said they always wanted to make a quilt, so, we started a little quilt group and met at my place when ever we could and each made two quilts.  We started with a Wonky Square quilt and each made blocks in our own colour palate, and level of wonkiness.

Here's mine

I was thinking about avocado and harvest gold appliances when I chose the fabrics.  Each block started with a slightly skew rectangle and was then built out in rings with different widths of the same colour.  At the end I squared up the blocks with white and used my 12.5 inch square ruler to cut it to size.  When I laid it out, the blocks were too close together, so I added in a 2 inch sashing of the background colour and got a nice overall wonky feel.  I quilted it in small overlapping rectangles on my oldest sewing machine - the one mom and dad got just after they were married.

Kenzie's quilt was all yellow-orange and purple-blue.

Her blocks ended up more square and she "engaged the edge" by cutting some blocks in half and putting them around the quilt as if her quilt is just a small part of a larger pattern.  She used batics as well as prints.  She didn't use any sashing, and with these blocks, you really didn't need to get the intersections to match up, since it's all white around each block.  This is a really good beginner quilt since there's really no corners and seems to match up.

Lawanda's quilt is jagged blue, green and brown.

These blocks were trickier to square up since there's big areas of white triangles around most of the blocks.

Hisayo's quilt is pink and light green

Half of her centres are black and half are maroon and two are green.  It took her forever to figure out how to lay it out such that she was happy with it.  Some people just can't embrace wonkiness! 

Here's all of the quilts together

Before we quilted them, we made a kids sized disappearing 9 patch quilt and practiced our quilting skills on them, then went back to the big ones.

Lawanda and I gave our quilts away to friends with babies.  Kenzie kept hers for her own baby boy who was born soon after the quilt was made.  We all used the same red sailors and yellow puppies and light blue boats fabrics.  I did 3 stacked coins strips across the back of mine and appliqued a P for Preston.

Trunk Show Part 3 - Still Pre-Modern

Here's some more traditional quilts that I made in the late 80s early 90s.

Irish Chains

The big green one on the back is a triple Irish chain that my mother and aunt hand quilted on a big frame in Chilliwack.  My aunt and oma have made thick satin quilts for all the girls for their weddings which were filled with a thick batting of carded wool.  The quilting in that kind of quilt is quite wide spread and contains hearts and diamonds in the borders.  Mom and Dad have one that got them through the Saskatchewan winters when they first married.  I had mom and aunty Martha just follow the dark green squares and do diagonal lines across the quilt.  This one got stolen from a house I was renting.  The police figured they wrapped all the stuff they took in it so it looked like they were just heading down the street to the laundry-mat or something.

The blue single Irish chain was for a good friend Michael who shared the house I was living in.  I think his mother has it now.  Single Irish chain quilts are easy to do.  Just make a bunch of 9 patches that look like the 5 face of a dice, then alternate them with solid squares the same size as the whole 9 patch. 

Stack and Whack

I always wanted to do a stack and whack, but I really hated this one once I got this far.  So I gave it to a friend, Vince, who said he loved it and would finish it.  I think the feature fabric wasn't the best for this technique.  I think I got it because the repeat was very close so I wouldn't have to buy a lot to get 8 repeats for the pinwheels.  And I don't like the yellows or the green.  Makes me wonder why I even started it.

Trunk Show Part 2 - More Traditional Quilts

Here's more of my trunk show.  I'm still in my traditional phase here in the mid 90s.

 In 1993 I quilt my job at the Royal Bank and cut up my dress shirts to make this quilt top. The yellow zig zag isn't working for me, so I'll take that off when I finish it - if I ever do.

All of 94 I traveled through Africa from Cairo to Capetown using local transportation. This quilt is my diary of the trip.

In each town I visited, I would go to the tailor shops and ask for scraps of fabric. Once I had a few blocks done, I could just show them what I wanted the fabric for. Most of the fabric I got for free. I embroidered the name of the country, the town, and the name of the fabric, or the type of outfit that would be made from the fabric.

I have enough blocks made for two more quilts.

Trunk Show Part 1 - Gramma Walker's Quilts

I tried to photograph all the quilts I have hanging around so I have a record of them.  I'm going to try to post them in sort-of chronological order.

But first I got to start with the quilts that inspired me to start quilting.

I think this is the oldest one I have from my Gramma Walker in West Virginia.  A nice red and white one that has a sort of Jacob's Ladder block set on point.

 This next one, I was told, was made from my mom and her older sister's dresses.  One wore red and the other wore blue.  I'm going to have to confirm it with Aunty Wanda.  These would have been made in the late 40s early 50s.

This yellow one is a quilt from the "missionary cupboard".  The church ladies in Hanna Alberta made these Bible verse quilts for the missionaries.  We must have had 3 or 4 of these growing up, but this seems to be the only one that survived - probably because we kept it here in Canada and didn't take it out to India.  This one has the verses drawn on with liquid embroidery tubes.  Can you find the misspelled block?

 

This is one of the older quilts I made while I was still making traditional quilts.  It's a very traditional log cabin quilt laid out in the straight furrows style.

 

And this last one is a nice scrappy block with several shades of light and dark grey.  I think the block is called the road home.  This one and the log cabin one are single bed size.