Thursday, April 10, 2008

Lovely Quilts

I went to a quilt show with my aunt on Monday night and thought I would share some of my favorites. I walk around these things in kind of a haze with a silly grin on my face taking lots of close up pictures of quilts that I either find stunning or inspire me for future quilty projects. As posting pictures on Blogger can be sort of a pain in the rump, I am only posting a handful of my favorites. You can click to make them bigger. The picture quality is clearly not my best ever, but the lighting was lacking and carrying a tripod around to make the camera steady enough really is not so convenient. Also, if you have ever been to a quilt show, you know how pushy those quilt ladies can get, and if you haven't then believe me, you take your picture and get the heck out of the way!
This entire quilt was done with fabric selvages (the edge pieces that you usually cut off and often contain the name of the fabric manufacturer, fabric line and designer). They are all about 1" wide strips. Crazy!
For Mandy. She based the design off a picture she had taken. Lots of layers of fabric on top of each other to get the shading on the trunk. For the leaves she used actual leaves as templates and traced them onto fabric.

I love old quilts. This quilt is a new one made from some old parts. The mother of the lady who made it found a stack of Dresden plates unfinished at a flea market for $.75. They ripped them apart and made them into fans. Added some more pieces and added the black background blocks. She added the appliqued vines and her mother embroidered in the solid black blocks. I love the wavy border and think the black just really makes the whole thing. I have a few Dresden plates that I might attempt a smaller version of something like this with.

The flash really washed this out, but I loved the fabrics in this also. There were repeated fabrics, but it had very "eye spy" quality to it. I have not been brave enough to do anything with these angles yet, but this inspired me.
The quilt on the rack is approx. 100 years old. The quilt hanging is a reproduction of the same quilt. Amazing hand quilting and wonderful job recreating the original quilt.

3 comments:

Maren said...

Thanks! Holy quilting on the tree one, eh? I like the selvege one too...but then I think of all the selveges I have thrown away and am sad...

Pieces said...

I love that selvedge one. I've toyed with hanging on to selvedges and then I think--will I ever actually do anything with these? And I throw them away. I still have twinges of regret.

The Chicken Lady said...

Wow. That selvedge quilt is AWESOME~ what a great idea. We saw a quilt made of purple felt Seagram's bags at the Sister's quilt show one year. I swear, some people have such a great imagination! :)