Unbelievable! It's been nearly a year and a half since I posted to this blog. There are numerous drafts waiting in line to be completed, but somehow it hasn't happened. To get the ball rolling, I'll share with you some beautiful quilts made by a new friend. Talking with her this week and seeing her quilts has been such an inspiration! So rather than hitting the rewind button, let's start with Linda and her beautiful quilts.
Linda lives in Pinehurst, NC. She's been making quilts since the 1990's and has a Gammill longarm ensconced in one of her two bedrooms. She has shown her quilts at several prestigious juried shows (Paducah, Houston) and has won many prizes. She had a quilting business for some years, but is now closing that down to spend more time travelling in her beloved RV and making art quilts.
She recently finished this blue beauty. Believe it or not, it's a Block of the Month. There are enough flying geese to make my heart stop! The entire quilt is custom-quilted, even the borders. So much texture!
The half-rings of flying geese were paper-pieced, but Linda said it was still difficult to make everything work out exactly right. She's making the same quilt for someone else, but she's going to use a single strip of fabric in place of the pieced rings. Also note how she's used dense quilting to make the flowers and star blocks really pop.
Another traditionally-patterned quilt she made using stencilled fabric (unfortunately, I couldn't get a picture of the whole quilt). Of course, like most of us, she had to make it her way! The blocks between the square-in-square blocks bordering the panels were all the same (booorrring!) so she used all different blocks instead. She embroidered the panels but her quilting really brings each one to life. Do you see all the different snowflake designs in the squares?
... and the furrowed fields, snow-filled clouds and frozen creek?
The quilt reminded her of Robert Frost's poem, "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," so she decided to add the first lines to the border. She searched the web for just the right font, used it to print the words on fabric, and appliqued them to the border.
She had the quilt in a local quilt show, and a man named Robert Frost contacted her and asked if he could buy the quilt. She didn't know if he just liked the quilt, or if he was a relative of the poet, checking to make sure she didn't violate the poem's copyright by selling it. She said No, but she'd wanted to keep it for herself anyway.
Now for her art quilts! Maybe this one doesn't exactly count as an art quilt, but it's definitely fiber art. The quilt is not very big, so you have to look closely to appreciate the handwork.
The bird is thread-painted, copying a photo. She said it was much easier than she'd expected (!).
Some leaves were made with crochet (must have been a 0000 crochet hook!), beading and thread-painting with heavy thread. The blue centers of the coneflowers are made of dozens of French knots. And there is a lot of hand embroidery.
This beautiful quilt is the view out the kitchen window in her previous home. The squirrel sign was giving her trouble (she said), so she went outside and took a photo of it, then printed it on fabric and appliqued it onto the quilt. Ingenious.
Finally, you know how much I love a pretty quilt back! To combine her loves, Linda made a quilt for her RV. It's a panel, pretty but not terribly original. But check out this quilting! You don't really notice it from the front, but she found the perfect pantograph!
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