Quilty Pleasures Monday: Depression Era Blocks, Paper Pieced

Back during The Great Depression, readers could find patterns for clothing or quilt blocks in their local newspapers. The Kansas City Star was one of those newspapers, and they didn't even charge for their complete patterns. Caroline Cullinan McCormick decided to write a book about some of these blocks from the newspaper and adapted many of the designs for paper piecing.

ThreadBear, my local quilt store, decided to offer a Block of the Month program based on this book. So we have bought the book and just finished our first block.

What I like about ThreadBear's BOM is we may choose whatever fabrics we want. I decided to go with a black pindot background and for this month I chose Denyse Schmidt's fabrics from her Shelburne Falls collection.

This fabric looks so pretty and fresh and this block came together nicely.

How do we get such precise results? For my friends who are not quilters, it's called paper piecing, kind of like painting by the numbers. Here is how it looks on the back. Each number shows the order in which the fabric is placed on the paper pattern. Et, voila! It looks perfectly perfect! Just what this ADHD person needs to keep her head on straight.

No, ThreadBear didn't pay me to write about their BOM. I just like their store.

Now I am on my way to meet up with our Modern Quilt Group. We are going to muddle through my presentation on sewing giant hexies by machine, the class I took from Jacquie Gering at QuiltCon.

Quilty Pleasures-Quiltcon Part 2: Best in Show in Detail

The previous post had a pic of Victoria Findlay Wolfe's Best in Show Quilt, "Double Edged Love," but here it is again as a reference point.

I like how design and color play around with the Wedding Ring Quilt design. Sometimes the rings disappear and sometimes they are strongly linked. Sometimes there is darkness and other times the colors are bright and happy. Whether the artist was going for these ideas or not, that's what this viewer felt while I was looking at it.

Lisa Sipes was the long arm quilter and I would have been cross-eyed after working on this quilt! Her intricate attention to detail is amazing.

Straight line quilting, teensy pebbles and grids are the predominant designs Lisa used. The hand quilting adds even more interest. My handler would have said, "Step away from the quilt."

Distance between the squares might be around a quarter to a half inch or so. Look at that triple line of stitching. I would have been screaming insanely right around now if I were sewing.

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I've been following Victoria's blog, Bumble Beans, for several years now and admire her commitment to the idea that it's okay to play around while designing quilts.

I have just discovered Lisa Sipes and her blog That Crazy Quilty Girl. Her most recent post discusses the controversy surrounding the idea of modern quilting and how should we conduct ourselves when we see a piece we don't like. In addition, she shows some of the quilts she has made herself or has quilted for others. Her work is amazing and she's just a kid!

Quilty Pleasures: Quiltcon 2013

I just had a fun weekend in Austin, Texas at Quiltcon, sponsored by The Modern Quilt Guild.

The quilts on display were elegant, funny, thought-provoking and full of ingenuity and my class with Jacquie Gering was great because I learned a new technique I can bring home to share with others.

Today, though, I just wanted to share one quilt with you, the Best in Show quilt which I really need to wrap my head around a bit because the artist, Victoria Findlay Wolfe, did something really weird and interesting while making it.

 
In her blog post, she says she made an entire quilt top and then cut it up to make the pieces she needed.

I will show you some closeups of the quilting in this quilt in another post. The quilting is intricate, varied, and really drop dead amazing. The quilter was Lisa Sipes and I need to learn more about her.

Bye for now!