Wednesday, March 13, 2013

Winners and Cutting: A Brief IHQS Report

The number of entries, vendors, and I believe class attendees was down from last year.  Nonetheless, there were some outstanding quilts.

You can see pictures of the winners here.  Marilyn Badger's Eureka won best bed quilt.  It was a big medallion, it was bright, it had fabulous quilting.  Best wall quilt was America, Let It Shine by Sherry Reynolds.  This quilt has won other awards, and you have probably seen pictures of it.  It seems an odd quilt to be such a winner, in some ways.  It lacks the knock-'em-dead-from-across-the-room impact of many others because there's so much apparently blank white space.  You have to be at least mid-distance or even closer to see the unique qualities: phenomenal quilting, not just dense, but very precisely patterned, lots of metallic thread, superhuman piecing, and last but not least, the thousands of tiny crystals.   Amazing, indeed.


In Debbie Caffrey's Power Cutting class we learned, among other things, her technique for making triangle squares.  Here are mine: there are about 40 of them, 2 1/2 inch square, very accurate and with no dog ears to trim.  I can actually see using this technique again.  I repeated it after I came home, and as promised, it was easier the second time.  I will also start using my smaller cutting board so I can turn it for cutting from the other side.


Debbie presented a huge amount of information.  She's one of those engineer-type quilters, very interested in efficiency, planning, and the mathematics and logic of the process.  I learned plenty I didn't know about some of the tools, especially the Omnigrid triangle tools, and have ordered Judy Martin's point cutter tool.  Ironically, I had one of those once, but put it in a white elephant sale because I never used it.  But now, I think it will help me do a better job on the triangle/parallelogram placement.


1 comment:

McIrish Annie said...

thanks for the link on the quilts. Some of those have made the rounds for sure. The turtle one is really better from the back. The quilting was fabulous.

Have seen let it shine which you are right needs to be viewed up close.

I'm glad there are quilters out there that will figure out all of the "engineering" and math of quilting. I am not one of those at all!