American Heritage Quilt Show

What a wonderful Saturday! I began the day at Wheeling Quilt & Embroidery, my local shop and support group. This was the day of the Big Sale so of course I had to help the cause! I was good and didn't do a whole lot of damage to my cause, though. All books were half off, so got "Passionate Journey" by Kaffe Fassett, which I'd been drooling over for a long while. And I found a "Quilting Arts" Summer 2003 that had an article by Melody, my mentor and muse, about making tiny art quilts. I also picked up some black fabric so that I can try my hand at fused woodblock prints, and finally, my first purchase of beautiful threads, because that's what I need to learn next--machine quilting.

After elbowing my way around Leslie's store, I left the other quilt shoppers for the Wheeling Artisan Center. There I heard a wonderful lecture, complete with slides and quilt examples, on "Color for Quilters" by Susan McKelvey. She was great to listen to, a former English teacher so she was articulate and organized. It's not that I learned so very much from her, but that so much of what I knew instinctively about color was validated and was able to apply color theory to quilts. Warm colors emerge; cool colors receed. Susan had lots of wonderful quilt tops, some her own, some antique, some lovely, some ugly, but each was a good lesson for us. And she had us immediately commenting on the colors in each example, which was very, very helpful.

Before leaving home that morning I had been auditioning borders for my "Golgotha" fused piece which is wild and frantic with color. Nothing looked right. After Susan's talk, I returned to my "studio" and knew what to do. Yellow is the strongest color, I remember her saying. There was already a lot of yellow and reds in my chaotic piece, so I tried a yellow border and Yes! that was just what was needed. The strong yellow border held its own next to the riotous "Golgotha."

So applying that lecture immediately to my own work was priceless. I'm anxious to get to work on "Golgotha" again--appropriate as Lent begins this week.

But the best news from the quilt show was that I received two, that's two! ribbons! Yahoo! I earned a blue ribbon for "My First Quilt" and a red ribbon for my "Window#3: Window of the Heart" my first fused quilt! (The blue ribbon went to Penny Klug who will be my instructor next week in a machine quilting class, so that's cool.) These were great accolades to me as a novice, and especially a novice fuser in the land of tiny floral prints. Let the fusers roll!