Vermont Quilt Festival (part three)

One of my favorite parts of going to VQF, other than seeing the magnificent quilts that are hung with care in the show, is visiting all the vendors and making some careful purchases of fabric, thread, patterns, embellishments, jewelry....the temptations are huge! And seriously, when the vendors bring their best and newest goods with them, it's a joy to see what they've got.

One of my favorite vendors is Usha at Handloom Batik. She has family in India who hand block print and batik most of the fabric that she sells. She had these two cool patterns "Quilting Bee" and "Laundry Day" by Bunny Leighton, made up in a rainbow of ethnic fabrics. Here's a close-up of the Quilting Bee pattern.

I just had to buy the patterns, as well as some of Usha's Indian cottons to use in this or some other project. (Gingy was snoozing on the ironing board and didn't mind modeling all of the fabrics and goodies.)

Here are some batiks that i got with the Quilting Bee project in mind from Batiks Etcetera, all the way from North Dakota....well, the vendor came from North Dakota, the fabric came from Indonesia!

Some yummy sparkly fabrics that i got from the guys at Woodstock Quilt Supply.

This is a lovely calligraphy and quilt design transferred to fabric by my friend Kathi Giberman of Nova Scotia. She has a great selection of lovely sayings like this set in quilt blocks, as well as many Celtic designs, Nova Scotia scenery, animals, and geometric designs. Her calligraphy and ink work are quite outstanding. I think last year was the first time she brought her designs transferred to fabric...i had to buy several with the idea of making up little wall hangings for some special friends.

Speaking of special friends, my friend Betsy and i always give each other some cat/quilt/book related gifts...in addition to being a very talented quilter in her own right, Betsy is also a cat mom, a professional librarian, and an author. We met years ago at a B&B in Northfield, Vermont, when the Vermont Quilt Festival was still held there and now every year we look forward to sharing a suite at VQF. Here's some really cute ceramic "buttons" that can also be used as stamps.

Unique handprinted cat designs on hand dyed fabric from Marit Lee Kucera of Artspoken Yardage.

Really cute ceramic cat buttons.

A cute pincushion from her local quilt show...picked out especially for me because of the cat fabrics on it.

Last but not least, a kitty cookie cutter Betsy picked up at the King Arthur Flour store on her way up to the quilt festival.

Vermont Quilt Festival (part two)

On Saturday, June 18, i took the "Wee Willow" class with Jane Sassaman. "Wee Willow" is one of four small seasonal quilts that Jane designed. "Wee Willow" is the summer quilt, and it's a much much smaller version of Jane's famous "Willow" quilt, which was named one of the Best 100 Quilts of the 20th Century (she made it in 1996 for her daughter, who was 12 at the time).

Jane Sassaman is well known for her use of forms derived from nature...lots of curves and squiggles, lots of flowers, leaves, thorns, etc...in her own inimitable graphic style. Her technique involves cutting the basic design out of a piece of fabric that has been backed with lightweight nonwoven fusible interfacing and then layering on other pieces that are backed with a fusible (except for the pieces that overlap a dark/light intersection where you don't want the color to show through, and those pieces are backed with the nonwoven fusible interfacing as well). The advantage of having the whole quilt backed with nonwoven interfacing is that she heavily machine embroiders her quilt tops and the interfacing stabilizes it without having to use tearaway stabilizer.

Here's all i accomplished in a 6-hour class...it's the foundation on which the rest of the quilt will be assembled (this is a small piece, about 18" square. (The white piece is also backed with nonwoven fusible interfacing and is set in behind the black, which is all one piece.) Here's the pattern envelope, and some of my many little pieces of flowers, all traced, fused, and ready to go. There's a lot of work left after they get fused to the background: Jane edges each piece with a straight stitch, with a medium zig zag stitch, and then many get some sort of fancy edge stitch. The quilting should be fun...she uses a thick (12-weight) topstitching thread with fairly long stitches, so it almost looks like hand quilting.

Jane brought a whole pile of her quilts to class which were great fun to look through. This is the class sample for her other class at the Vermont Quilt Festival that i didn't get into, called The Personality of a Leaf. Students made a sampler with multiples of pretty much the same leaf and stem, but they're all embellished with different stitches, which changes their appearance a lot. Here's a close up. What fun! I think the cute moth is from one of her fabrics.

And here's a huge moth quilt...the quilt is big (maybe 50 inches square) and moths are big, too! I read somewhere that she made this quilt when she and her family moved from the city to the country and exchanged the wild city life for the wildlife and clear night skies of the country.