Quilt Show Winners

I feel bad.... OK not that bad but still i should have totally posted this info for you all months ago! As you already know my quilt guild The Crossroads Quilters Guild of Effingham IL., held their annual quilt show back in September (like i said MONTHS ago!) I did send a list of the show winners to the local newspaper but i have been told by many that the list never appeared and if it did no one has ever seen it.  So here it is, the list of all the winners as well as photos of each of the winning quilts!

The winning quilts are listed by the name of the person who entered the quilt into the show. Also listed is the name of the person that quilted the quilt. If no quilter is named it is assumed that the same person who made the quilt also did the quilting.

Miniature Quilt Category

1st  - 110 Diamonds In The Rough - Elizabeth Karnes

2nd - 103 Nine patch Flowers - Carol Bidrawn

3rd - 109 Wee Garden - Joy Voltenburg

Baby/Juvenile Quilts (smaller than a twin)

1st  - 214 The Cat In The Hat Is Back - Sharon Shields

2nd - 201 Yipes Stripes - Carol Bidrawn

3rd - 203 Scrappy Trails, - Harvy Gerth quilted by Sharon Shields

Wall or Lap Quilt (smaller than a twin)

1st  - 309 Cream Fantasy - Jeanne Harbin

2nd - 314 Star At The Heart Of The Sampler - Carol Bidrawn

3rd - 306 Patriotic Wall Hanging - Gerry Thoman, quilted by Karie Wines

Art Quilt (any size)

1st  - 402 Climbing Clematis - Becky Miller

2nd - 410 Summer Breeze Over Lake Ontario - Rena Van Zee Smith, quilted by Elizabeth karnes

3rd - 409 Just Cause I Can - Elizabeth Karnes

Embroidery or Applique (twin or larger)

1st  - 502 State Flowers- Becky Miller

2nd - 505 Purple Daisies - Betty Boos

3rd - 503 Budding Beauty - Shirley Zimmerman

Mixed Technique (twin or larger)

1st  - 604 Vintage Purple  - Glenda Edwards, quilted by Joy Voltenburg

2nd - 601 Spring Shadows  - Joy Voltenburg

3rd - 605 My Latte  - Glenda Edwards

Pieced or Whole Cloth (twin or larger)

1st  - 703 Queen Anne Star - Dana Silva, quilted by Dana Silva & Shirley Zimmerman

2nd - 715 - Habing

3rd - 706 Daisy Dash - Pam Romack

Pieced or Whole cloth (pantograph machine quilted)

1st  - 805 Christmas In July - Angie Neu, quilted by Sharon Shields

2nd - 802 Summer Porch - Janet Kay Hall, Quilted by Gloria Hall

3rd - 806 Christmastime - Harvy Gerth, Quilted by Deb Workman

Pieced or Whole Cloth (custom machine quilted)

1st  - 912 Grandmother’s Diamond Ring - Mary Hagen, Quilted By Elizabeth Karnes

2nd - 922 Dresden Dreams - Elizabeth Karnes

3rd - 915 Primrose  - Mary Hagen, quilted by Elizabeth Karnes

Crossroads Quilters Guild 2013 Challenge

(Crossroads Quilters Guild members only)

1st - 1010 Carol Bidrawn

2nd - 1013 Bev Elving

3rd - 1015 - Nita Motogawa

Judges Best of Show:

301 Fireworks, Tylene Alexander, quilted by Joy Voltenburg

Viewers Choice:

904 No Diamonds In The Sky, Mary Hagen, quilted by Elizabeth Karnes

(full view of quilt can bee seen above)

If you would like to see photos of the other quilts in the 2013 Crossroads Harvest of Quilts show you can find them all on flickr!

2013 Crossroads Harvest of Quilts Show

Its almost that time again...

Quilt Show Time!

[caption id="attachment_149" align="aligncenter" width="229"] Left click and open in a new tab to see the flyer![/caption]

You may or may not already know i belong to the local quilt guild, The Crossroads Quilters Guild of Effingham, IL. and that each year for the past nine years we have held a pretty darn nice quilt show. This year is our tenth year, and we are hoping it will be even better than years past.

The first show took place at the local school, i was not a part of the guild at that time, matter of fact i didn't even know there was a quilt guild in the area until i went to that first show.  The next year the show was moved to the local Hendelmeyer Park Recreation Center, it had great lighting, a great large area to display the quilts, but we didn't have a sound system so to announce events i literally had to stand in the middle of the room and scream each and every event... Every, Single, Hour, all, Day, Long. The venders of the show dubbed me the Quilt Show Crier. Oh and let's not forget the lack of air conditioning. i don't know if you have ever been to Southern Illinois or not but it can be (and usually is) very very very hot in September.  I joined the guild after the second show and we stayed at the Rec Center for a total of six years. The heat was always a issue but we dealt with it. In 2001 we were able to move the show to the Thelma Keller Convention Center, Great location, nice carpeted flooring, a sound system to announce events, lights in the parking lot that didn't flicker on and off, and a big plus Air Conditioning! Granted ever since we had the added air conditioning we have had a cold front and have been known to start our days with jackets on. Mother nature, got to love her irony!

The show improves each and every year. The judges have told us in a previous year that we may have had a few less quilts at that year's show but the quality of the quilts on display had improved 100%  Categories have come and gone, and as time goes by we do our best to add to or take away from the categories to keep up with the quilting world. Want to see the quilts? Well most all of the quilts, starting from the 2005 quilt show can be found online. Just pick a year and enjoy!

2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012

This years show takes place on September 20th & 21st and i hope to see a few of you there, or better yet why not enter a quilt in the show?! Because of the holiday weekend we have extended the deadline from this past Sunday September 1st to this upcoming Saturday September 7th. If you would like your quit and its info to show up in the book we need to receive your information by September 7th to include it. Anything after that will not be in the show book so if you want to be sure to get your quilt listed in the show book you can email the information to our shows Chairman Marilyn at the email on the entry form! You can find the entry for on the Quilt guilds blog at:  Crossroads Quilters Guild

Want to come to the show to see the quilts but don't want to bring your husbands along? Well it just so happens that at the same time the Corvette FunFest is also taking place! Now i am not condoning you leaving your husbands alone and unsupervised at car show why you come check out all the pretty quilts on display.  Just be sure to leave them with a cell phone, a peanut butter sandwich for a snack, and be sure to take the credit cards away from them (just in case he decides to make a unsupervised purchase) and all will be just fine!

Ask Your Machine Quilter

Well sort of a night out with the girls! Recently I was in charge of my quilt guilds monthly program and go figure, I talked about machine quilting! After a few questions to some of the guild members I decided it was past time to have "The Talk" with the ladies in the group. You know the "Why we ask for the things we ask for" and the "Let me try to explain WHY I need your backings to be larger than your quilt tops" kind of talk.

At first I thought this was going to be the easiest program I have ever done, then I sat down and started listing everything I wanted to talk about. It didn't take more than five minutes to discover "easy" wasn't the best word to describe the program! What to do before you bring your quilt for quilting, batting, threads, pressing, backing, borders, ruler work, and lets not forget marking tools. So I set down and got to work on typing up everything that I could think of. Typing by the way is not a strong point for me, and being dyslexic tends to get in the way especially when I want something to turn out perfect so not to embarrass myself too much. I typed up the book over five times before I was satisfied that the last edition wasn't too terribly bad to try to fix! Thank goodness I have a good proof reader in the house!

By the time I was near the end I had a  little mini book to hand out to the guild members So I thought I might as well add a few questions and answers to the back of the book for easy reference.  I quickly realized however that, #1 I wanted questions from people who weren't me and #2 I had no clue where to get those questions! So what's a Bad Ass Quilter to do when stuck with a tough task? As other Bad Ass Quilters of course!

Luckily for me I am a member of The Bad Ass Quilters Society so I hit up the group's Facebook page for a little help! I wasn't expecting so many questions but when Bad Ass Founder Maddie Kertay posted the questions to the big wall I was bombarded! I want to say a big old THANK YOU to Maddie and the rest of the Bad Ass Quilters that helped me out with questions! If you all hadn't helped me out I'm not sure what I would have finished up the mini book with!

[caption id="attachment_75" align="aligncenter" width="300"] My Quilting Machine, a Gammill Optimum Pro[/caption]

I had tons of samples and tools to bring along and show, photos, longarm rulers, samples of quilting, threads, batting types, and a number of quilts to show. My friend and fellow machine quilter Sharon S. brought in samples of her quilting to share and talk about as well another machine quilting friend Karie W. who gratefully played the part of Vanna White for me! (Thanks Girls!)

[caption id="attachment_78" align="aligncenter" width="300"] A selection of my favorite rulers, most from Jamie Wallen and Dusty Farrell[/caption]

The group had a lot of questions on threads so it helped to have the samples to show what a thick thread looked like compared to a thin thread. To show them all i picked a filigree feather design and quilted it out in every thickness of thread that i had available to me. Different fiber types, cotton, polyester, and rayon samples also helped to show some of the thread choices available. I also want to say Thank You to  Joy V. (Custom Quilts of Joy)for the help with some extra threads to quilt up some samples with!

[caption id="attachment_77" align="aligncenter" width="300"] A few of the samples i brought to share[/caption]

Batting was the next up, why pick puffy poly, why pick a flat batt, what was my favorite and what would I prefer to never have to use were some of the questions that came up. In my business I will pretty much quilt with any batting that the customers what to bring me but I do have favorite and not so favorite batting, I don't really know a quilter that doesn't. For me, if I have /need to use a Puffy Polyester batting I LOVE the brand Quilt King. It comes out of the plastic bag with nearly no wrinkles so I can start using it right away and even if I quilt closely together it doesn't get too stiff from all the quilting. I also love pretty much anything from the Quilters Dream Batting Company, especially the Dream Poly and Dream Puff. For my least liked favorite I would have to pick Hobbs Polly Down. It is stuffed so tightly into the plastic bag that it is almost always badly wrinkled to the point where I have to let it rest for a few days or stuff it in the dryer to get the wrinkles out before I can use it.

[caption id="attachment_76" align="aligncenter" width="300"] Setting up the quilt for quilting[/caption]

All in all I think it was a pretty good night, even if for some reason I forgot to print the one page that was the most important for the mini book, forgot to show Sharon's sample of her Block Work, forgot to get ANY photos of the program stuff once I had it all setup, and lets not forget that the program went a "bit" longer than it normally does. I have received a number of thank you's from the guild members as well as feedback on the different things we talked about.

If you would like to see the mini book I handed out you can view, download, and/or print it here: Ask Your Machine Quilter (including the forgotten page!)

But please remember that the info provided is MY OPINION and thoughts, and I am 100% positive that not all machine quilters feel the same way, think the same way, or want the same things that I want. So PLEASE be sure to "Ask Your OWN Machine Quilter" before believing anything that I have in my handout as being written in stone!

2013 Crossroads Quilters Guild Raffle Quilt

Another year, another quilt show, another raffle quilt!

Once again i quilted the Crossroads Quilters Guild  of Effingham IL. Raffle quilt that will be raffled off on the last day of the 2013 September quilt show.

This year the Raffle Committee  picked a free pattern titled Summer In The Park, if you Google it you will find tons (and i mean TONS!) of free tutorials on how to make the quilt! The raffle committee picked a range of autumn color batik fabrics to go with our fall quilt show.  The guild decided to title their quilt Autumn In The Park, to go with the quilts colors!

When Sue W. (raffle quilt committee chairman) handed over the quilt the first thing i thought of was Modern quilting. But i wasn't all that sure that modern machine quilting designs would work all that well with the fabrics nor was i confident that modern quilting would go over well in our area. You see the Modern Quilting movement still has not made it to this part of Southern Illinois! Go figure!  In the end i had to ask some friends and fellow machine quilters for some help with ideals for quilting. I ended up blending a couple of different suggestions together and then changing them up just a  it to make it work for me.

Here is a photo of the quilt once i had the quilting finished up:

I had some issues getting the quilting to show up in the photos!

This one shows the quilting pretty good. I went with two colors of thread, Natural for the lighter areas with some double ribbon swirl quilting. Then for the darker areas i used a solid brown Espresso color thread with a slightly modern U-Turn quilting design. I used Essential Pro thread from Connectingthreads.com and the Raffle Committee picked Quilters Dream Polly batting. If you look you can see that the seams of the blocks didn't always match up perfectly so i tried to do quilting that would not draw to much attention to the seams. All the blocks are cut on the bias so the edges would stretch easily when sewing them together

The quilting took some time, lots and lots of stops and starts that had to be finished off. The thread color changes went very smoothly, i was able to quilt all the Natural thread areas then go back a second time and quilt the Espresso color thread areas. Raffle tickets went on sale this past weekend at the Effingham Artisan Fair and will continue to be available until just before the winning ticket is picked!