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!

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!