During lunch break from class on that Friday, Jan and I went down to the show floor to see the quilts, and what ribbons I might have won …… teeeheee!   I got lucky this year, and received two first place blue ribbons and, drum roll please, my first ever Judges’ Choice from (usually traditional-loving) Lisa Erlandson (you’ll have to read to the bottom for more!)!  The first of my quilts that I ran across was Nourish; when I walked up all sorts of folks were looking at it closely (way cool!).

Here’s me doing the “Vanna White pose” and explaining to some viewers how I did it….

The next aisle had a wonderful exhibit called A Sense of Place, the annual Art Quilts Maine challenge for the year.  This year there were many entries (some years there are not so many!), and they were all wonderful, and some outstanding.  Of course I loved Kathy and Kate’s!   Kathy’s features her signature bright colors and many beads….as always not one too many, not one too few:

This detail shows more of her fine work:

Kate outdid herself this year.  She went to Italy earlier this year, and was so inspired by Cinque Terra.  She took her time with this quilt (as an overextended mom, we all tend to rush!) and it shows in the quality of design and workmanship.  This may be the best machine quilting she’s done… I totally love the piece:

Anne Walker, the President (aka Queen) of AQM, made this stunning aerial view…. her work is always tops—I wouldn’t mind owning a piece like this one!  The blue binding on the bottom is inspired!:

Across the aisle, the Coastal Quilters challenge hung on the ugly burgundy drapes.  Inspired by the Frayed Edges 5×5 grid (seen here in an older blogpost, and here and here), the chapter chose a photo by Jan’s husband and photographer Dwight P. called Ropes and Buoys.  The challenge was to make a 10x 10 inch quilt using any technique.   Many went for realistic colors….weathered wood and rope and a bright buoy, but some of us went hog wild!

Mine are the two close-ups….last one on the 4th row, first one on the 5th row.

I LOVED that some went traditional in their interpretation, and that others went totally wild.  What is astonishing is that some of the most traditional quilters who had never EVER made an art quilt did some of the most AMAZING piece….major kudos to Karen Martin and Leigh Smith for not only attempting the challenge, but excelling!

This quilt was a round robin made by Roxanne Wells, Rebeccah Hokkanen, Susan Barry and Gail Galloway-Nicholson.   Despite serious medical challenges to them and / or their spouses for at least three of them, they did a wonderful job.  Alas, I somehow only got the picture of this one (not all four) of their challenge quilts.  Of course they are, all 4 of them, part of my awesome local Coastal Quilters chapter.  I’m so glad I’m here! What luck to find so many kindred souls.

As promised, here is Rana O’Connor’s tiger….he is totally, completely amazing.  The tiger himself is ALL THREAD….and then appliqued onto the surface, which is a single batik. Everything else you see is thread–the snake, the tree, everything.  Can you tell she loves thread as much as I do?  Not surprisingly, he took a well-earned blue ribbon!  The quilt is fairly small, maybe 14 inches tall?

Here are several quilts (and sorry, I’m too lazy and rushed to run upstairs and find the show brochure to add who made them… if you know tell me and I’ll update the post, which I’ll try to do later anyway) that I really liked…. first this awesome green NY Beauty:

And this very Maine-ish quilt, complete with loose-flapping flags:

No blog about the show would be complete without one of Jeanne-Marie Robinson’s quilts (she’s also in Coastal Quilters…grin!).  Almost always her quilts feature animals, and most often are brightly colored.  This one is softer, yet is one of my favorites….the handwork (all hand applique and quilting, and lots of embroidery) is stunning:

This charming little quilt was made of one of those fabrics you’d think would turn out, well, a bit tacky, but it SO works, and the beading is just perfect.  I want to track down the maker (I have the info in my notes somewhere) and ask her if I may use it in my lecture on beading on quilts:

Last but not least, here I am doing another “Vanna” showing off my Judges’ choice ribbon for Naiads:

It was a good year!   I actually got to see the show this year, Joshua is well, Paul is well, and Eli is well!  After helping hang the show on Wednesday (see the post from a couple of days ago), I returned Friday morning for a class on “Woodcut Quilts with Laura Wasilowski.”  Jan and I had signed up eons ago, as soon as we could, with the idea of a “moms escape to play.” To see Laura’s work and / or buy her fabric and thread, go here.

To get an idea of the type of pieces, take a look at Laura’s small quilts on the demo-board.  There were no patterns, just your imagination to run wild.  The class kit fee included two lengths of Laura’s hand-dyed fabric (it is a rainbow run of color from one selvage to the other) in bright and a narrower strip in pastel, plus some dyed-to-match perle cotton.

For some reason, I don’t have a picture of my piece (in progress and untouched since class…sigh…), so you’ll get to enjoy Jan’s piece, above.  I really like the bricks…not a whole raft of them, just some to suggest the wall around the door.   As usual, I was disobedient, and brought Misty Fuse instead of Wonder Under (and did just fine thankyewveddymuch), and also brought along my stash of pre-fused batiks (see the flowerpot to the left of Jan’s door!).

There were some awesome pieces…one lady made a giraffe for a granddaughter (sorry I don’t recall her name)….and please remember, these are all “in progress” pieces:

You can see the shading on the pastel hand-dyed in the sky on this piece.

Virginia Morrell of Art Quilts Maine made this awesome and vibrant flower doing very careful fussy cutting…can’t wait to see where it goes:

And Beth Guisely from Coastal Quilters is well on her way to achieving a rooster here:

I’ll be back in a couple of days with one more post about MQ2008!

A visitor to my website (and I’m guessing also this blog) asked me recently what would be in my ideal wet / dyeing studio….. she has the pleasure of being able to convert a greenhouse to a dye studio….heaven!   Here’s my list… I’d love suggestions from those that have “been there, done that.”  Let me know what worked, what you’d wish you’d done…..

• An absolute must for me is a sink with hot water!   My dream sink would be deep, but not so deep that I have to stoop to reach the bottom (thereby avoiding aching back).  I would actually love two sinks….one huge and deep for soaking large quantities, another not so deep for easier reach.  A pull-out spray/regular faucet (the kind for sinks) would be good too…..  OK, so what I really want is a restaurant sink with counter with overhead spray hose/nozzle/whatever it is called.
• A mixing counter with shallow shelves above for holding the dyes and the beakers/mixing paraphernalia.   Needs to have enough space to lay out dye-binders and recipes next to the actual mixing zone.  If it were next to the sink for easy wiping-down that would be a bonus (remember the old integrated drainboards?  that would be ideal!).  And maybe a bulletin board for pinning the current recipe or basic ones up right in front of my nose.
• Deep shelving nearby for bulky/heavy stuff like Urea and Soda Ash (on the bottom) and buckets/basins.
• Since I like to paint the fabric, not do LWI “scrunch and dump” dyeing for the most part, a LARGE FLAT surface…. like 4×8 feet!  And maybe something like a carpenter’s “crib”…  places where I could store 4×8 sheets (would need help moving them) stacked horizontally one above another for batching.  Think of those cookie cooling towers in Costco or wherever where you can stack up 20 cookie sheets at a time…. like that but maybe for 4 sheets, not 20, and of course way huger for my purposes! I’d love for the sheets to have a rim (just like a cookie sheet), but that might be hard to finagle.  My friend Lisa Walton of Dyed and Gone to Heaven (who sells her hand dyeds worldwide I might add!) uses pond liner in the back yard, but Sydney, Australia, is a more hospitable climate for outdoor dyeing than Camden, Maine! Still, using the heavy plastic and pinching up the corners (setting it on a table of course) could work well.
• Washer and dryer in the studio or nearby so as not the require hauling wet, just-batched fabric long distances.
• Wipe-down-easily walls and floor (well, for me maybe the ceiling too!)
• A couple places to suspend rods from the ceiling if I want to hang yardage and drip-dye (pour it on and watch it flow down).  A plastic sled or window box makes a good drip catches…line with scrunched fabric and you have a coordinated piece of cloth…
• LIGHT….lots of good light (shouldn’t be an issue in a greenhouse, except at night)
• Warmth….I live in Maine, so hope to be able to afford an electric blanket to set over things for batching so I can dye in winter……
• A small space to write notes, keep my dye-binders and reference books that is far enough away from water to give them a little protection
• A stool on which to perch, and maybe one of those chef’s mats for when standing to ease the foot-pain!
• Entertainment…radio, tv, something….and maybe access to the outside.
• BATHROOM nearby!

What’s on your list?

Have you ever wondered what a quilt show looks like before the quilts are hung?  I always had, and two years ago when I first volunteered to help hang the quilts, I got an inkling.  With permission from the powers that be at Maine Quilts, I took some photos during set-up this year for sharing on my blog.  Here,

The quilts have arrived.  Since quilts come in from the entire state, there are regional drop-off centers (most often quilt shops) where they are logged in as they arrive.  Entrants must fill out their forms and place their quilts in a pillowcase or cloth bag, then deliver their babies to the drop-off point the Saturday before the show opens.  A volunteer for each drop-off point then drives all the quilts to Augusta where the show is held at the Civic Center.  If, like me, you have “fussy” quilts that need special handling, you may ask for special permission to hand-deliver your quilt on the Wednesday before the show, when the quilts are hung.

This photo is looking down the center aisle toward the main entrance.  The juried quilts are on the left, the display section is on the right, and special exhibits are either in the first aisle or the last aisle or two (depending on how many special exhibits).  Fortunately, the Civic Center is adding black drapes.  The blue ones aren’t so bad but those faded burgundy..well…bleah! They suck the life out of some quilts…. Anyway, the juried quilts are hung first so they are up and done in time for judging on Thursday (the show previews on Thursday evening and opens for Friday, Saturday and Sunday).

Those wood slats are for hanging the quilts.  My dream is that someday the Civic Center will have ALL black drapes, then we can spray paint the used-for-years slats so they disappear against the drapes.  In the meantime, Paula was responsible for one of the best improvements in the hanging process this year, bagging hanging loops in pairs by quilt number–saved a TON of time and frustration.  Nancy Z. is responsible for the other great improvement…for quilts hung one above the other, the lower quilt had loops that were adjustable with toggles (you know those push-clamp-gizzies on the drawcords of parkas?).  This made leveling the quilts a breeze!  Thanks Paula and Nancy!!!!

Here’s the aisle that I helped hang, which included the art quilts in the juried section and the special exhibits from the Art Quilts Maine chapter.

Here are some ladies hanging a large quilt in the Display section…as you can see it takes teamwork to get the quilts up and level.  Someone several years ago designed a spreadsheet that is fantastic…each aisle has a layout of which quilts in order, their width, which size bar is needed, how many inches between the quilts and (another new and appreciated item) a 12 inch wooden ruler to measure the distance between quilts so you don’t reach the end of the row with too much or not enough room!

One of the best parts of hanging is getting a sneak peek at the quilts.  I got to hang my own Naiads, and it was in great company.

To the right is Mathea Daunheimer’s Rooflines quilt (which hoooray for her! got juried into Tactile Architecture in Houston at the big International Quilt Festival), plus another of Mathea’s pieces and two tigers from Rana O’Connor.  I’ll show you a close up of Rana’s two tigers in my next post, but wow!   I’m thrilled to have met her a couple years ago; she lives down near Portland and I wish our paths crossed occasionally….for now, just occasional e-mail.

I’ll be back with a post in a couple of days.  Thanks to the wonders of WordPress I can write my blogs BEFORE I head out the door, then they “publish” when I set the date.  That means I’ll have goodies for you while I’m off teaching at the Images quilt show / Lowell (Mass.) Quilt Festival.

Cheers, Sarah

Hey!  A milestone happened last night, and I think it was someone from the
Quiltart list…..    I got the 100,000th visit to my blog!   I thought I’d
do a giftie (a half yard of my hand-dyes probably) for that person, so if
you surfed in to see the two blogposts about Nourish last night and

you are from Tel Aviv, Israel
your ISP is netvision.net.il
you surf using firefox on a microsoft windows XP platform
and you visited two blogposts last night,

write and let me know!  Send your snail mail address and I’ll pop an
envelope in the mail…and tell me your favorite color(s) and I’ll see what
I’ve got in the stash!

AND—

since it is sometimes hard to catch the correct person when they’ve just been to the site, I will ALSO send a half yard (or two fat quarters) of my hand-dyeds to the FIRST PERSON TO WRITE  to me from  here!   Just use the comment for this post and write to let me know!  (Note from later in the morning:  Mary is the first person to comment, so she wins it… Mary, I sent an e-mail; if you’d like the fabric please reply to my message with your snail mail address! WOOT!)

Cheers, Sarah