Show and Tell Quilts in Kansas City

Written by Diane Harris on October 11, 2024. Posted in Blog, How-tos and Ideas, Inspiration, Quilt Lifestyle

My latest trips to guilds in New York, Florida, Texas and beyond have featured amazing quilts by guild members.

At Kansas City Modern Quilt Guild on Oct 10, Chris Jacobs displayed her Stars and Stripes finish. The overall impact is really strong but hone in on that background piecing. It adds so much to the design! This is a complimentary pattern by Cherry Guidry. Wouldn’t it make a great Quilt of Valor?

I fell in love with Beth Gude’s quilt, too. She made blocks for an exchange one year and then created the quilt from blocks she received back from friends. Find Beth on Instagram @gudegoods.

Some of the blocks feature a large square at the center, but a few makers put patchwork there instead. This would be such a fun quilt to make! I love being able to feature larger scale prints in big patches. The design is Crumb Coat by Tara Evans @taraleequiltery.

I love the rainbow effect in Nicole Moore’s finish, above. Nicole is an AccuQuilt ambassador and she cut the Drunkard’s Path blocks with her Go! cutter.

She also brought AccuQuilt dies for a bowl cozy and a bucket hat, and she’s already made items from both. Bowl cozies for the microwave make great Christmas gifts. I use mine all the time!

Tia Curtis brought a fabulous quilt, above, that was inspired by what she sees while swimming laps: ceiling and floor tiles.

This is a beautiful piece but my photos don’t do it justice. The colors are wonderful!

And maybe my favorite of the night was this quilt by Nikki Woolsey @sassypearlquilts. Look at that quilting!

I love how it changes from one section to another. Nikki is president-elect of KCMQG and if her energy is any indication, next year will be one to remember.

Also I’m a fan of her shirt. It’s the kind of thing I’d put on for church and my husband would raise his eyebrows.

More show and tell from other guilds still to come. Quilt on, friends!

If you’re looking for dynamic programs for your quilt group, check out my offerings here!

• Continue Reading
• 2 Comments

Quilts on covered bridges

Written by Diane Harris on June 7, 2023. Posted in Blog, How-tos and Ideas, Inspiration, Quilt Lifestyle

It’s a romantic recipe: small town, famous county, covered bridges and quilts on a lovely summer day.

That’s the “airing of the quilts” during the Iowa Quilt Festival, where I spent Saturday, June 2. I grabbed my quilting travel buddy Mary and off we went to Winterset, which is set in wooded rolling hills toward the center of the state.

Quick overview:

Iowa Quilt Festival is a recently expanded event in and around Winterset, Iowa featuring several days worth of events for makers and lovers of quilts, hosted by Iowa Quilt Museum and sponsored/supported by a host of businesses and organizations local and beyond.

I’ll do a series of posts because there is just so much.

Central Iowa Modern Quilt Guild hung quilts on Cedar Covered Bridge and these were among my favorites of the day. I was happy to meet Eva Marie Evans on site and she chatted with us about two quilts I adored.

This modern version of Double Wedding Ring lit my fire because of its scrappy vibe and the wide variety of fabrics.

Sometimes it’s hard to convince my students that fabrics don’t have to match. But a quilt like this brings home that point beautifully.

I wanted to look at this quilt, and look some more, and look some more. That’s a successful quilt! The viewer can hardly look away because of all the fascinating interactions.

Look carefully at the fabrics and notice the different textures and sizes of prints.

How many different styles of fabric can you spot? I see floral, Asian, novelty, stripe, modern, shirting, batik, solid and scenic, also known as toile.

Virtually nothing “matches” and yet the quilt looks fabulous. I’d love to spend a day sewing with Eva Marie because I think I could learn from her.

Do you see how the overall effect is what really matters? The big picture is what makes a quilt work.

I think it’s really interesting that there isn’t a lot of contrast between the rings and the backgrounds. And yet most quilters would instantly recognize it as Double Wedding Ring. I like how the value moves from the lightest at the top left to the darkest at the bottom right. This is a quilt that grabbed me and wouldn’t let me go.

If you aspire to create like this, check out Double Wedding Ring Quilts by Victoria Findlay Wolfe. It’s been out a while so you can grab a copy quite inexpensively.

Iowa Quilt Festival was sponsored by Iowa Quilt Museum and many other organizations and businesses.

And from what I observed, it couldn’t happen without hundreds of volunteers who worked long and hard. Thank you, all.

Much more to come, so quilt on,

P.S. Visit my Instagram @stashbanditquilts for many more great photos in the meantime!

• Continue Reading
• 3 Comments

Have No Fear

Written by Diane Harris on February 21, 2020. Posted in Blog, How-tos and Ideas, Quilt Lifestyle

I’ve been working on something totally outlandish and I have decided that the most important guideline for making art and doing original work in your quilting or any creative field is this:

Have No Fear

You can’t be afraid to make something that nobody else has ever made.

You can’t be afraid to make something ugly.

You can’t be afraid to waste fabric or time or effort.

You just can’t be afraid of anything.

I started out with a simple idea of making a few more samples for a class I’m teaching at Vermont Quilt Festival this summer. It’s all about improvisationally-pieced curves.

It was innocent enough as I began. Pull, cut, sew, press, audition. Repeat.

One key is to have enough contrast between the fabrics in each block. And you want them to do different things. Curvy looks good with straight lines, or geometric looks nice with floral. You want a bit of tension between them.

As soon as this went up for its audition, my heart skipped a beat. Remember that for any audition you always want to stand WAY back across the room. You don’t get a good perspective if you are too close.

I ask a lot of questions: What would happen if I put in a very bold and graphic fabric like the blue and white above?

What would happen if I started mixing up the pairs? Could I put a center patch in that hole above with a partial seam? (Answer, yes you could!)

I cut and sew and add more blocks. I stand across the room. I fret. I thrill.

A color story starts to emerge and the quilt seems to be pink, red, orange and yellow. Very analagous. I decide that I should add more blue and blue-green and also some very darks.

I learned long ago from Mary Mashuta and Roberta Horton that if something sticks out like a sore thumb, you should add more of it. That’s right! If it resides in more than one place, your eye will move around the quilt instead of going straight to that one place. It’s absolutely true.

It was around this time that I panicked and thought the whole thing was just too bizarre. I made two sets with this stripe and dot, above. Would I be smarter to just make blocks in one size with two fabrics each? Maybe that would be better. But honestly.

If you look at these two blocks side by side, which one is more interesting? I decide to

Stay the Course.

I make a few smaller blocks so that I can fill in awkward spaces as needed. After each finish, I walk across the studio for the best possible view. It does you no good to stand close by.

At one point I shoot a text to a good quilting friend.

Her response is measured.
But I carry on.

At some point you have to start thinking about how you’re going to sew it all together. I decide where I can add fillers and coping strips and I start to think about sections and partial seams.

I make decisions about repeating fabrics to help tie the whole mess together. I trim and skootch and trim some more. I hope to high heaven that it will lie flat.

After about three days, it comes together! Just below is the final version, 68″ x 83″. I had free time to spend and this is how I spent it. My husband did laundry and meals while I hunkered down and didn’t talk to him very much. He’s a very good sport!

When he came in to the studio and saw it on the design wall, he crossed his arms over his chest and thought. He wasn’t sure.

“That is really different.”

His answer did not bother me. And I think that is when I realized that for three days, I had been forging ahead without fear.

When fear crept in, I batted it down.

When it threatened to derail me, I swatted it away.

When I was tired of risking and wondering and deciding, I pressed on.

And that is exactly what you will need to do in order to make art, to create something original no matter what your medium is.

The payoff is that you will have something that has never been made before in all the history of humankind. Nor will it ever be made again. It is yours and yours alone.

Pretty great reward, if you ask me.

Have No Fear,

• Continue Reading
• 4 Comments

QuiltCon in Nashville

Written by Diane Harris on February 27, 2019. Posted in Blog, Quilt Lifestyle

QuiltCon is the annual gathering of The Modern Quilt Guild, and it was held last week in Nashville. I decided to go because I’m interested in what’s happening in this arm of the quilting world. Today I’m sharing photos of some of the quilts in the juried show.

Wild Goose Riot by Wendy Hill from Sunriver, Oregon; @wendyquilter.

This quilt didn’t photograph especially well but I stood in front of it for a long time, which Jo Morton says is the mark of a successful piece. It’s a happy quilt and there’s a lot to see.

• Continue Reading
• 3 Comments

Changing It Up: From Christmas to Industry

Written by Diane Harris on November 7, 2018. Posted in Blog, Quilt Lifestyle, Uncategorized

I posted an image of my recent modern Christmas wreath quilt on Instagram, and a follower named Karen saw “urban-industrial style Christmas.” What a great description!

Oh, Christmas Wreath by Diane Harris; quilted by Julie Lechner @beenquiltin

Her thoughts moved me to play around with this design and purposely go for an industrial look. So I moved away from Christmas entirely, to these possibilities.

A little bit different, but it still feels like the same quilt. Sashing is wider and all of the background and the border is one color.

Here I moved to a darker background color. I kind of like this idea. In terms of fabric, I’d use a lot of variety in the Bow Ties. (Ha, they don’t even look like Bow Ties now!)

More playing around. I’m not sure how effective this really is. But you never know until you try, so I don’t rule anything out when I’m experimenting, especially if it’s just in EQ. Even in fabric, play is the name of the game.

Whoa. This happened by accident! The background is the same color as one of the Bow Ties, so that piecing disappears and they look like weird C’s. Now we’re getting somewhere. In reality you wouldn’t actually piece the C’s, you could just use a solid patch in the same fabric as the background. I love this one, and surprisingly, it looks Christmas-y to me once more.

I had one more thought. I changed the gray to another green.

Like I said, you never know until you mess around!

A note about Electric Quilt design software: I resisted upgrading to EQ8 from EQ7 because I thought I didn’t have time to learn a new program. But when I did upgrade, I was blown away by how easy and intuitive it is. I spent almost zero time learning EQ8 because everything felt natural and logical. I love it. If you’re interested in designing quilts, you should get it. Well worth the investment!

Today, I wish you the courage, the curiosity and the commitment to play.

Let’s Talk Quilts! Does your quilt group need a speaker for 2019 or 2020? I’m booking entertaining, energizing, inspiring trunk shows now.

SaveSave

SaveSave

• Continue Reading
• 4 Comments