phan·tas·ma·go·ria

I will confess to feeling like a kid in a candy store at quilt market. I am just bedazzled by the inventive displays - the ones by fabric companies are always amazing. I thought Moda's was a bit hokey when they were setting it up and behold! When I came upon it at market and a whale was spouting bubbles, it took my breath away. But I didn't get a decent picture of it, I'll be on the lookout for one ...

One display I could not get over was the Fairfield booth. It was truly a phantasmagoria!  I was told one woman created 4 sides (you are viewing one side) for this large square booth (probably 20 feet tall) by stitching blocks displaying different batting and foam products together. Keep an eye on their website - they said there would be more about how this display came together soon (click on the museum).

Here's a close-up shot. 

I liked this one with a ceiling of quilt tops. We all have lots of tops - we should try this at home.

Another company had quilted panels of their solid reading fabrics. Grommets for rings held it all together.

Solids are hot. It's exciting to see solids coming out in the hues that Marcia Derse designed.

I saw leaves and circles on strings in several spots - Lotta's caught my eye.

Some folks I know will be happy to see this lovely display for a new V&A Museum line.

 Last, but not least -  we were hooting when we saw this one! Many of these won awards from Quilts Inc.

I Saw Red

First, sorry to be slow with the market news. I  helped with a booth and I forgot how hard people work setting up and running market booths (kinda like you forget the pain of childbirth).

But I'm at it now, I'll post a few reports of what I saw at market. On my first walk through, my search was to answer this question - WHAT is the hot color or colors? And I posed it to others, who reported back.

We agreed that we all saw a very BRIGHT colored market. Wild, hot colors everywhere! And I noticed a lot of red quilts. I must disclose that I love red, so maybe that is why I gravitated to these quilts. But notice I kept seeing red ...

I noticed red and white quilts graced a few booths - like Minick and Simpson's:

Weeks and Ringle:

And as splashes of color:

So you can imagine I chuckled with I noticed this fellow:









Now that I'm home looking at these, i notice most have some blue or turquoise in them, which makes me add this quilt I liked so much by Jean and Valori Wells:

So to sum it up, we can agree it was BRIGHT!

More soon, I promise! I have lots of pictures!

612 Quilts

Some lucky child will get this colorful quilt made by Carol Jones.

Our guild (Kaw Valley Quilt Guild) is helping with a quilt project for children in Lawrence.

Every child admitted to our local hospital's (Lawrence Memorial Hospital) pediatric department is presented with a quilt. It's the work of Pieces for Pediatrics, a project started in 2010 by Marla Welch. She writes:

"On May 28, 2010, I delivered the first quilts to LMH--11 to be exact. With the 28 I took this week, we have delivered 612 quilts ... unbelievable to this crazy person who was going to just make a few quilts to fill some time.  Since then, they have never run out of quilts - even though it has meant some scrambling at times."

Guild members help her keep up with the project. Hospital workers anticipate a busy winter at the department, as the coming flu season is expected to be bad.

Marla was by yesterday to pick up some quilts. When she was at the hospital this week, one of the nurses said she hoped one of her own children would get sick so her child could get a quilt!

Hopefully she reconsiders. See more of Marla's work here.

No Scraps Too Small Revisited

So! I gathered up these little scraps at a recent quilt retreat.


I tethered them with a little glue onto some postcards, then stitched over the edges so the post office wouldn't reject them.


They are scraps from a wonderful seminole piecing obsessed woman in our guild. Total leftovers, but aren't the colors just wonderful ...


The detail shot below tells the rest of the story, and reveals the intricacy of our seminole piecer friend's work:

You are reading the little ruler right - those are unfinished one-inch squares. Her scraps covered 3 postcards, here is another:

I'm off to Quilt Market in Houston later this week - I'll try to be a good reporter and show you what I marvel at there ...

Hail, Ruth Benerito

The New York Times reported the death of Ruth Benerito yesterday.
Ruth certainly changed all quilters' lives.

When I was little, I remember cotton was, well, fairly creepy. Wrinkly, wierd. I'm talking about cotton clothes, but we all know that cotton from, ahem, 50 years ago can be pretty rugged to work with. It needs a good deal of pressing and is often a bit brittle feeling.

Ruth changed all that. As a USDA chemist, she helped perfect modern wrinkle-free cotton in the late 1950s which became available to all in the mid-1960s. Reading how takes me back to the college textiles lab (cellulose, polymers, glucose molecules, hydrogen bonds).

She was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2008. She was 97 when she died.

You can read the Times article by Margalit Fox here. I love the head - (Ruth) Made Cotton Cloth Behave! Be sure to google her name too - you can learn a lot.