Surprise! Shirts Quilt by Elsie

Our guild speaker this month was Elsie Campbell, the award-winning maker of many tasteful quilts. She gave a wonderful talk - I was especially impressed by a brief little video she showed of how she hand quilts. That little film was worth a million words, it was so interesting and helpful to see how she quilts.

When she showed the quilt above and mentioned making it from shirts, of course, everyone turned and nudged me. Look at this great quilt (apologies about the classic guild meeting shot, I was in the back of the room - Elsie is the blur at the left)! Elsie proclaimed she is not a purist, meaning she collected shirts she liked, not necessarily all cotton shirts. She made this from 47 shirts, some even had a bit of spandex. Her opinion about that was you just need to notice what you are working with and make sure you treat it appropriately (don't stretch it).

Elsie sure makes great quilts. She also said, "There's no law that we have to finish what we start."