A Trunk Show from Quilter Sam Hunter

Sam Hunter was the speaker at my guild last night.You can see Sam's web page, Hunter's Design Studio right here.

Sam was an entertaining speaker. She self-describes as "sassy" and it certainly came through in the hour-long talk she gave last night. Her quilts were lovely and creative. In fact, she says this is the first quilt she ever made. I'd say that's a big Wow!

She creates her own hand-dyes and bemoaned the quilt below, saying that she'd entered it in a show only to have it hung in bright sunshine, which faded the colors. Still, it's a lovely quilt.

Having quilted for some years on a strict budget, she's made an art of using scraps, precuts, and using all the fabrics in her stash.

When she learned to make the pickle dish design, she was so excited by it that she created some hand dyed fabric to match for the remainder of the quilt.

Her backs are often pieced in bright and whimsical colors, and she explains this came out of her "budget" years.

This quilt is one of the first patterns she created.

And she claims this quilt below can be made with none of the dreaded "Y" seams.

The quilts below are different layouts using jelly rolls.

And here's a nice scrappy version with the little dark detailing to add interest.

When she made this quilt, she thought it needed something to make it a little more interesting.

And so she made the same quilt, adding the little squares on the top and the bottom to give it some spark.

Her patterns feature her "Fabulous Fourteen" designs that can be made from fourteen fat quarters.

In her quest to use all the fabric from a particular project, she uses the cut-off ends from blocks to create the two patches in the border.

She didn't make the next quilt. Rather, her guild created it for her when she left. They used her own hand-dyed blues for the background.

Here's some detail that shows that the blocks are signature blocks. Clever quilting too!

Dr. Who fans will appreciate the next one. 

The next quilt is paper-pieced, and she had patterns for sale at our meeting. In fact, there were patterns for many of the quilts seen here.

Here's a detail of the flower. It seems to me that one could cut the center pentagon and then just add strips around it to create the same flower without the need for paper-piecing. Paper-piecing certainly has its place in quilting. Let's just say, I'm not a fan of doing it.

Sam showed us her only "vintage" quilt. This quilt was hand-pieced and hand-quilted, although she purchased it without knowing any more about it. She paused her to spend some time talking about imperfections in our sewing and claimed to "love every imperfection" in all of her quilts. She's a quilter after my own heart when she says that a hand-made quilt should show the hand of the quilter in its imperfections. Such a forgiving philosophy, and it preserves the fun in quilting.

Her book Quilt Talk (link right here) features the paper-pieced quilting alphabet she developed.

It includes all the upper and lower case letters of the alphabet along with numbers and popular symbols. These can be resized for use in any quilt.

She's created some very cute projects using her alphabet, including these two baby quilts:

The lambs' ears are three-dimensional.

This one was inspired by a "Star Wars" dialog exchange:

and its quilting also reflects its origin.

Here's a nod to the creative process.

Check out this reversible bed runner for the mood of the person who occupies the bed. A nap, or........

And this is the quilt Sam made for herself using words that she strives to "be":

Finally, her Dingbats pattern. She'll be teaching a class at our guild in April based on this pattern.

Sam Hunter was an entertaining speaker. I'm especially appreciative that her quilts are do-able for the average quilter. As much as I love seeing truly artistic work, it can be disheartening to think that one could never recreate such incredible expertise in one's own sewing room. These quilts were entertaining in that I felt as if I could have made any one of them with a little instruction.

I hope you enjoyed the show as much as I did!