Stitches in Bloom Quilt Show

As promised, I have some quilts to show you today. There are still more after this, but I'll wait and post them tomorrow and perhaps the next day. I didn't photograph all of the quilts...it only seems that way. Of course, it takes quite a bit of time to go through all of those, and so I'll be doling them out to you over a couple of days and continuing on with the rest of my life while I'm at it.

Let's start with one of my favorite quilts of this show, this exquisite Baltimore Album. The near exclusive use of red, green, and white made this one of the more striking Baltimore Album quilts I've ever seen.

This next quilt reminded me of my red birds on white trees from last year's show. Here's a different take on the "put a bird on it" motif.

I like the way this quilter fussy cut her cardinals and placed them on the tree branches.

I apologize for the terrible lighting in some of these pictures, but I liked this quilt.

And I especially liked the quilting on the dragonfly.

My picture doesn't show off the shimmer and glitter in this next quilt very well. At first, I thought it was embellished with crystals.

Closer examination revealed that the glitz was in the metallic fabrics.

And this appears to be painted on to me. What do you think?

The snow quilts really caught my eye yesterday. I'm nearly finished embroidering all of the quilting snowlady blocks, and I'm starting to think about how to set it. This next quilt was both simple in appearance, and yet complicated in its piecing.

Look at these beautifully paper-pieced snowflakes. I really like what the quilter did with the metallic thread.

Here's the attached card. I was happy to see that this block is available in one of the Quiltmaker 100 blocks issues. In case you missed it, all of the issues are now available for purchase as a PDF, and so I now own the patterns for Volumes 1-10. (Strangely, I just now tried to link to that, and it doesn't seem to be available any longer. It makes me wonder if someone overstepped the bounds of copyright law.)

Padsworth, this one is for you:

The volunteer standing near this quilt happened to be the quiltmaker. When I snapped a picture of her quilt, she told us all about it. Most interesting of what she told us is that the quilt survived the entire Christmas season on her bed. With all that embellishment, that must have been quite a feat. I know some cats who would have influenced how well it would have fared in our household.

You may recall when I blogged about designer Janet Fogg visiting our guild. Her designs are incredible. I regret that I wasn't able to attend the workshop she gave when she spoke with our guild. If you read my post (click here), you'll see that she uses an appropriate block to the subject matter in her designs. In this polar bear quilt, she has used the bear paw block.

I like the quilting in this one...sort of stippling with some other design elements incorporated in.

I've been showing you a lot of designs related to cold and snow, and so I thought I'd end off today with some sunshine. I've bumped the contrast up quite a bit in this one so that you can see the words quilted across the top...this is from Shakespeare's As you Like It: "All the World's a Stage..."

Okay, so I have lots more quilts to show you, but I need to get some things done around here too. I still need to unpack. The birds are starving since the bird feeders are all empty. They're sitting around the yard with their eyes fixed on the house and their tongues hanging out. At least, that's how it looks from where I sit. Also, there's not a crumb of food in the house, and so I need to make at least a quick trip to the grocery store or we'll all be sitting around looking like the birds. It's hard to keep the critters around here fed, be they two-legged or four-legged, with fur, feathers, or none of the above.

Once I get all that done, I'm going to try my hand at a little felted cat. My sincere thanks go to Debbie at Woolen Sails who has been loading me up with the most helpful links. Thank you, Debbie. Wish me luck on that. I want to try it soon while the process is still fresh in my mind.

And don't think I've forgotten that I'm in the middle of quilting Shoot for the Moon. I'm hoping to get some work done on that today too. Time to get a move on.