Common Threads Quilt Show ~ Wichita Kansas

Along with my mom, I attended the Common Threads Quilt Show in Wichita KS this morning.  Featuring over 500 quilts, it is the biggest quilt show that I have ever attended.  I am glad it wasn't any bigger.  As much as I enjoy looking quilts, I found that I reached a point where I just couldn't take any more in.  Quilt saturation?  Who would have thought it?

When I got home and surveyed the pictures I'd taken, I tried to decide what drew me to some quilts more than others.  I'm very partial to certain colors, but that's far from the whole story.  So much is in the design ~ both of the quilt pattern and the quilting.

Glad some quilters somewhere have been busy.  Despite my best intentions, I haven't sat down at my sewing machine yet.  So over the next few days, I'm going to share some of the quilty eye candy, and be glad I have something to report on my quilting blog.

First Storm at Sea.  Aptly named, the "motion" of the design never ceases to intrigue me. I've liked it in every color combination in which I've seen it done.   

Hard to see in the overall picture, the quilter used a lot of circular quilting which only served to accentuation the sense of movement.

I took the next group of pictures with Shay at Quilting in My Pyjamas in mind, since I know she has been working on a selvage quilt.  (I've been so long absent, she may have finished it by now.)  My apologies that the picture of the overall quilt is rather blurry.  There was a very slight breeze that kept the quilts subtly in motion.

Fortunately, the close-ups below do the quilt justice.  Isn't the quilting fantastic?

I'm not much for quilts in subdued tones and old-fashioned colors, but the design and quilting in this piece fascinated me.  This quilt is so subdued that you might be liable to think that the lighting at the show was bad, or something was wrong with my camera.  But no, these are the actual colors in the quilt.

Stay-tuned!  There are more quilts to come.

Dark and Stormy Night

There is one project on my WIP list that I have yet to blog about:  Dark and Stormy Night (Storm at Sea).  Despite the fact that I usually find naming quilts an arduous process, this one came unbidden.  Probably because Snoopy in Peanuts started all of his creative writing endeavors with, "It was a dark and stormy night..."  This always gave me a giggle (yeah, I know, I'm easily entertained).  However, it seems perfect for this quilt.

The picture above is courtesy of my EQ5 program.  I have not proceeded very far with the project.  I'm still cutting the pieces.  While the project will be color controlled in that all the blue pieces will be some shade of blue, the green pieces some shade of green, etc., each of the 64 blocks will be unique.  No fabric repeats.  That probably sounds crazy to a lot of quilters, but for me, it's fun.  I'm still collecting fabrics for the purple and green pieces.  The blue pieces are all cut.

My favorite colors are blue, purple, and green.  Yet as a rule, I tend to pair them with at least one warm color.  It always seemed to me that cool colors tend to need warm colors and visa-versa.  Art theory tends to confirm this.  My art background is very minimal, being limited to one art education class back when I thought I was going to become a teacher.  The teacher spent a lot of time teaching us about the color wheel.  Complimentary colors:  those straight across the wheel from each other.  Analogous colors:  those right next to each other.  Apparently, there are defined ways of putting colors together in order to create an attractive combination.


Then she told us about the painting "Blue Boy" by Thomas Gainsborough. 

Apparently Gainsborough broke the color theory rules when he created this painting.  The theory is that warm colors give the feeling of moving toward the viewer, while cool colors--like blue--give the feeling of receding from the viewer.  Gainsborough proved this didn't necessarily have to be the case, because Blue Boy feels fully front and center in this painting.  Of course, if there are any warm colors to be found in this painting they are very muted.

I have no idea why this particular thing of the many things that art education teacher taught us stuck in my head, but it did.  So my Storm at Sea is my own attempt to make cool colors come forward.  I'm doing it by making the background totally black.  A cheat compared to Gainsborough's beautiful painting.  Nevertheless, there you have it.