San Francisco Quilt Show

The San Francisco Quilt Guild held its biannual quilt show last weekend. There were over 200 quilts displayed, and it was a great show. Here are some of the quilts in the show that I made (or at least worked on).

One of the categories was Miniature Quilts. I was working on this small Amish-style quilt (the one on the right in the photo) so I decided to put it in the show as a miniature, since it met the requirements. I did the flying geese parts using a foundation fabric. I didn't have enough time before the show to hand quilt it like I wanted to. I might still do some hand quilting before hanging it in my house. I think it's too dark with the black border - I should have used a color for the border, I think now. You can see that this category had quite a variety of quilts, based on the two hung next to mine!

The quilts in this group were made by members of my sewing circle. We had a fabric exchange where we exchanged 5" squares of fabrics, a different color each week. We ended up with ~100 squares. Then we each made a quilt out of them. Mine is the one in the center of this picture. I made a spool block out of each fabric, using some of them for the background and some for the spools. Then I set them in a solid green fabric and quilted it with a multicolored thread.


These blue quilts are part of the display of Challenge Quilts. There is a theme for the challenge quilts - this year it was "Indigo Passport". Everyone is to make a 24" square quilt, interpreting the theme however they want. Mine is the quilt on the right with the circles. I wanted to make a larger quilt with these fabrics and the quarter circle blocks, so I "practiced" on this little one. I have some nice, textured Asian fabrics that I think are perfect for this quilt. The other 2 in this picture were done by friends of mine and show a little of the variation in interpreting the theme.

Finally, this is a group quilt put together in a joint effort by my sewing circle. We used Ruth McDowell's book of paper-pieced vegetable patterns, and each chose 2 vegetables to make. (I made the ear of corn, and the 4 tomatoes.) Once we were done, we all got together and put them together into the quilt top. That was quite a contentious process - quilters have strong feelings about these things! But we forged ahead, and completed the top, and one of our members coordinated the quilting on her mid-arm quilting machine. We're going to donate it to the Food Bank. I really enjoyed doing the paper-pieced blocks, so I made more of them for myself, and am now composing my quilt top with them.

One of my volunteer jobs for the quilt show was helping with the judging, which was quite interesting. There were over 200 quilts in the show, and there were 5 judges hired to judge the quilts for various awards. We spent one long day in the home of our guild president displaying all the quilts, recording comments, and helping the judges as they looked at all the quilts and chose the winners. I learned a lot about how quilts are judged, so maybe for the next show I'll have mine judged! This year I opted out of judging for my quilts.