Two more little quilts... done!

Just a short post today to show you two small quilts I recently finished.  (It's always worth celebrating when I actually finish something!)  The quilt tops were both sewn at the quilt retreat I went to in April, so it's especially remarkable that I finished them both in the last month!

I received a charm pack (5 inch squares) of the colorful pieces (Benartex Fossil Fern) from my daughter at Christmas and I paired them with 5 inch squares of cream colored Kona to make this "disappearing nine-patch" lattice pattern.

I backed it with a colorful print of whimsical birds and flowers.

The dimensions of this quilt are 42x48 which is large enough to be sent to Quilts Beyond Borders.  QBB will then send the quilt somewhere in the world where it is needed by a child, usually a country that has some upheaval, a natural disaster, or lots of poverty and many orphans.  I like to think that my quilt will become a child's precious possession and provide them with much needed warmth and comfort.

The next quilt is a little smaller and is also made with 5 inch charm squares.  Many of these squares came my way through a couple of charm square exchanges I participated in over the last few years.  This quilt is called "I Spy Hugs and Kisses" because each of the colored pieces contain some recognizable images and they are arranged in a pattern of X's and O's.

I did my best to sort the squares by color so you could see the X's and O's.  This quilt is meant to engage children in finding objects, numbers, and colors... "How many dogs do you see?  I spy an octopus, do you?  What color is the pepper?"... You get the idea.  

I was able to find a backing fabric with wiggly lines, so quilting it was just a matter of following every third line!

I'm not sure where this quilt will end up.  Perhaps it would be a good quilt for our guild's annual gift to every local baby born on National Quilt Day.  National Quilt Day has recently passed, so I have a while to think about that.  In the meantime, I am anxious to try it out on my almost two year old grandchildren when they visit next month.

I made it into the Country Music Hall of Fame!

I have to admit, I was a little bit nervous about entering the CMHOF.  After all, I grew up in a northern city and came of age with the British rock groups of the late 60's.  I certainly didn't consider myself a country music fan.  Oh, I admit, I like the contemporary country pop crossover music that is featured in ABC's TV soup opera/drama, "Nashville," but that's not the really twangy stuff that I considered "country."  But I guess you can't live for 65 years immersed in American culture without picking up a little country... after all, I watched "The Beverly Hillbillies" and "Hee Haw" and "The Glen Campbell Show."

The woman who directed us to the elevator which would take us to the third floor start of the museum encouraged us not to miss the special Kenny Rogers exhibit and video that preceded the main museum exhibits.  Ah, Kenny Rogers.  That reminded me that Kenny Rogers was one of those country stars that crossed over into the pop charts... a lot of them did... and somewhere around 1980 I actually went to a Kenny Rogers concert in Montreal.  From the exhibit, I learned a bit about his early life that I didn't know, including the fact that he was one of the "New Christie Minstrels."  (Folk music was big when I was starting college in the late 60's, something else I could relate to.)  Humming "The Gambler" and "You picked a fine time to leave me, Lucille," I wandered into the permanent exhibit outlining the origins of country music.

There on the first screen I encountered was Asheville's own Bascom Lamar Lunsford singing!

In my last post I talked about the quilt that my friends and I were making as a fund raiser for Asheville's Shindig on the Green.  The Shindig is performed on the outdoor Bascom Lamar Lunsford stage in Asheville and every week the emcee recounts how Lunsford worked to preserve the music that was indigenous to the settlers of the Appalachian region.  Okay, maybe I did know a bit about country music after all.

We did pay the extra fee to get the audio tour, something that we usually do when we go to museums that have a wealth of material in them.  The audio wands generally give a fuller explanation to the exhibits and go beyond what is written or presented in the display cases.  

One large wall is decorated with Hatch Letterpress Show Prints and reproduced posters from historic concerts.  Hatch Letterpress is located in the same building as the museum and is still producing show posters.  I took a photo of Patsy Cline, since we plan to go to see the Flat Rock Theater production of her life story this coming week.

There were several vehicles and cars on display, including Elvis' Cadillac which featured a small TV, a freezer that could produce ice, and a phone that could be used to call the driver from the back seat.

One particular display that appealed to me featured Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan's collaboration which did much to entice many pop musicians to spend time writing and recording in the Nashville sound studios.

That extensive exhibit was enhanced by the commissioned art work of Jon Langford and was visually as well as auditorily interesting.

And, of course, at the end of the formal exhibits is the actual Hall of Fame where inductees are memorialized by bronze plaques which highlight their accomplishments.  The actual hall is a visually pleasing space with a soaring ceiling decorated by an inverted radio tower.

In a central place is a special commissioned painting called "The Sources of Country Music" by Thomas Hart Benton which was lovely to see.

After we left the museum I had a cup of coffee with Johnny Cash.

I loved the photo of a young Johnny holding a coffee cup that graced the front of the cafe that was part of the Johnny Cash Museum and right across the street from the Goo Goo Cluster factory.

Yes, we did purchase a custom Goo Goo Cluster... and then walked down Broadway where we ran into Elvis!

And I knew why he was stranded on the street.  His car is in the Hall of Fame after all!

I'm seeing RED!

It all started a few months ago when the collaborative I have with my friends Alice and Cheryl, the Mountain Jam Circle, decided on a pattern and color scheme for the quilt we have been donating to the local Folk Heritage Committee to be raffled off during the summer to support "Shindig on the Green."

We decided to use our "stashes" to create blocks of red and white (or neutral or beige).  When I went through my fabrics, I was amazed at how many red fabrics I had.  However I didn't have very many neutrals.

For each block we needed a central 5 inch square of a red, four smaller squares of the same red, and four rectangles of a neutral.  I went to town cutting my fabric squares and didn't really keep track of how many I was cutting.  Turns out I had plenty for the 15 squares I was assigned to make, plus I made a few extra... and I still had a generous pile of 5 inch squares left over!

So last month we got together and stitched together the quilt top.  Here we are holding up the top which is single bed sized:

Alice had cut all the beige background fabric that was also used for the border.  Cheryl took the quilt top home and she will do the machine heirloom quilting which will transform this top into something spectacular!  No doubt you will see the completed quilt on this blog fairly soon.

Since we all had made some extra blocks, we ended up with 12 unused blocks which Alice and I stitched into a smaller quilt top.

You'll notice that even though we used the same basic block, the Shindig quilt is set on point with alternating blocks of beige, while the smaller quilt is set with the blocks lined up in rows.  

I took the little quilt home and quilted it and backed it with fabric we had had left over from a prior Shindig quilt and added a binding from that stash box of red fabrics that I have.

Here it is draped over a chair in my living room:

 And a closer look, so you can see the binding.

Well, you might remember that I had quite a few of those red 5 inch squares already cut, so I decided to make yet another red and white quilt.  I used a very simple pattern called "disappearing nine patch" and set the squares on point to get this quilt top:

I think it's about 50 inches square, which is a good size for practicing my free motion quilting.  When it gets quilted, it will probably deserve a nicer picture on this blog.  Right now I don't have an appropriate piece of backing fabric, so it may be a while...

I hope our Shindig quilt makes a lot of money for the Folk Heritage Committee and perhaps these two smaller quilts will warm someone's lap or make a nice place for a baby to play!