Hallelujah! Two finished quilts!

I'm very excited! I finished two quilts in one week. OK, that could be two in one month, or two in one season, too -- I hadn't finished another since last March. And actually, one still needs to be bound and washed.

I finished "Down Under" last Friday, with motivation that came to me in the form of e-mails from both Pacific Piecemakers Quilt Guild (PPQG) and East Bay Heritage Quilters (EBHQ). Both sent out a call for quilt submissions, with only a few days' notice, for Lark Publication's upcoming book, 500 Quilts. I had the quilt sandwiched but not quilted or bound, so I went for it, finishing just in time to shoot some photos and head to the post office. Unfortunately, I had to count on my own photography, and no photo software corrections were allowed. The quilt really is square, though it doesn't look it here.

This small piece incorporates lessons from a variety of workshops I've taken over the past year or two. With Jane Sassaman, I started playing with a shape I liked: the Sydney Opera House. (This is actually the third quilt I've made that includes that building.) The shape is simplified and stylized, based on a line drawing of it I saw somewhere. (I'd give credit if I had any idea where I saw the drawing.) I rotated the Opera House as Jane might rotate leaves. The curves represent the arch of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, which I am thrilled to have climbed. Ever since a workshop with Miriam Nathan Roberts, I have been wanting to get more abstract in my work, and this is my attempt to do so. The fusing method used for making the top and the quilt sandwich involves a technique I learned from Pamela Allen and Sue Benner, and the composition itself was done during a Sue Benner workshop. I decided how to quilt the piece after pondering all we learned during a weeklong workshop I had the privilege of hosting in October, with Hollis Chatelain teaching us how to work with color, threads, lines, and a dozen other factors to create background, middle ground, and foreground (among a host of other things, quilt-related and otherwise).

So the question is: can I claim this quilt as my own original work? It was certainly influenced by all these amazing artists who share their expertise through teaching, and yet, the overall design, composition, fabric and thread choices, and of course, the execution, are mine. I have heard that workshop products should never be entered in shows (or, I suppose, submitted for publication), but don't we all learn from others all the time? I'd love to hear your opinions on this topic.


I finished hand quilting the Tesselation piece just an hour ago, at my weekly quilt group of eight friends. These women can attest that this quilt has been YEARS in the making, which is really obvious to me as I look at the individual fabrics, many of which -- the more traditional ones -- I would never have bought in recent years. I do love the colors, and I hand quilted it just so that every week, I would have something to work on as we sat at our group, sewing and chatting. I didn't worry about hand quilting with uniformly small stitches, nor about laying out the clamshell pattern very precisely. I simply stitched for the no-stress pleasure of it. By our next meeting, I'll have the binding on and then I'll wash out all the marking pencil and let it get that "antique" look of a washed quilt. With a finished product, and it being the week before Thanksgiving, my Cavalier, Logan, and I think it appropriate that my shirt says, with bling, "Give Thanks."