Silk scarves Sassaman style

These are some of the quilts that will be in Jane’s new book, Patchwork Sassaman Style, coming out in the Spring. They are made from her fabric line for Free Spirit and are totally captivating with all the detail and color and pattern going on.

We’ve decided that they would make some luscious silk scarves and will have them printed for sale on our websites BUT we wanted to have your input. Which design would you want to see on a silk scarf?  Put the name of the design(found below each design) in the Comment Section below and we’ll pick someone at random to win a Sassaman mousepad.

                                  SPIDERWEB

                              GYPSY

 

                       PRIMROSE

                   DAISY.

Please just vote once since this will be on Jane’s blog also. Thanks for helping us!

Early Christmas

Christmas came a little early this year for me. Noriko Endo, author of Confetti Naturescapes, made a quilt for above my livingroom fireplace and showed it to me in Houston. It is Spring in Japan with cherry blossoms at their peak reflected on water below and it is just breathtaking!  So I bought it!

She has made cherry blossom quilts before where she hand cut the 5-petal blossoms with a little notch in each petal. Then her husband helped her hand color the centers. Well this one was much easier. Accuquilt made her a special die for the Go Baby fabric cutting machine. She could place 6 layers of fabric under the die and get dozens of little blossoms perfectly cut in a few seconds!  Silk and cotton were used.  This Cherry Blossom die will be on the market soon so you can try this technique too!

Also while in Houston, there was a silent auction with small quilts donated by the teachers and others. I bid on a beautiful little Pat Holly masterpiece. The pieces are so small that I don’t know how she gets them sewn on!  Pat is also in the Bernina Master Artisans group and I met her on our trip to the Bernina factory in Switzerland. She was there with her sister Sue Nickels. Pat lives in Ann Arbor where my son just started at U Michigan!

The way the auction works is that you bid on a sheet of paper with your number and then after a certain time limit, the high bid wins. Most of us bid and then leave so we don’t know who won. Well half an hour before the end of this auction, I texted my Quilt Festival roomie, Susan Brubaker Knapp, who was still there and asked her to go by the table and tell me if I was winning.

She texted me that I had been outbid so I asked her to write in a higher bid for me. Then she decided to stand by the table to watch until the end and ‘protect’ my bid. Here’s the photo that she sent me! Can you recognize two who are picking up some of the quilts at the end?

Thanks to Susan, I won the quilt Magical Mehrangarh Memory by Pat Holly!!  I was thrilled!

 

It is 12 inches square so you can see how tiny some of these pieces are! What incredible workmanship! I feel so lucky!

A visit to NYC & Koos

 

After teaching ten classes at Quilt Festival, Philippa Naylor was tired and wanted to spend a few days in New York City before flying back to the UK so I gave her the tour! First stop the Met Museum with lovely works that could all be inspiration for a quilt in our eyes!

Next stop was the KOOS boutique where the owner, Puck, showed us the newest artwear creations while we tried on a few! The store is on Madison at 92nd St and a must for all you collage lovers! It’s small but packed with the most beautiful mixes of fabrics and just exciting things to see! I wrote the book, Koos Collage Couture, 22 years after apprenticing with Koos while at Pratt Institute. You can find Koos on facebook where he posts photos of his latest creations.

 

Rockefeller Center-left- had ice skaters (and also the Anthropologie flagship store). Bryant Park-right-behind the library on Fifth and 42nd Street was transformed into a fantastic winter venue! They had an ice rink and then all these temporary little kiosks of vendors where we got such items as NYC scenes on tiles and t-shirts. It was very warm weather and fun to walk around the park shopping. Then we met my friend Michael and ate outside while watching the skaters and enjoying the warm night air!

Our last day we spent at Koos’s workroom in the Garment District.

   I saw this dress and fell in love with it years ago. It has  interesting side draping and a fishtail drape in the center back! So unusual and I love unusual so I traced off the pattern. Well, it was so complex, I couldn’t make heads or tails of it so one of the

ladies helped me cut it out and pin it together for me to take home and sew. It came out beautifully  and I ended up making a second one too! It’s very forgiving fit. Philippa and I went fabric shopping to all the fantastic stores around there including MOOD,the famous store from Project Runway and she got some beautiful red and black wool.  Then we went to the best leather store around called Leather, Suede, Skins and she bought some fox dyed bright red to make a matching collar! It’ll be spectacular and unique for sure!

We ate great food and shopped until we dropped! The best thing we did was to see Daniel Radcliffe on Broadway in How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. He was a super song and dance man and amazing to watch/that show is a MUST SEE! Perhaps we can make NYC an annual trip after Houston!

Happy Thanksgiving to all!

Quilt Festival Quilts

Here is an overview of the Quilt Festival selling side of the show floor before opening:

 

And only here will you be able to see a QUILTED car!

Or a QUILTED horse!

There were some lovely group quilts where they took a photo and cut it into pieces, gave a piece to each quilter who interpreted it in fabric and then put it together. The method is explained in my book, Quilting Party…wish I had a group to do one of these again!

   

 

 

 

Here is Noriko Endo’s Confetti Naturescape entry this yr:

 

close up of section.

And here are some done by her students in her style:

  

And this cute one:

 

I have much more to show and giveaways to come so stay tuned!

Quilt Festival Classes

Just back from my 4 days in Houston at the International Quilt Festival. I haven’t taught in 4 years so I missed it and loved my classes! The students were so creative and loved sewing with silk and I enjoyed meeting them. Here’s some photos of their projects and you can see the variations of the projects.

And then in the afternoon Silk Flowers and Spirals quilt class:

And if you walk around the hallways and peek into the classrooms, you can see what you’d like to take next year!

Here is Philippa Naylor’s class…author of Quilting in the LImelight.  She offered 10 (TEN!) classes this year and some were double-filled! The hardest working quilt teacher…

Another of our authors, Noriko Endo’s confetti naturescapes classes were full also and with happy students.

This year I roomed with Susan Brubaker Knapp who taught some thread sketching and painting classes that everyone loved! Her new book is Point, Click,Quilt but I love her videos since you can see Susan actually sewing and it looks so easy! Susan is a rising star, more on her in the next blogs…

 

Do you feel as if you missed a great week? Well, you did!! Plan to attend next November and look for the class booklet this summer…you need to sign up IMMEDIATELY to get your first choices but then…they are all great classes!