I promised you quilt show pics

I almost forgot!
Though I have to admit, I took a lot fewer pictures than I thought I did.  Part of it was camnesia - too busy gasping at all the beauty to snap a photo - and part was because it was a small museum with a lot of quilts on display, so the aisles were narrow and it was hard to stand back far enough to get a good shot.
Here are just a few of the things we saw, anyway.  (And some of these pics are mostly for me - notes to refer to later, as it were.  That's what blogs are for, right?)

I'm always a sucker for a good nine patch -

and the nine patches appliqued in the border of that one really made me smile.
And more nine patches, this time as a star.

And a really pretty nine patch quilt that made me fall in love with nine patches all over again.

Let's take a closer look, okay?
Here's the label.

That's a file card sized label clipped to the quilt with a clothespin.  Consider for a moment how wide a clothespin is, then compare that to the size of the nine-patch squares...
And here's a close-up of that label.  Omigosh! is right!

 I especially like what she named her quilt - "Never Again"...

I backed up as far as I could to get that last shot and still couldn't catch the whole thing.  Big quilt, tiny pieces, gorgeous color.
I can feel another of those crazy itches I get in the back of my brain.  I've certainly got lots of tiny scraps...

As a not-so-crazy alternative, here's a pretty setting for four patches.  I'm avidly collecting four patch ideas since they've been my leader/enders for most of the last year.

And here's a pretty 25 patch - I love the applique.

One huge quilt that really knocked my socks off (Seriously.  I had to sit down on the floor and put them back on and everything.) was this huge sampler quilt done in Civil War repros.
It was so big I could only catch parts of it at a time.  Here's the center -

and here's (most of) the upper left quadrant.  This one was in a particularly narrow aisle, and the lighting wasn't the best, so I'm disappointed at not being able to get a photo of the whole thing.

It was one flat-out gorgeous sampler.  I lost track of how many blocks were used in it.  There was a general symmetry used, but blocks varied in pattern within the same size range.

On a more modern note, I loved this quilt - the colors and pattern both.  And hey!  Another excuse to use the tri-recs rulers!

Most of the show was comprised of guild quilts ('guild quilts' was really hard to type, for some reason;  like the written equivalent of a tongue-twister...), but there was a section of antique quilts as well.  There were several glorious crazy quilts which resisted my best efforts to photograph them, and a large redwork quilt from 1889 that was almost as wily.

My sister-in-law does lovely redwork, and has done a couple of quilts in it, so we spent quite a lot of time ooohing and aaahing over this one.

It looked like each block was designed by the maker, since there were a variety of styles and fonts used in it.  The stitches were TINY.   Tiny tiny tiny.  SIL pointed out one small line to me and said that she would have made it using about three stitches, but the maker of the block had used at least ten.

But the show wasn't all quilts and giggles.  Because it was set up in the historical society museum, there were other displays tucked away here and there.  Way in the back we found this wonderful motorcycle.

Check out those handlebars.

And the seat isn't where you'd expect it to be.

The venue for the show is the Tioga County Historical Society Museum and the quilt show is called 'Quilts by the River', running through the end of April.  If you're in the upstate NY area, be sure to check it out!