October is for Catchups

(Ketchups?  Naw.)

My Goosey Temps quilt is now caught up through the end of September and I've started laying out triangles to get October rolling.  (That's June, July, and August on the right.)

And I've been puttering away with my Sand Castles - trying to get caught up with the pinks and blues that I got behind on.

 A lovely interruption to all this diligence was the Quilter's Guild show that took place last weekend.  My sister-in-law called to see if I'd even heard it was happening (I hadn't) and if I had any plans to go see it (I didn't), so we met up an hour later and headed on up.  (Life is short.  Get in the car and go look at quilts whenever the opportunity is offered.)

I dutifully brought my camera, then dutifully neglected to take many pictures, despite the fact that the show was loaded with gorgeous work.  Here's one of my very favorites, which was one of the first ones I saw going in, before camnesia set in.

Now you may be thinking, "yeah yeah, applique, how nice", but here's another picture that will give you an idea of the scale of this quilt.

The camera is about 6" from the quilt, and my fingers are hovering about 2" above the surface.  Those little grapey dots?  They're about 1/8" in diameter.  And needle-turned.  One at a time by the hundreds.  I wouldn't have even thought it possible.  I still don't even think it's possible and I saw it with my own eyes.

Another quilt I loved was this framed four-patch made with aboriginal fabrics.  The picture doesn't do justice to all the bright happy colors.

And this one caught my eye, with even more four-patches.  (I admit I'm a total sucker for anything four-patchy!)

I almost didn't get that picture, though.  As I was backing up to get more of it into the shot, I kept  watch in my peripheral vision for the quilts behind me, but wasn't thinking about the wooden bases that stuck out near the floor.

Ooops!  As I floundered for balance, I had a sudden vision of causing a domino-style disaster of all those quilt racks...





Luckily, I'm not actually THAT clumsy...


Linking with SoScrappy for ScrapHappy Saturday (even though it's Sunday - oops again!) and with Quilting is more fun than Housework for Oh Scrap!  Come see all the colorful fun!

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!