Springtime is quilt show season. Early April was the Foothill Quilt Guild show in Auburn, I entered 5 quilts. At the beginning of the year, I usually plan on making a large art quilt. Last year I made 'Melman, the Vulnerable Giraffe'. I entered him in this show and later he was juried into The World of Color Exhibit at IQF Houston. This year I made 'Bullseye X Nine'

The story behind this quilt; I met a customer dropping off t-shirts for a quilt, at my local coffee shop and she had her two dogs with her. Since I am always looking for subjects for my pet portrait quilts, I have no pets of my own, I took photos. I loved this one of Bullseye with his great big black eye. I manipulated the photo into three values; black, white and grey which I had never done before.

I made one 18" block for this quilt in black, white and grey. I made up pattern pieces with freezer paper so I could then make colored blocks. I made 3 more blocks thinking this would be a 4-patch quilt. It was looking good but I needed more. I had decided to use my own hand dyed fabrics in bright complementary colors and then used a commercial fabric colored in a darker color to use for the black areas. My choice now was to make a 9-patch so I had to make 5 more blocks. I was now on a bit of a tight timeline to get a photo of how the finished quilt would look to enter it into our show. Once these were done I laid the black and white one in the center of all the colored blocks and really it did't look right, so I had no choice but to make one more block!

Bullseye on my design floor figuring out colors and layout.

I hadn't realized how tricky it would be to figure out the dog and background colors in the correct layout. I seemed to go around in circles! Anyhow I figured it all out and got the quilt quilted and finished during the week before the show and guess what I won 'Best of Show!' That is the first time my work has been recognized at that level. I was truly happy and amazed.

Finally the highlight of the show for me and many others who were viewing the show was when Bullseye and his owners came to visit the show and the quilt.

Last weekend was the Pine Tree Quilt Guild show in Grass Valley. I did enter a couple of my quilts but spent most of the weekend hanging out with Artistic Alchemy as we were promoting our Tahoe retreat in September. We each had examples of our work and goodies for sale and we got 5 new sign-ups for the retreat too.

In April I taught two fabric collage classes for the River City Quilters Guild and the Santa Clara Valley Quilters Association. Both classes were maxed out and I was very impressed with what students achieved. Here are some of the work in progress photos form those classes and in time as students send me photos of completed works I will show those photos too.

Completed student work from Fish, Frogs and Reptiles Fabric Collage class

If you wish to learn fabric collage from me look at my Calendar page to see details about the retreat and up coming classes and contact me. I will share details of my classes at IQF Houston and Craft Napa soon.