applique – Sandy Gilreath

Hot Hot Summertime

One of our favorite pastimes is going shopping for antiques. Now the words thrifting or junking are more popular than antiquing…but whatever you call it, Jim and I enjoy doing it.

One of our favorite haunts is Monroe, GA. It’s the birthplace of my partner in crime, so the route there and back is filled with stories of his childhood travels in that part of the state. So as we travel to find treasures, we travel through time, too.

On our most recent visit, we took along a quilt. It’s made with brightly colored fabrics using a pattern by Tula Pink called Birdseed. I followed her suggestions for background fabrics in shades of gray, and pulled bright prints from my stash for the orange peel and flying geese blocks.

I love quilts that combine applique and piecing, and this simple design gave me some handwork to do in front of the tv at night with minimal preparation. In fact, to decrease that prep time even more, I used my Accuquilt cutting device to cut the melons. The size die I had did not match Tula’s template size, so I resized the whole quilt. I don’t know how many units her pattern specified; I just made them until I thought I had enough; put them on the design wall and moved them around until I was happy. Then I sewed them together.

I pieced brightly colored fabrics for the backing, layered and pin-based the whole thing, then put it aside until this spring. Quilting it was fun. I played with different free-motion designs in each area enclosed by the melons. As I finished this project, the daily high temperatures were three digits. The vibrant colors in the quilt said, it’s Hot Hot Summertime, so that’s the title.

Several of the antique malls we visit in Monroe, Ga (throughout the state, actually) are housed in old textile mills. In front of Hodge Podge are some old techology relics. We posed Hot Hot Summertime in several spots on that property. Her vibrant colors are a nice contrast with the dull rust machinery; her soft texture pleasing against the hard surfaces of brick and stone.

The entrance to another shop there provided a nice background for the quilt, too.

The quilt’s finished size is 46” x 55”, perfect for a napping quilt. Yes, I’ve done that!

A vintage coaster (purchased on an earlier trip to this antique mall) serves as the label for the quilt.

The Rebellious Weathergirl

My latest finished quilt is a journal quilt of sorts. The background squares are color coded to the lowest temperature of a given day, the melon appliquéd on top indicates the high temperature. My quilt has more than 365 blocks, and they aren’t arranged chronologically, but the quilt still tells my story of 2023.

While I was sewing on the binding, I dropped the quilt to the floor to go get more thread, and I loved how it puddled…where the front and back are visible and melons of two sizes show in the same shot.

I knew from the start that my arrangement of blocks would not be chronological. I had seen quite a few photos of temperature quilts using various blocks to show the high and low temperatures of the day and with my love of journal quilts, I thought it would be fun to do. Some people even include stitches to depict rain, snow, wind, but temperatures seemed enough for me.

i decided on appliquéd melons as my quilt block and chose to use a range of Cherrywood hand-dyed solid fabrics already selected by another quilting blogger. I cut 3” squares of fabrics, made a melon template that fit within that 3”, and was ready to sew.

Each day in 2023, I checked the previous day’s temperature data, recorded the figures on my spreadsheet, pulled the fabrics from my dedicated stash, and appliquéd a melon. On days when we were away from home, I recorded the temperatures for Macon and for our physical location, stitching the blocks when I returned home.

Early in 2024, I assembled the blocks on the design wall in monthly arrays, and made photos. I also assembled two chronological arrays using 365 blocks; one for the temperatures at home, one for the temperatures in whatever location we had been. With trips to Scotland, Colorado, and Louisiana, there were visible differences in those two arrangements.

Here I’m removing days from the Macon arrangement and replacing them with our travel days.

This is the final layout I assembled…reminding me of the Dots and Vines quilt I made similarly with circles.

I used a variegated thread to stitch it all together with a meandering quilting line.

I uploaded those two photos to Spoonflower (an online digital printing service) and had each one printed on ½ yard of cotton fabric. I was then free to arrange the 400 blocks in a more pleasing arrangement than the calendar provided. So I spent a few days moving blocks and looking, moving again, and finally settling on an arrangement that pleased me.

The image on the top left shows chronological temperatures in Macon, GA 2023, the image on the right shows temperatures wherever we were.

The back of the quilt holds records of the two chronological layouts, and a strip that shows the temperature range assigned to each color. The label is a vintage doily overdyed with indigo dye and the title, The Rebellious Weathergirl, acknowledges the fact that I knowingly broke the rules of temperature quilting. The quilt measures 50” square and is finished with a ⅜” plaid binding.

Welcome to Quilt Village

One aisle of bed quilts and large wall hangings.

I just spent three days with my quilting sisters. We hosted our guild’s quilt show and had a blast! Normally held biennially, it had been four years since our big weekend party. Covid had forced us to cancel our show in 2020, so we were ready to get back to business sharing our love of quilting with others.

We host the show to share our passion and educate others about the history of quilting, the art of quilting, and the availability of resources available locally. The truth is that members of the guild are also inspired by this display. We’ve seen most of these quilts before in meetings at our show and tell sessions. But having them hang together for three days gives us a chance to visit, to examine things up close, to ask questions of each other, and to learn.

Susan’s *Sweet Dreams* quilt was made with many vintage feedsacks.

It’s a lot of work to put on a show. Planning has been going on for months. Members submit entry forms for quilts, members share the tasks of organizing that information, preparing booklets, labels, ballots, ribbons, and a floor layout. On Thursday, all that comes into play as we “hang the show”.

On Thursday night, members and our guests meet to bask in the beauty with each other. We examine the quilts and cast our votes in several categories. “Quilters’ Choice” ribbons are awarded by our ribbon queen Tess at our members’ reception.

During the show, we love visiting with our guests. Some visitors are not quilters, but friends of quilters, or folks who are interested in every art form they can find. Answering their questions gives us a new perspective on what we do…seeing our work through the eyes of those who might not be quilters puts a new spin on things. Other visitors are quilters from other guilds in the area, and I love to chat with them and learn about their quilting and their stitching groups. In fact, I wrangled invitations to visit a couple of groups soon. You’ll hear about them in the future.

At the end of the show, more ribbons are awarded (viewers’ choices) along with the winners of our silent auction quilts and our raffle quilt. More details of some quilts and their makers are in the captions of photos that follow.

Angie’s *Roseville Album* won many awards: Best Appliqué, Best Bed Quilt, Best of Show, and 1st place Viewers’ Choice.

Pam is telling visitors about her *Wind Beneath My Wings* quilt which included some vintage barkcloth.

Marie’s *Heart Strings* portrays an image of her homeplace. I love of Marie’s use of raw edges, hand stitching, and photos on fabric.

Donna’s Italy Dream won 3rd place in the Wall Quilt category.

Yvonne’s quilt, *Betty’s Quilt*, won Best Hand Quilting. Whole cloth quilts are always loved by viewers.

**Starlight**, a beauty pieced by Donna, shows Dewey’s astounding longarm quilting. (He’s the same genius who prepares our floor layout.)

One of many scrappy quilts in our show, Kathy’s **Selvage Kites** features selvages from her stash in the background of the stars.

Is This the Party To Whom I am Speaking? (above) is a bold graphic quilt…but the title comes from the fact that Kathy’s mother is a retired telephone operator. Kathy collected fabrics with images of phones to include in her quilt. The detailed shot at the left shows some of those.

*Idaho Square Dance* was made by a new quilter. Carol got interested in quilting after making hundreds of facemasks for Covid in 2020. She needed to do something with her scraps. This is one of her first half-dozen quilts. And, she does her own quilting on her home machine.

*Heaven’s Home* was begun by beloved member Jean and completed by her son and daughter. Duree finished piecing the quilt, son Dewey quilted it on his longarm.

This photo shows many of my sisters as we pose with a group of quilts we made for the Methodist Home for Children. Our show was displayed in their gymnasium.

I had several quilts in the show, won’t bore you with all….but a few with links to their stories are here.

We shared our Challenge quilts from the past four years and my *Playhouse in the Chickenyard* was fun for many visitors, especially the men who attended. You can read that story here.

My *Miss Nellie’s Country Garden* sported a Viewers’ Choice ribbon on Saturday afternoon. Her story is here.

I admit that seeing my own quilt hung in the show inspired me…to do more work using linen. The lighting on this shot of *Paducah Journey* shows how wool batting and linen fabric work together to create glorious texture.

Heart Project Update

Today is the last day of February, time to report on my heart project.

I did not stitch just one heart per day….nearly fifty are on this piece now. One stage of the process is complete now…the appliqué. Well, it’s complete until I decide to add something.

I do plan to add some buttons and to quilt it at some point. But for now, it’s a linen tablecloth with some hearts appliquéd on it.

I did stitch a heart on the backside of the ragged spot and stitched around it on the front. It may be left this way. Or not.

I’ve been asked about the size of the piece. It is now……33″ x 47”. The original tablecloth measured 33” x 84”, a runner for a French farmhouse. I removed one end and reattached it to make it a size that works for me.

I will let this project incubate for a while as I work on other projects. At some point, it will be quilted. I enjoyed the stitching on linen so much that I may decide to hand quilt this one. Time will tell.

A Christmas Garden

We have a new Christmas quilt in our house this year.

This large quilt was finished earlier this year, but I wanted to share it at Christmastime. It hasn’t been on a photo shoot outdoors yet, but here are some shots and its stitching story.

The design is from a Barb Adams and Alma Allen book, Where the Cold Wind Blows. The pattern Mistletoe and Holly looks quite different in their version, but the appliqué basket is their creation.

I had this fabulous toile-like fabric that looked a bit Christmasey to me, with lots of green and brown and red. Wanting to leave big swatches of that intact in the background, I chose to do minimal piecing.