Hello Houston

Updated with a photo from the Andover booth.

This time every year there's a big quilt industry tradeshow and quilt festival in Houston. I didn't go, but two of my quilts are there.

Thomas Knauer brought my Hurle Burle Marx quilt to show off his Frippery fabric collection for Andover Fabrics. Here's an action shot of Thomas showing the quilt in a Friday "schoolhouse" session, tweeted by the Fat Quarter Shop team.

Photo Credit: Fat Quarter Shop

And here it is hanging in the Andover Fabrics booth.

Photo credit: Heather Grant

On the festival side, my Ripple quilt is included in The Modern Quilt Guild Showcase 2012, a juried collection of quilts made by members of the modern quilt guild. Alissa took this photo of the quilt hanging in Houston.

Photo credit: Alissa Haight Carlton

The Modern Quilt Guild has some more photos of the collection on Facebook.

Looking at the quilts side by side (or top and bottom) I realize both are riffs on the traditional drunkards path block, taken in very different directions.

There's a good chance I'll make it to Spring Quilt Market in Portland next May. It will be great to meet in real life so many of the people I interact with in the online quilting community. But for now, it's fun to have my quilts in the mix.

Hurle Burle Marx Quilt

I've just finished a quilt using Thomas Knauer's new Frippery fabric collection for Andover fabrics. It's bright and a bit crazy.

The design of the quilt is inspired by the work of Brazilian landscape architect and artist Roberto Burle Marx. Burle Marx had a bold graphical style that is on display in private gardens and huge public spaces throughout Brazil and around the world, including the iconic paving design of the Copacabana Promenade in Rio de Janeiro.

Thomas had asked for an energetic modernism. Thomas's brief and the exuberant geometries of the fabric line made me think of modern tropical landscapes. (Confession: the list of things that make me think of modern tropical landscapes is long and varied.) And that led me back to Burle Marx. I love how his designs capture both a retro 50's space-age aesthetic and a 70's rainbow vibe.

The quilt is constructed in thirty 12" (finished) blocks, using squares and rectangles, and drunkard's path and point-to-point curve units in various sizes. The blue background uses an egg print in three Frippery color ways and three blue solids. The red background uses the Frippery tonal swirl in red and gold and two salmon/red solids. The circles feature Thomas's large-scale prints.

I quilted free motion on my domestic machine using three quilting patterns. The circles have a radiating asterisk pattern similar to the Frippery firework print. The two backgrounds use patterns from Angela Walters's Free Motion Quilting. I used "Flower Power" on the red background, and wavy lines & pebbles on the blue.

It was pretty easy to get the hang of the flower pattern, an the quilting went quickly. The lines and pebbles were trickier. It's hard to free-motion quilt continuous lines without getting jiggy and jaggy, and the pebbles just take a long time (and a lot of thread). The best thing about the pebbles is that they are great for hiding those jigs and jags. I quilted with Aurifil 50wt cotton thread in salmon and aqua. The thread was wonderful to work with, giving me even tension and only one or two thread breaks.

I used all the scraps from the front on the back, along with some larger pieces of the large-scale prints. I trimmed all the quarter-arc scraps from the drunkard's path units into triangles and made half-square triangle units.

The quilting shows beautifully on the back.

The binding is the red arc print from the collection (the blue arcs appear on both sides of the quilt). It's a double-fold bias binding, hand-finished on the back.

Frippey started showing up in online shops last week, including Fat Quarter Shop and Hawthorne Threads.