Empire Quilt Show-New York City

A trip to New York City vitalizes you but a trip to New York City for a quilt show is pure heaven. This past weekend a good friend and I took a trip to NY City to the Empire Quilt Guild Quilt Show. My husband and daughter's Christmas gift to me was a trip to NY City to hear Paula Nadelstern, world-renowned quilter, speak and share her quilts and techniques. Paula’s style is to capture in fabric what you would see in a kaleidoscope. Her lecture included information about her technique and process of her creations. Each kaleidoscope block she makes is an unknown creation until it is fully assembled giving the same thrill with each turn of a kaleidoscope – the unknown and beauty of each design. Her process involves looking at each unit and asking questions about the symmetry of each pieced component and the lines it will create in the pie shape before assembly – if up on one side, it will go down on the other. Her goal is to blend the seam lines in each unit so upon assembly of the block, the pieced seams will appear invisible and the contrast of the colors and texture of the fabric will dominate the block design. Here is a photograph of the star struck fan with Paula. She has connections to the State of Maine as her brother lives here. I knew I liked her for a reason. Paula will be showing her work at the Museum of Folk Art in NY City starting in April. If you get a chance, go see her work. She is amazing.

The Empire Quilt Guild’s show showed such diversity in their talent and entries. Here are a few of my favorite quilts from the show.

Thank you to my family for giving me a Christmas gift that created memories. A New York City trip would not be complete without a Broadway show or shows in my case. Linda and I saw Susan Sarandon in Exit the King – incredible. It was Susan’s first Broadway appearance since 1972. The play was a dark comedy with political metaphors that had each actor shining in their roles. We also saw the play, Impressionism with Jeremy Irons and Joan Allen, a mature intelligent love story. Our trip to New York City was full of creative inspiration restoring our souls for many more masterpieces.

Helping our communities

I have been working on two raffle quilts these past two weeks. What better way to share your quilting talent than to create quilts to be used for raffles to raise funds for a non-profit organizations. Our Fair Association had a block contest last year for contestants and I am now putting the blocks into a quilt top I designed. The theme of the blocks are blueberries. A friend of mine, Linda Trickey, helped with the design of this quilt. The top is done and now waiting for it to be machine quilted. Here is a computer design of the quilt created on EQ6, an incredible software program that can do it all. A real picture will soon follow as soon as I find two people tall enough to hold the quilt for a picture. It is a huge quilt.



The second raffle quilt is a major fund raiser for my quilt guild. Friends and Needle Quilt Guild www.friendsandneedle.org. The colors are in the beautiful tropical colors, turquoise, purples, greens, blues and red violets. Here is a computer drawing of the quilt sampler for our Guild's 25th Anniversary which will soon be made into fabric. Our group is 80 members strong with many talents. In 1984 our founder, Karen Gallop, started a small group of quilters who wanted to get together to share their quilting passion. To date we have grown from 10 members to over 80 members in our 25 years. Our guild sponsors a chapter of Project Linus, a non-profit organization that creates and gives blankets to children in need in their communities. To date we have given over 500 hundred blankets. This past month, our membership sponsored a Make A Blanket Day and made over 170 blankets to stock our cupboards for those wonderful children who have suffered a tragedy in their family, a loss or under medical care. Quilt Guilds have the ability to change lives and our guild proves that. I am honored to be part of a group of women who love quilting and make positive changes in our communities.