Tacoma Lakes Quilt Show

Our quilt show was held over the weekend, and it seemed to be a great success. It was months long in the planning and then over before I knew it. I was the Registrar for quilt entry, so I was pretty busy the last couple weeks before the show, taking in quilts, making sure they were ready for hanging, helping to lay out the show, and logging in all the entry numbers.

We set up the show Friday night; and other than decorations, we set up the entire show--118 quilts--in less than three hours. Every committee was well organized, and everyone knew exactly what they needed to do. Sunday evening, I think the whole thing came down in about 45 minutes. We used a gymnasium at a local elementary school. The lighting was fabulous, and we had plenty of room to move around.

Our special exhibit was a display of America the Beautiful quilts, a year-long project from McCall's Quilting magazine a few years back. The group that made these challenged themselves to use only fabrics and scraps they had on hand. They were all so different and turned out so beautifully.

Viewers Choice was awarded to SallyC for this spectacular bargello. Sally is one of our newer members. I didn't find out until this weekend that she is also a new quilter. This quilt was only her second quilt. Pretty impressive, huh?

Sherry's Prairie Sampler was one of my very favorites. I loved everything about this quilt.

Margo's Ohio Collection was another of my favorites. I have the book and would very much like to make it one of these days.

Suanne's quilt was so fun, and I really like this one too. She collected pinup girls for 10 years in order to have enough different fabrics. I wish I'd gotten a picture of the back, because there were larger squares of the pinup girls on the back too. The quilt is called "For the Man Who Loves Women" and was a gift for her brother-in-law.

I got my little crocus finished in time for the show too and put it in the minis section. I blogged about this quilt a long time ago, got the top finished and never got it quilted. Story of my life.

I can never decide how to quilt these little quilts because I don't hand quilt; and stitch in the ditch is, in my opinion, a pain. Nonetheless, I did a little topstitching with a 100-weight thread, which I liked, and ditch quilted the rest of it.

When I outlined the leaves, I carried the tan thread out into the borders but didn't like the way the tan thread looked on the border fabric. So I took a dark purple Sharpie and colored the thread. It worked great, and that's not the first time I've done that. Sharpies are good for a lot of little touchups like that. I used Sharpies to color the threads that frayed around the arcs in the clock quilt too.