Gallery - QuiltCon 2016

"Often, when I design quilts I start with a shape in mind. In this case it was a ring. After playing with colors and lay outs and settling on this one, it reminded me of those stacks of huge pipes you sometimes see during summer road construction season. I hope there is an invisible one in the bottom right corner and that the yellow one isn't the one they need first! The quilting continues the theme with a ""road"" quilted in white thread from the upper right to lower left. The remainder of the quilt is echo-quilted off the road."

I was thinking a lot about why we work so hard to get "somewhere" while making this quilt. Life can feel like an uphill battle, yet we don't always pause to think about what is on the other side. Is it worth the climb? I must have been optimistic at the time because a steep climb leads to a gentle slope with increased visual interest and hand-painted fabric. The children's song "The Bear Went Over the Mountain" was stuck in my head for weeks as I worked on this quilt.

I reworked a block I designed earlier this year for the Cirrus Solids BOM challenge. The woven glitz fabrics show how we, individual people, are different colors and have different features, and how our lives intertwine with others over our lifetimes. The lives of the people that we have these relationships with, also intertwine with people we will never meet and never directly have any impact on because we lead parallel lives. However, the circular stitching exposes the bits and pieces of ourselves that get carried from our direct relationships to these parallel relationships. Without our knowledge, bits and pieces of ourselves are deposited into others lives and we never know if these pieces will have a small or a significant impact. Moral of the story: Your life affects more than just the people you know first-hand, so make sure your life is worth sharing.

Juxtaposing a graphic and organic pop with crisp geometric piecing in her quilt Stone + Bloom, Kelsey explores layering through minimal forms. Screen printing over her finished quilt tops, Kelsey selectively masks and over-prints the image to present a modern puzzle of layers for the viewer to experience. The printed image is further enhanced through utilization of free-motion and straight-line quilting, which subtly highlights the nuanced layers and hand-printed fabrics throughout.

Concordia came about from another design I had sketched. As I tweaked the design, a more complex design emerged. I colored the tips of the geese to offer sharp, contrasting triangles and chose dark lines to frame the design allowing the eyes to keep moving. Keeping the quilt in monochromatic colors satisfied my aesthetic style. This quilt is paper pieced and hand quilted.

A new spin (HA!) on a familiar pinwheel design. I made the pinwheels interlock so that the block construction is harder to recognize. The lighter background section is that size because I ran out of that color and chose to keep going anyway.

I love the classic shapes found in traditional quilts. Pickled Beets was inspired by the triangles that are captured in curves found in some Pickle Dish quilts. This large arcs of this quilt were drafted in Illustrator and then the paper piecing templates were printed on large engineering prints. This color and layout of this quilt was inspired by the modern Indah batiks and hand dyed solids by Me + You. The name Pickled Beets is a play on the word "pickle" from the Pickle Dish quilts that inspired it.

The black and white Michael Miller Glitz fabric immediately reminded me of the battle my right and left brain have in my life. I have been using half rectangle triangles recently and felt that one twisted strand of each confetti border, fading from heavy dots to light dots, perfectly depicts "the dance" the two sides of my brain engage in every single day. The quilting also reflects my constant decision struggle of linear versus free motion quilting. I purposely started without a plan and the result yielded very typical tidy partitions and then some very off-course journeys.

I was inspired by a crisp October day with a deep turquoise sky and the beautiful golden trees. I machine appliqued the leaves and arranged them as if the wind was blowing the trees and making the leaves flutter around me. Stipple quilting in the background makes the leaves stand out.

"This quilt was designed for a Boston Modern Quilt Guild challenge. The challenge required the use of the colors grey, soft white, black, red, and powder blue. Trees inspire me. Trees are everywhere I look. They surround my house. They fill my neighborhood. They cover much of my state. The structure and the shape of trees fascinate me. I was compelled by the colors of the challenge to create a tree. For this quilt, I worked directly on my design wall from a sketch I drew on graph paper. I constructed this quilt piece by piece from the bottom to the top."