A fun quilty day in Des Moines....

 Some friends and I went to Des Moines on Saturday for the America Quilts Expo. Not only did we get to see my quilt, Shortcut, as part of the Be Creative!quilt Challenge display, we saw many other beautiful quilts as well. I had seen pictures of the other finalist quilts, but it was fun to see them up close to see the design aspects better as well as the quilting.

 They are all beautiful and different in so many ways. That's what is fun about a design contest with specifications that need to be met. I wrote about that in more detail here, but probably one of the hardest was using 8 of the 12 fabrics in the fabric bundle in the quilt. They were mostly quarter yd. cuts with a couple being a bit larger, so coming up with a design that used that many, plus in those amounts was challenging for me. I thought about it and worked on design ideas for several months before committing by buying the needed fabric bundle. You could add up to 3 other fabrics as well, so more head scratching to figure out what else to use...what, more fabrics? In the end, I'm happy with it and it was fun to see it as part of the exhibit.

 The quilt above and to the right took the top prize and I thought it was too bad they didn't show the back as well as she made a patio and swimming pool on the back to go with her house on the front.

 I don't take as many photos at shows as I used to, as I found that I wasn't looking at them as closely when I did and they never look as good in a photo as in person. But I had to take pictures of this one as the techniques were so unusual.  It had to be taken from a photo, but then the shading was accomplished by using gauze. We got as close to it as we could to try to see exactly what was involved in this stunning quilt. Unfortunately, we only guessed at what we thought was done, and don't know for sure, but it doesn't matter as it truly was a work of art.

 I love this one as well...great illusion. They were both part of an exhibit by the Studio Art Quilts Association titled Celebrating Silver. It was interesting with many different aspects of silver.

 After the show, we stopped at Piece Work Quilt Shop in Winterset, Ia. It is sort of on the way home. It was a nice shop, and we managed to find a few things we needed!

I finished the quilting on the Henry Glass project on Friday night, so spent some time yesterday finishing it. You might remember the darker print border I had added and then taken off because it didn't look right with the scrappy quilt. I trimmed it down, and re-pieced it to use as the binding. I got my pop of color on the edge without overpowering it. I took it on a photo shoot and will post more about it tomorrow when it will be on the Henry Glass and Co. blog as part of the Desire to Inspire Challenge this month.

I got a few things planted in the garden yesterday, but need to mow today. What are you doing for the holiday?