Inspired by Amish Quilts? Um, YEAHH!

Recently, the modern quilt guilds of the SF Bay area were approached for an exciting new project.  The San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles will be showing Ohio Amish quilts from the collection of Darwin D. Bearley and guilds were invited to submit Amish inspired quilts of our own for a simultaneous show, called Amish: The Modern Muse, curated by Joe Cunningham.

Wow!  I didn't even know where to start designing because there's so much inspiration to choose from!  Well, I finally narrowed it down to wanting to work with triangles, so I chose the traditional Railroad Crossing pattern to work with.  I decided that I wanted to incorporate scraps and pieces of up-cycled fabric, so I visited SCRAP, a great re-use store in San Francisco that carries a huge variety of donated fabrics, and picked up a lot of small pieces of black fabric scraps.  As much as I love the wonderful prints of new fabric designs, I really enjoy the process of making quilts the way they were originally made - patchworked with small bits and pieces left over from other things that were too small for making clothes, but too dear to throw away.

Once I'd but the quilt top together, I decided to use a wool batting, as I've been a bit obsessed with Welsh quilts lately, as well as Amish.  The wool batting gives the quilt some loft, so that when I quilted the borders, the design really shows through.  This is important on Welsh quilts, because they are often wholecloth, so the entire design comes from the quilting alone, plus, they have a lot of wool there!  Welsh quilting is AMAZING - kind of a bit chunky and archaic looking and so much fun! If you are on Facebook, follow Jen Jones' Welsh Quilt Centre as she occasionally posts photos of her collection.  Drool!

So anyway, enough chatter about my quilt.  Here's what it looks like!

X Quilt

X Quilt, back

X Quilt, quilting detail

The Modern Muse show is curated, so it's possible that my quilt won't make the cut, but I've seen some of the other East Bay Modern guild member's entries, and I know it's going to be amazing!  If you want to check it out, the Amish show opens on November 15th and runs until March 1st.  If you can't make it to San Jose, you might want to get a copy of Darwin Bearley's book, Antique Ohio Amish Quilts.  He sells it personally through his E-bay site, so you could even ask for a signed copy.  That's what I did!  It's a beautiful book!

In wrapping up, I'm excited to announce the winner of the Kim Andersson's Tidal Lace fat quarter collection is Nancy! Kim was on the Modern Sewciety podcast a few weeks ago talking about her design inspirations and you can really get to know her a little bit just by listening!