What's Finished, Today, For Future

 This post features two of the prayer quilts I finished this week (quilt dedication this coming Sunday).  This is the star quilt I picked up from Judy after Sweet Teen's recital.

 I quilted feathery almost-hearts in each of the star points.

 each a different color...and feathery sprigs in the center.

 but the most fun was getting to quilt feathers in all that green space.

 Judy also entrusted her kitty-quilt to me.  Ten different cat fabrics (eleven counting the binding).

 I quilted each set of four blocks differently.

 Judy's cat died a few months ago, and she told me she thinks she'll be ready to get a new cat by July.  I'm wondering if making the cat quilt helped.

Today [since Sweet Teen is at a four-day singing workshop at NM Tech] a friend and I took off for Santa Fe.  Frankly, the reason the pictures of those two quilts weren't so great was that I forgot to photograph them earlier and was hurriedly doing so in bright morning sun, albeit filtered through forest fire smoke.

We also made a stop at Santa Fe Quilting, where I picked up these ducks for a man-quilt.

 I am so drawn toward flowerdee fabrics that I don't make as many quilts for men as I should.  I'm looking forward to putting these geese with some more blue fabrics.

 Sweet Teen has been after me for several years to buy fabrics with food because, she insists, men always respond to food!  I think all these fat quarters are by Timeless Treasures.

 I had searched unsuccessfully both land-based and cyber-based shops for lime green batiks with paisleys--and now I can add this to the quilt for baby Paisley.

The avowed purpose of our trip to Santa Fe was to see the Amish quilts in the Neutrogena wing of the Museum of American Folk Art.  My souvenir of this trip is Rachel and Kenneth Pellman/s 1990-98 book A Treasury of Amish Quilts.  I purchased their earlier book (the one with the fuchsia cover) when I lived in TN, but this one wasn't published until after I moved to NM, and I'd never seen it before.  It's not all that different from their earlier book; it's just full of more quilts to drool over.

Amish quilts inspired quite a few of the quilts and wallhangings I made in earlier years [decades, actually] when I was doing a lot of hand piecing and all my quilting was by hand.  I'm not sure if I've seen an Amish quilt out here in the Southwest, but I continue to love them.  In fact, I have an Amish inspired quilt from the 1980's that I'm hoping to finish this summer.

I encourage anyone travelling I-40 through New Mexico to take a little detour to Santa Fe to see this fantastic collection of quilts.  It's not a large show, but the quilts in the show (excepting a couple) are incredibly fine examples in design and workmanship--with the kind of quilting that inspired me to be a better handquilter early in my quilting life.

We're still having forest fires and smoke out here--but not the devastation causing so many evacuations in CO although we've lost thousands of acres [many square miles] of forests.  The winds have been rough but we haven't had a repeat of the 58 mph winds that hit our little town on Monday.

Happy quiltmaking...