Irises and my Grab Bag Quilt Collection

Last week I broke in my new sketch book with some Iris drawings.
I have chosen to put stylized irises in the Grab Bag Challenge I am doing. I am making good progress, and should be done by the due date in six days. I have been doing a lot of had stitching, and will add machine quilting in a few days.

Here are some of the Grab Bag Quilts which were made for me over the years:

“Technicolor Sunflowers” by Gerri Congdon, 2004 Quiltart Challenge

This quilt was made by Yvonne Fluehr for the 2005 Piecemakers Challenge

“Sew Much Fun!” by Shelley Dawson Davies for the 2006 Quiltart Challenge

“City Five” by Julie Zaccone Stiller in 2007 for the CQFA Challenge

Grab Bag Quilts

I am working on a grab bag challenge. Everyone submits a bag filled with fabrics and optional trims, and they are exchanged. Quilts are made using the contents of the bag, and the finished quilts are returned to the owner. I think I am not supposed to show what I am doing until the challenge has ended. So I will show some other Grab Bag challenges I have been in.

I did my first for a Quiltart challenge in 2004. A photo of this quilt is here.

In 2005 the Piecemakers Quilt Guild did a similar exchange and made this quilt. I used Robbi Joy Eklow's fusing techniqe. I overpainted the background fabrics to coordinate them more with the rest of the quilt, and added the solid dark purples from my own fabrics for some contrast:

In 2006, I made this quilt for the second Quiltart Grab Bag Challenge. Inspired by photos of succulent plants from my garden. I pushed the colors a bit in order to use the fabrics from my bag. I used Robbi’s technique again. The green smaller green succulents were shaded with Pigma markers to add some depth:

And again in 2006, I made this quilt for my CQFA group. This was based on photos I took of the pickle weed marshes in San Leandro:

I have been busy trying to get other things done, and hadn’t started work on this years grab bag, and have been a bit scared to start, because I wasn’t sure exactly what I was going to do with the fabric. The deadline is the end of the month, and I decided I better just do it.

I cut a piece of batting a couple of inches bigger than the finished size, started laying fabrics on it, and it became obvious what I will do. This afternoon I am off to the library to find reference photos of Irises, and then I will be very busy for the next week and a half.

More about Last Weekend's Show

Thanks for all of your nice comments about last weekends show.

One of you requestd more detail shots. I didn't bother originally, since most of the newer work I had at the show has an individual entry either on this blog or the Fast Friday blog. I have a label that points to all of my finished work on this blog: finished quilts, and a label on the Fast Friday blog: Linda Cline. All of the labels are listed in the sidebar of each blog. Also pictures on Blogger are always clickable to show a larger picture.

Ellen Edith was the guest artist for our show. She is a cartoonist with her own line of fabrics, and she makes whimsical story quilts. She is a wonderful lecturer who tells stories about her family which go with the quilts she has made.


I had to buy something from Ellen's booth, just because she is such a fun person to be around, and her work makes me smile. So I bought this journal for myself, and a few half yards of fabric which I will use to piece together a skirt for my daughter.

Weekend Quilt Show

The Piecemakers Quilt Show this weekend was a success. My featured artist corner looked really great when it was all set up. I displayed about half of the quilts I had available in my corner booth. The other half were shown during my presentations.




My pre-show jitters vanished, and I really enjoyed doing my short half hour presentations where I showed the other half of my quilts. Halfway through one of my presentations, my parents walked in the back of the room, and Dad said, “Hey, you think you know what you’re doing?” Everyone laughed, and the short interlude lightened the mood a bit. (Hi, Dad)

After I had planned which quilts I was going to take, my husband saw this small 6” quilt laying about, “Aren’t you going to take this one?” and he was insistent that I should find a place to show this one also. I had a binder of my work in clear plastic sheet protectors, so on impulse, I slipped it into the front of the binder, and added it to my price list. And this little six inch quilt was my big sale for the day, which was great since I wasn't necessarily expecting to sell anything.