The quilt show

Out in the field this morning (this post actually written last night). I'm not sure what the posting schedule will be like the next few weeks...the tentative plan is for us to go out and do fieldwork from 8 am until noon or so...but I have other things I should be doing (sorting soil samples) in the afternoons, so posting may be sporadic.

Anyway.

I went to the quilt show (which was being held at the church I belong to) on Friday. It was small but nice. I think there were maybe 35 quilts total. They had a "people's choice" voting, for me, it was an easy decision - I voted for an applique quilt (surprise! I'm not normally a fan of applique, but this quilt was really lovely - both the colors and the way the fabrics and design worked together. The pattern was called "Ladies of the Orient" and was a series of simple back-views of women (all identical) in long kimonos with a shawl over their shoulders...all you saw was the "kimono" back, the shawl, and then the dark hair and long braid of the woman. (Almost kind of a variant on the old "Sunbonnet Sue" design). It was done in jewel-toned Japanese-inspired fabrics and it all worked so well together - the design, the fabrics, the quilting - that it was my favorite.

There were other quilts I liked - a twin-bed sized Log Cabin in dark green and tan (with burgundy "centers." I was taught that it was traditional to use a red color for the center of the block because that was supposed to represent the hearth of the cabin). There was also a bright-pastels "Stack and Whack" pinwheel quilt made of a large floral print.

There were other quilts that were not to my taste but I am sure that either the person who made them, or the person they were made for, really liked them - several quilts that were mostly black and white, with a few red accents, for example. That would not go in my decor but in some houses I'm sure it would be perfect.

Nearly all the quilts were machine-quilted. I guess not as many people hand-quilt any more, and to be honest, it is a very time consuming process and it takes a long time to finish a quilt. (But I still like how it looks - and I still like doing it - so I will continue to hand quilt at least some of my quilts).

There were also a few vendors there. One was the quilt shop here in town, one was someone from Allen (not that far away, and they noted that they would be open the weekend of the big Amish festival this fall...I might make the time to go up and to to the festival (they sell things like homemade noodles and stuff, I'm not sure if it's like a fundraiser for missions type thing like the Mennonites do, or if it's just a fun thing they do)). There was also someone from Chickasha, pretty far away from here.

I bought a few pieces of fabric that would go with some projects I have in mind. I also bought a set of pillowcases to embroider - the people from Allen had a whole lot of those stamped embroidery blanks. These pillowcases had a mare and a foal (well, just the head view) stamped on them, with some flowers surrounding (just simple lazy-daisy type flowers). I don't know, I just liked the design so I bought the pillowcases. After I got home, I went through my floss, to see if I had the colors that matched the ones suggested on the back of the pattern. I didn't, but decided to just choose my own colors. (With some of the cross-stitched pillowcases, if you follow the suggested colors, you get a "shading" effect, where you often use three close shades of the same color, so you get sort of a light-shining-on-the-design effect - so it's more important, I think, to go with the suggested colors to get a good effect). But here, it was almost all designed for backstitch outlining, so the colors are less crucial. (I wound up deciding to choose a lighter shade of brown for the colt, too - the original design had both the mare and colt the same color, but I think having the colt one shade lighter will be more interesting.)

(I also admit I briefly toyed with making the horses an unnatural color...probably influenced by the fact that I've watched some episodes recently of the new My Little Pony cartoon. Before you totally snort in derision, it's actually...not...bad. It's not like a half-hour long toy commercial. There's something oddly endearing about it. I think that's because one of the main people producing it had earlier worked on the PowerPuff Girls and there's the same kind of energy and even humor there. And I have to admit...it's one of the few "girl oriented" cartoons on television right now. (I read somewhere that a tv executive justified mostly boy-centered, boy-themed programming as, "Girls will watch cartoons aimed at boys [and true, if it's a good cartoon, it shouldn't matter, but I have little interest in most superhero/space alien fighting/shoot-em-up cartoons], but boys will not watch cartoons aimed at girls."). So if I'm home when it's on, I watch it. Realizing, of course, I'm so far out of the target demographic that I could be a GRANDMOTHER of some of those in the target demographic. But whatever.

I guess I really am becoming more girly in some ways as I age. I probably would have rejected a cartoon about pastel horses when I was actually a six-year-old. But now...I don't know, it's one of the "nicer" places on television. (Like the old Adorablog used to say: "Some parts of the internet should be nice...for the nice people." I also used to occasionally watch the "Little Bear" cartoon, in part because it was so quiet and "nice.")

And besides, they used the "wacky saxophone" chase music (as seen in Benny Hill) in one of the episodes, so I guess they are assuming SOME adults watch, even if just as parents of the children watching...)