Friends and Teacher Ribbon

Saturday afternoon I sat down to check email and facebook Angela Walters sat with me to enjoy her bagel and some witty banter.  She’s quite funny.  Angela sat at a table with some very happy quilters the evening before and I told her the truth.  As they were taking pictures I very nearly raced over to the table and did the whole rabbit ears thing over her head.  I resisted.  I can’t for the life of me figure out why I resisted but I did.

Part of our conversation involved our teacher ribbons and how challenging it was to award them and our individual criteria.  First, it needed to be a quilt without a ribbon already including other teacher ribbons and second, I wanted to award a domestic machine quilter as that is what I’m remaining committed to doing.  This isn’t as easy as it sounds because there are so many amazing quilts in this show and most of the teachers had awarded their ribbons.

I perused the aisles with great care and nearly took my shoes off to think.  The quality of the quilts is amazing.  Every quilt had a quality or 5 that said give me the ribbon, give me the ribbon.   It came down to a couple of quilts and then I rounded the corner and saw this quilt (which I’d spent time ogling over) titled “Bursting with Joy”  by Terry Knott and I knew that this was the one.  The quilt that I would give my ribbon.  It’s a whole cloth quilt, stitched out on her Bernina.  This is something so right!  Terry it’s an honor to give you this ribbon.

Back to Angela, another quilter joined us for a little while and as we sat there Andy Brunhammer walked by and whoopsie!  I would have said blond moment but Angela was sitting right there.  Truth be told she would have loved the comment as we’d already established a mutual love for sarcasm – hers being the giggly style and mine being rather dry.  It works tho.  Andy wanted to talk about Tilde and I said I’d be there after class.  Yep, promptly forgot.  This wasn’t the first time this week I’d forgotten an appointment!  I wanted to sit down with the Janome folks and go over the machine  I made it just in time then too.

I got a mango smoothie because I needed a bit of brain freeze (not really) and walked over to Tilde where Andy & I discussed the quilt for a while.  As an aside, the binding on Tilde is Robert Kaufman’s Radiance and after last night I understand Keith’s comment about it being very challenging to hand stitch down.  It’s so right for the binding on the quilt though.

I must share that I love being “just the quilter” on the quilts I work with other people on.  I know that the quilting if its right will make the quilt and if it’s wrong seriously detract from the quilt.  Next year there will be at  least 4 quilts that will hit the public view.  One will be Staten Island Sunset, one will be with Jeanie Sumrall-Ajero of Kaleidoscope Collections, Keith will be sending another quilt soon and there will be 1 or two more.  Thankfully they are spaced out enough that I’m not freaking out. Yet.

The quilt on the left is Stella Luminosa by Karen Marchetti.  Oh my!

There are more quilts that I’ll post in the next day or two.

Happy Quilting!

Teri