QNM Quilting Bee

Quilting Bee

To see a larger view of each quilt mentioned, click on the underlined text or the small view of the quilt.

We invite reader letters and slides for this column. Part of the fun of any quilting bee is seeing the faces of the people who share their thoughts and quilts, so we encourage you to put yourself in the picture with your quilt. Please send submissions to:

Quilting Bee
Quilter's Newsletter Magazine
741 Corporate Circle
Suite A
Golden, CO 80401

Dear Editors,

My father loves and collects Japanese art. I began a search for Japanese fabrics and just the right pattern to make a quilt for him. After collecting fabrics for a year, I stumbled on Kaffe Fassett's book Glorious Patchwork. The pattern Stamps and Money Quilt was perfect. Japanese Happy for My Pappy took almost a year to make. I even had a little help from my friends at a quilting weekend in northern Minnesota so I would have it finished in time for Christmas. It was machine quilted by Moose Country Quilting in Minnesota. My dad loves his quilt, and it fits his personality perfectly.
Lisa L. Seaman
Hammond, Wisconsin

Dear Editors,

We adopted our son Richard when he was 28 years old, and my quilt club gave me a "baby" shower. They each gave me fabric to make him a quilt. I chose Bear Hollow from QNM issues 266-271. I left the Tree of Life out and put in more Log Cabin blocks. It took me a few years to complete it because I worked on other quilt projects at the same time.

Richard is a Lieutenant Commander in the Navy stationed at Whidbey Island Naval Air Station in Washington State.
Phyllis M. Bills
Louisville, Kentucky

Dear Editors,

I'd like to share this picture of our Franciscan Oaks Quilters Group. We are senior citizens all living in Franciscan Oaks, a retirement community in Denville, New Jersey. We meet every Friday morning, and our completed crib quilts are sent to Project Linus for distribution to children in hospitals. All of our quilts are made by hand, and it is a labor of love.
Pearl Strom
Denville, New Jersey

Dear Editors,

The Quilt Lovers' Forum in QNM issue 343 by Julie Greenspan, As Good as It Gets, struck a chord with me. The work many quilters do boggles my mind, and sometimes I wonder why I even try to quilt anymore, especially as it becomes more difficult as the years progress. However, joy is still something to be savored as the old pieced patterns take shape on the sewing machine. I enjoy trying to place a geometric design in some new order, even if the result is just a quilt to keep small bodies warm on a drive on a cold winter's night. The result may not win an award or grace anyone's walls, but it will serve the purpose to produce a quilt--providing warmth and comfort.
Zona Rumpel
Mundelein, Illinois

Dear Editors,

The 19th-Century People Quilt was made by the fifth-grade class at the Duke School for Children Middle School. It was inspired by the historic quilt featured in the article Fabric of Persuasion: Politics in American Quilts in QNM issue 331. Our quilt celebrates the famous nineteenth-century Americans whom the students researched as part of their history studies. It contains the names Harriet Tubman, Zebulon Pike, Ulysses S. Grant, Abraham Lincoln, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, among others. Fellow teacher Suzanne Payne and I are indebted to Joy Apperson, a wonderful parent volunteer, for sharing her expertise and enthusiasm for quilting with our class.
Janet Krakauer
Durham, North Carolina

Dear Editors,

We asked guilds from across North Dakota to send us a 12" block-their chosen block or logo if they had one-which we sewed into the Capital Quilters Millennium Quilt. We used the quilt to demonstrate hand quilting at our show in July 2000. No list of North Dakota quilt groups existed, so we compiled one as we located the guilds. We found more groups after the first top was completed, so we made another, smaller quilt after the show.

After display at the Capital Quilters' twentieth anniversary celebration in 2001, the quilts were presented to the North Dakota State Historical Society. Accompanying the quilts is a binder containing information from the groups including newsletters, membership lists, newspaper clippings, photos, and guild pins.
Debra Hall Forsberg
Bismarck, North Dakota

Dear Editors,

We have made regular trips to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to visit family, and naturally, I go to the fabric stores. The shops there carry wonderful Mardi Gras-themed fabrics in purples, golds, and greens that I've never seen anywhere else.

I collected a lot of fabrics and then had to find a pattern suited to the ambience of Mardi Gras. Nothing seemed to capture the wild abandon of Bourbon Street on Fat Tuesday like the unpredictability of bargello. I had taken a strip-piecing class and realized the possibilities of the technique. I spent a year working on the design. Mardi Gras 2001 is my third quilt.
Linda Stone
Pittsburgh, California

Dear Editors,

One of the rewards of working on the West Virginia Heritage Quilt Search Documentation Project was learning about old quilts and quilt patterns. One unusual pattern consisted of three rings of triangles surrounding an eight-point or twelve-point design. Family members called the pattern Farmer's Fancy and believed it to be a regional Appalachian design. A similar one-ringed design has been called Pyrotechnics by several quilt historians. It was a real challenge and a labor of love to draft and construct the one-, two-, and three-ring variations.
Fran Kordek
Elkins, West Virginia
[Editor's Note: Fran shares her technique for making the one-ring Pyrotechnics block in this issue's Quiltmaker's Workshop.]