May 21, 2018 Podcast
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Guest: Marla Varner
Topics: improv quilting
She says: "When I first started quilting, I enjoyed making traditional quilts for my friends and family. The turning point came a few years ago when a friend of mine showed me how to cut without rulers and also how to dye fabric. It was just liberating! All that measuring and math stuff -- I didn't need that anymore. All those years of traditional making came to my aid, because I knew that things needed to lay flat and look neat. Improvisationally, there's two things I go by: if it's too short, add on to it. And if it's too big, you cut it off."
Guest: Lindsey Neill
Topics: modern quilts
She says: "I eloped in Vegas 18 years ago, and I love a Double Wedding Ring quilt. I want to make one eventually at some point, but the curves really intimidate me and the amount of curves. So I wondered if there was a way to just make a standard pieced modern Double Wedding Ring quilt. And because of how more quickly and easily it came together than the normal Double Wedding Ring Quilt, I named it the Vegas Wedding quilt. It's a fun take on it."
Guest: Cindy Needham
Topics: antique quilts
She says: "I'm known in the quilting world for taking ordinary and extraordinary vintage linens and turning them into one-of-a-kind heirloom wholecloth quilts. So an idea I came up with in the mid-1990's, because I had an insane stash of linens and didn't know what to do with them. And one morning, I spied an old tattered linen on my nightstand and I thought, 'I wonder how that would look quilted?'."
Guest: Richy Lainson
Topics: fabric selection
He says: "Sometimes I have an idea for a quilt and I have it sketched out roughly what I want to do. Than I go looking for some inspiration fabric -- some big print, some print with multiple colors. And then I pull from there. I first started looking at the little selvage dots and seeing what colors were in there. Then I'd go to that section in the quilt store and pull fabrics that I liked. And then I'd look at some of those fabrics and say, 'Well, these have some new dots on it that weren't on the first fabric', and then I'd pull some new fabrics from there. I figured as long as I had 20, 40, 60 fabrics in there, I could add more color."