Quilts of Mary Palmer at the North Sea Quilters and Friends Exhibition

Many of you admired the work of Mary Palmer during the Patchwork en Quiltdagen 14-15 February in Rijswijk. You can look at the quilts again and read about them here.

Mary Palmer: "20th Century Stars" (2006)
90” x 90”, 2006

"This quilt was made as part of a challenge themed “Blue and White Stars”. Having recently made a traditional star quilt, I tried to play with the term “stars”, hence the familiar faces. The two girls in the centre are my daughters, both born in the 20th century, and stars to me! In the quilting, I have tried to complement the image in each area."

"Log Cabin Houses" quilted by Mary Palmer
64” x 88”

"Marie O’Brien pieced this quilt, having purchased Heidi Stoll-Weber’s hand-dyed cotton sateen and having seen the pattern in a book by Favin Glover. She then gave it to me to quilt. I felt that as the houses had such tiny pieces of fabric, then tiny quilting would be most appropriate. The quilting in the “sky” represents wind, and the earth and borders are cobbled like a road."

Mary Palmer: "Grandmaster " (2004)
90” x 90”

"This quilt was made for the Amish Long Arm Challenge. It was inspired by Amish strippy quilts, with colours inspired by 20th century Amish quilts. When it was finished it reminded me of a circus tent, hence the name “Grandmaster”.
It was the second or third quilt I quilted on a long arm machine (Gammill Optimum with stitch regulator and Gammil Optimum w/o stitch regulator!), which a friend very kindly let me use."



Mary Palmer has been an avid quilter since 1990. Her work has been shown in many exhibitions both in Europe and the US. She has been juried into the AQS show in Paducah and has won awards through the RDS competition in Dublin. Most recently, she has qualified as a Quilt Judge through the Quilters Guild of the British Isles.
www.marimudesigns.com

Summer in The Netherlands

We have been very busy over the summer, not updating the blog obviously, but then it is no secret that we really prefer sewing and quilting to doing anything else.
Now what have we been busy doing??? Well for some reason we thought we would have a quiet time over the summer regarding our machinequilting for customers. Well we are pleased to inform you that there are enough really addicted quilters in NL who keep up their patchwork and quilting all summer and don’t want to go and sit in the garden or go to the beach. Maybe it was because we had rather a lot of rain.... Now we really enjoy quilting other people’s quilts, and we will show you some of the pictures over the coming weeks, but we also like quilting our own projects!!!

So our plan was to work on our own quilts. Our friend Beryl Cadman (Gammill long-arm representative for Europe) organises the long-arm gallery each year at the Festival of Quilts in Birmingham. She usually selects a theme beforehand such as Blue and White Stars (2006) or Black and White and One other Colour (2007). This year the challenge was to completely incorporate two half yards of fabric which we received beforehand: a mauve Japanese floral with chrysanthemums and a small green floral to make a 90” by 90” quilt (about 230cm square - yes that is quite big).

Detail of Robyn Fahy's black and white and yellow quilt

Now we each had our own ideas of what we wanted to do. Marybeth was inspired by the hydrangeas in her garden. Her idea was brilliant: to use a snowball block in different sizes, and vary the colour from top left to bottom right; the centre of the blocks the flowers ranging from hydrangea blue to mauve to pink and the corners the leaves in a variety of greens. Now we don’t know exactly how many different fabrics she used in her quilt, but we think equilter did quite well out of it...

Marybeth Tawfik's "Hortensia Hideaway"

Next time more about Maria’s and Leslie’s quilts!!