Great Guild Meeting & Crumb Quilts

Last night, I was (finally) able to attend my local quilt guild meeting, after missing the last 5 or 6 because of scheduling conflicts with Thing One, Thing Two and the big-but-not-yet-grown-up thing. I am SO glad that I managed to get to this meeting...we had the best program that I've heard in quite some time. Our speaker was Meredith Vastas, an employee at the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center in Eastern Connecticut. Meredith is a quilter and an anthropologist in addition to being a Native American. As such, her interest revolves around the Native American traditions related to quilting and all things textile. She told us about her grandmother experiences in a boarding school on a reservation in South Dakota and how the nuns taught the students to sew and quilt. We saw a number of slides that depict typical Native American quilts, and she explained the symbolism of the designs, the colors and the 'giveaways' where people were given quilts. It was very interesting, and I am hoping to be able to visit the Museum sometime soon to see all the exhibits there (and maybe I'll visit the casino while I'm there).

Today I am going to share pictures of a few of the quilts in that pile that I showed in my last post. Today, Finn shared a picture of one of her Mile-A-Minute quilts, which is pretty much the same as the crumb quilts I make a lot of . That post inspired me to chose the crumb quilts in my pile to share today. I love them because they are so scrappy. I imagine the child who receives the quilt spending a lot of time looking at all the various fabrics and noticing the silly little novelty things, the bright fabrics, the geometric patterns, etc. I also like taking these humble blocks and looking for new settings for them. Please excuse my lousy photography. Its me, not the pictures. Plus I couldn't get anyone to hold the quilts for me, so I clipped them onto my rolling garment rack and it was a little windy and started to get shady. Sorry! So here they are:






This is one of the tops I put together last weekend. You'll notice it has the same background fabric as the Peppermint Sticks quilt I showed on Monday. Hopefully it will be quilted soon. I think it will get a darker purple border.



I like the setting on this one. It reminds me of how much I want to do a row quilt.



This is another one that I was quite happy with. You probably can't tell from the picture, but the yellow sashing fabric has little bumblebees on it. The black border fabric was donated. Actually most of the fabric in the crumb blocks were donated too.



This one is fun too. I have to remember that I like the crumb blocks side by side a lot more than with a plain block in between. Somehow they look a lot more interesting in fours or in a row.