IQF 2014 Post 4: Farm to Fabric

The Celebrating Farm to Fabric Exhibit was the product of a challenge set by the American Made Brand. The quilts are made from American Made Brand's cotton solids and the quilters were asked, "What does it mean to you, your family or your community to bring fabric production back to America to use in American made quilts?".

In a serendipitous twist of fate my delay in doing this series till 2015 means I can link to the next quilter's post about this piece which went up this very week! I had seen sneak peeks of this one on instagram before I went to Festival and I was really looking forward to seeing it in real life. I'm not going to be much use because this is yet more online photos of it, but the scale of this quilt is astonishing. The piecing is tiny, and not at all paper pieced.

In Hogtown by Completely Cauchy

In Hogtown by Completely Cauchy is stunning in person, here are some close ups. The quilted grid is about 1" square by my best estimate. This was early in the day, so I was a little scared to put my finger near the quilt for scale... Silly and stupid of me!

Close up of In Hogtown - love the raspberry insert in the binding!

Look at the little corner of blue there amongst the green and yellow, that makes me so happy. And knowing that this is an interpretation of a real town (Gainesville, FL), it makes me love this extra. But also seriously, 1" quilting grid - see how small it makes that piecing! Crazy crazy crazy!

Close up of In Hogtown - 1" quilting grid, tiny piecing, happy blue corner

Furrows by Charlotte Noll is made with fused raw-edged appliqué and pieced. The inspiration comes from the farm fields in her home state of Florida, where she can drive through the countryside seeing newly prepared fields ready for planting and lush orange groves. Though most of the small farms near where she lives have been bought up and covered with concrete to be turned into stores. This quilt really caught my eye, I love the expanding diagonals, and the radiating nature of the lines, the fact that they're all at different angles and in such good colours just makes me happy on the inside.

Furrows by Charlotte Noll

This next quilt is made by various artists and is made up of license plates from the 50 states. Tour License Plate Quilt employs various techniques as you might imagine, and has an entire blog tour in case you want to make your own version. Each quilter was selected to make a license plate based on the state they call home!

Tour License Plate Quilt by Various Artists

I've lived in Texas and DC, now DC isn't a state so I had to go for second best, I worked in Maryland while I lived in DC so that's the license plate I took the picture of as a close up! This quilt is a lot of fun, we spent ages looking for Virginia and I'm not sure we found it before we had to move for other people to take photos so there's lots to look at.

Check out how bad the lighting was or my photo taking...

Finally this week we have Fresh Beginnings by Monica Mondragon. This quilt caught my eye straight away. The quilt is machine pieced, appliquéd, and hand-embroidered. Monica wanted to depict the early morning starts of her agricultural background, and how beautiful the sunrise is over rows and rows of crops. She used a squared dresden plate to achieve an intentionally pop art appearance which I love! Again I'm attracted to the radiating lines in strong solid colours, I might be sensing a trend in myself.

Fresh Beginnings by Monica Mondragon

Have a good weekend everyone! Hope you fit in some time getting to do something fun :)