A fun evening with Teddy Pruett

Last week our guild hosted Teddy Pruett from Lake City, Florida.  You can check out her blog here…..

By profession, she is a quilt appraiser, but she is also an excellent speaker and story teller and her quilts are magnificent stories in themselves.

She spent much of the evening talking about recycling old fabrics, many from unusable, un-quilted tops that she purchases as she finds them. 

As an example, she purchased several rows of blocks that had too much bias in them to ever use in a quilt …..

She took those half-square triangles and cut them down to make this piece….

Another great example was her use of a curtain similar to this one….

that was used as a starting point for this quilt…..

She also showed some interesting antique quilts that she had picked up along the way.

This one used corset fabric to piece the designs….

And this traditional quilt.  the blue leaves are actually green fabrics that had faded to blue over the years……

This one was amazing…..

She noted that as an appraiser, she sees many, many quilts using the same traditional designs.  Since this can be a bit boring, she loves to find traditional patterns that aren’t quite so traditional……

Like this amazing use of stripes….. 

or these VERY interesting circles…. 

with one orphan block in the setting…… This double wedding ring sort of disappears and then reappears depending on where you look on the quilt and how long you stare at it…..

She has named this quilt “Grandmother’s Soccer Balls”  because obviously the creator got tired of making flowers and allowed them to morph…..

And we all howled at this  version of the Sunbonnet Sue…..

….to be continued…….