Sisters Outdoor Quilt Show

Hi all,

I arrived back from the USA after a veeery long travel home yesterday and took the remainder of the day to recuperate a little - having left at 4.30am to get to the airport in Bend, I finally flew out of LA after a huge layover at midnight, and then had a 14 hour flight. Phew!! That was a long one - and it was my birthday too, boooo to birthdays in transit lounges. Oh well, I got plenty of reading done (finished Slough House No. 4 by Mick Herron, Spook Street, and started Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby van Pelt), and made a very good start on the tapestry kit of Anne Boleyn I won in an instagram competition recently! Emily Peacock is one of my very favourite designers of any kind, so I couldn’t resist entering, and I won - something that’s never happened before :D All very exciting. 

Sisters as always was wonderful. Its such a great show. I know I banged on about it last week, but it really is! I love every moment I spend there.

Monday I taught my first Quilter’s Affair class for the week in my Tiny Town quilt, and I was so busy with everyone buzzing about all day I forgot to take a single photo! Here is Tiny Town instead, hanging in the Teacher’s Pavilion of the show on Saturday. 

A lovely student from last year’s Quilter’s Affair also brought her finished quilt to show me! I love seeing  what everyone gets up to :)

If you want to make this quilt, the pattern and templates are available here… and for those of you who made it AND Spooky Town already, the Christmas Town pattern is coming very soon!!

On Tuesday and Wednesday I taught my Climbing Scrap Mountain class. This is so much fun. Everyone brings a bag of scrap from home, and we tip everyone's fabrics on the floor and work from the “mountain”. 

The class kit contains a booklet for over 40 quilt layouts, all using a template set in which every shape clicks together in different configurations. On day one, we make scrap “fabric” using either the string or crazy piecing methods, and on day 2 we cut and design our quilts. 

It’s a class I took 5 years to design and build, and I taught it for the first time at Sisters last year. It’s SO MUCH FUN, and everyone goes home with a quilt in progress, and the ideas for dozens and dozens more in their bags. Here’s all my awesome students having an excellent time - 

If you want to take this class from me, you can do it on demand via my website!

The final two days of the week were spent teaching Big Woods with Tula. She didn’t actually teach at Sisters this year, she just attended, and sat in on my BW class and heckled me from the sidelines. On day one we made our house blocks, and day 2 we appliquéd our trees. I had a lot of brand new appliqué students in class and they were all absolute champions!! 

Most people finished their whole blocks, and a few just had the tree tops to finish. It’s a good indication for those thinking about joining the BOM - its not NEARLY as much work as it looks. We finished the whole of Month 1 in just two days.

Throughout the week of Quilters Affair there are extra events at night for everyone’s entertainment. Wednesday night we had a fundraiser for the Quilt Show, which runs as a non profit. Tula and I came up with the idea for it last year, and it was fun to see it come to life this year. 

Freddy Moran has been a huge part of the Sisters show over the years and is a close friend of Jean Wells, who started the show in the first place, 49 years ago. Freddy is 94 and quite unwell, so we thought that a tribute to her was in order. All the teachers made a self portrait in the style of Freddy’s Faces. 

If you don’t know about Freddy, she is one of my all time biggest quilting heroes, and I have had the privilege to get to know her at Sisters over the years. I introduced this video at the event and talked about her influence on my quilting, and then they auctioned the teacher’s “faces”.

Here is my quilt - sorry it’s an awful picture, but its the only one I took and I forgot to take a good one before it was sent off to be sold!

Thursday night was a lecture by my lovely friend, Guiseppe Ribaudo, aka Juicy Guice. If you ever have the chance to take a class with Guiseppe, I highly recommend that you do. He’s a wonderful teacher and also one of the nicest, kindest and most enthusiastic humans you will ever meet.

Guiseppe did a creative residency at Pine Meadows Ranch in Sisters earlier this year, and his lecture was about the quilts he made during the residency and the ideas and sentiments behind them. The lecture was beautifully done and very emotional, I don’t think there was a dry eye in the house. 

And then it was Saturday, and time for the Sisters Outdoor Quilt Show! The first quilts go up on the side of The Stitchin’ Post store at 7am, hung by the local firefighters and directed by my dear friend Sally Frey. It’s one of my favourite moments of the whole show, but I’m not sure wether thats because its the moment the show begins, because of the hot firefighters or watching Sal order them around :) Maybe all three.

The other quilt I had in the Teacher’s Pavilion was of course Big Woods… T and I made sure to have a photo taken in front of it for you!

The town was teeming with beautiful quilts and people and lovely shops to browse in.

My friend the lovely Sujata Shah was this year’s Inspirational Tutor and she had an exhibition all of her own. Her quilts are so beautiful in person, very tactile and full of personailty.

And then Sunday was the walk through the forest at Five Pines. I was the artist last year (last weeks post has the photos from that) and this year it was Guiseppe. His saturated colours and beautiful piecing looked amazing in amongst the trees and flowers.

I hope you enjoyed your tour of Sisters…. And I hope that if you’ve never been I’ve inspired you to go! Next year is the 50th anniversary of the show and if ever there was a reason to go, there’s one :) I will be there teaching as always and we have some very very fun stuff planned to celebrate 50 years of Quilter’s Affair and the Outdoor Quilt Show. See you next week!

Sarah