Watercolor Quilts

[Gillian Cannon]

|Can anyone please give me more information on Watercolor Quilts. I am
|intrigued and this is the first I have heard of them.

Dear Eileen:

I am re-posting to you the original message I put out with regard to the
fabric exchange. I would be happy to answer any further questions you
might have.

Hi, everybody!

Well, Leah's Fabric Gallery (a chain of several upscale fabric
shops that are located in shopping malls around Orange County, CA)
had their annual sale last weekend (25% off everything in the store
including classes!) and I bought a quilting book I had been dying
to get. It is:

_Watercolor Quilts_, by Pat Maixner Magaret & Donna Ingram Slusser
(That Patchwork Place, 1993, paper, $24.95).

I have been looking at this book and drooling. For those of you
who have not seen it (if you are one, run, don't walk, to find it
and look at the wonderfulness), it is a new concept of quilt making
very unlike the traditional ways, where you cut 2" squares of fabrics
and create "watercolor" quilts a la the art of Monet, et al.

The thing is that you buy and use fabrics very differently than from
traditonal quilts--no monotones, almost all medium- and large-scale
prints, etc. And some of the quilts shown have taken up to 225
different prints!

These quilts are amazing. However, who in the heck has 220+ different
non-monotonic prints! Not me.

The suggestion in the book is for seven friends to get together and
agree to participate in a 6" square exchange. What happens is this:
each person takes a colorway (yellows, reds, blues, greens, etc.) and
buys ten 1/4 yards of different applicable fabrics, washes them and
cuts seven 6" squares from the piece (a 6" square will give you 9 -
2x2" pieces). This will give enough 6" squares for the person and
six others to have. The total from the exchange is 70 different
6" squares, which would go a long way to starting a stash. (Of
course, if you buy 1/4 yard of fabric, you probably will have an
additional 2" x 45" piece of the fabrics you bought as well.)

Have any of you seen the book, and are any of you interested in making
a quilt, thereby being willing to be a participant in an exchange?
I am going to post this in several different conferences, hoping
to get at least six others who are interested. If there's more,
then that's wonderful, too.

Gillian, in San Juan Capistrano (where it's in the mid 80's this
week--just the right temperature for the swallows to return on the
19th! [some are already here--they must not have checked their
Day-at-a-Glances!])

* SLMR 2.1a * The world needs more of *us* and less of *them*!