A Quilter's Paradise: 2015 CAMEO Quilt Guild Show

Here are some of the 186 quilts in the CAMEO Quilt Guild show.

Design Odyssey by Betty Carpenter; left is Starry Blue by Linda Wallace

French Braid by Susan VanEck

Tina Rink's Wedding Quilt for her son and daughter-in-law

 

Michigan Lighthouses by Sharon Cratsenburg, machine quilted by Barbara Lusk. Sharon made the quilt for her husband who was in the U.S. Navy. The Nautical flag border spells Michigan Lighthouses.

She included the Crisp Point Lighthouse, where my husband's grandmother spent time as a girl about 100 years ago!( see The Shipwreck Coast, Girl, and a Lamp)

Top Left: Marie Ware Dragonfly; Right: Tina Rink Modern Streets

Helen's Irish Bouquet by Helen Graham

Patricia Baldauf's quilt for her daughter's graduation from U of Montana

Designing Stars by Dorothy Strefling 

Summer Meadow by Jeneen Sharpe

Janet's Viewer's Choice winning quilt is reversible!

Austrian Heavens by Janet Steele also won Best Original Design

Marie Ware's Reef Refuge

Chambered Nautilus by Carole Gilbert

The raffle quilt seen above was amazing.

Theresa Nielson's Grand Central Station Quilt, which I blogged about here

60th Anniversary Quilt, Linda Hermes

Best Modern Quilt winner Sharon Bisoni's City Scape in Shades of Grey

An interesting use of lace doilies

Kay Schepke Blue Traveling

Cindy May's Christmas Morn  also incorporates lace doilies

Lucy Lesperance's Eye of Splendor

Best Use of Color Award to Janet Steele

 

Sharon Bisoni, Falling Leaves

Alaskan Triangles by Vanetta Sterling

Jan Mansfield, Grandma's Starlit Garden

Where's the Beef?  by Sharon Johnsonbaugh uses cow fabric

Clawson Historical Museum Quilts At the CAMEO Quilt Guild Show

The CAMEO Quilt Guild mets in Clawson, MI. Quilts donated to the Clawson Historical Museum were displayed at the show this weekend. They are in delicate condition and were displayed on quilt racks. The display was in the lobby and the lighting was not the best. 

Bicentennial Signature Quilt signed by Clawson Historical Society members, President Gerald Ford, Governor William Milliken, Congressman Blanchard and others; and a Tulip Appliqué on feedsack fabric quilt top by Dora Holscher.

 A very pretty quilt with lots of red, white and blue by Mrs. Malone circa 1920.

The sashing fabric on this quilt was startling and wonderful.

 By Mabel Davis Hodges, top completed circa 1920 and quilted in 1979 by Delores Kumler.

This quilt with the cigar flannels is owned by the Burns family and was on loan for the exhibit.

 Embroidered silks crazy quilt is not in the traditional crazy quilt setting.  Crazy Quilt top by Martha Morrison Davis circa 1890, silk, satin and velvet.

Friendship Quilt by Ida Hames circa 1920, "This red and white bow-tie quilt was begun in the later 'teens or early 1920s as a fundraiser for the Clawson Methodist Episcopal Church. The quilting was completed in 1978 by the Senior Citizen Women.

Very faded and badly shredded, a simple one template quilt.

 Love the windowpane plaid!

I would love to see this quilt laid out on a bed! It was called a candlewick quilt. Perhaps some day I will see if I can have a private viewing and get better photos.

 Candlewick by Martha Morrison Davis, hand woven, embroidered, tassel edge.

I Won Most "Humerous"!

My new quilt guild's biannual show started today. I will be sharing photos from the show over the next few days.

I entered five quilts, four of which were original patterns incorporating  hand quilting, hand embroidery, and hand appliqué. When I arrived a friend told me I had won a ribbon! I never win ribbons.

Which quilt was it? Little Women, my hand appliquéd and hand quilted version of the 1952 pattern by Marion Cheever Whiteside Newton?

Was it I Will Lift My Voice Like A Trumpet, hand appliquéd and hand quilted, that took three years to research, design, and execute?

My original take on Princess Feather, also hand appliquéd and hand quilted?

Or my original story book quilt based on Pride and Prejudice, hand appliquéd and hand quilted?

It was Gridlock and it won "Most Humerous!" That is a real "boner".

I suppose it is funny and appropriate that "Humorous" was misspelled.

Gridlock was the name of the Giddyup block I received in an exchange with Dustin Cecil who I met on Flickr while we were making the Austen Family Album quilt with Barbara Brackman.

I set the block with items from my political handkerchief collection and two 1952 linen towels with funny political sayings.

Gridlock block by Dustin Cecil

Perhaps they should have had a "group" category because this quilt would not have been made without Dustin's Giddyup block!

Worthy by Catherine Ryan Hyde

What do we deserve? Are we worth enough to demand fairness? When life has dealt us one blow, with one loss after another, should we expect something better, something more, or just more of the same?

Catherine Ryan Hyde's books deal with broken people who find happiness in unconventional ways. I first read "Don't Let Me Go" several years ago. The novel centers around a child whose mother is a drug addict. The child befriends a neighbor with agoraphobia and pushes him to face his fear to help take care of her. I next read "When I Found You"; while duck hunting Nathan finds a baby and takes him home. He becomes attached but the child's grandmother claims the baby. Fifteen years later the frustrated grandmother dumps the troubled boy at Nathan's doorstep. "Electric God" is about an angry man who needs to make peace with his past mistakes. "When You Were Older" deals with a man who after the deaths of his parents finds himself returning home to be a caretaker for his disabled brother. He befriends an Egyptian family being targeted in the aftermath of 9-11. My review for "The Language of Hoofbeats", about a horse and a girl saving each other, can be found here.

Her latest book "Worthy" has all the earmarks of her previous books: real people with real problems striving to find peace and wholeness in a broken world.

The night that widower Aaron and waitress Virginia admit their feelings and decide to date Aaron is killed in a freak accident. Aaron's son Buddy is taken away by his maternal grandfather. Virginia is left mourning but Buddy had given her one gift: the restaurant where she worked was up for sale and Buddy told Virginia she should buy it.

Nineteen years have passed. Virginia did buy the restaurant. She is engaged to a man but he is far from the gentleman that Aaron was. And Buddy, now called Jody, is a damaged young man watching his grandfather's senility take away the only family he remembers.

One brutally cold winter day Jody sees a man dump a dog and drive away. Jody takes the dog in and names him Worthy. But the owner of the dog is searching for him.

I don't want to give away the plot line. So that's all you get of that!

The dog Worthy teaches both of the people who love him what it means to accept their failings and see their strengths, to know that we are worthy of asking for better.

I received a free ebook through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Worthy
by Catherine Ryan Hyde
Lake Union Press
Publication date June 2, 2015
ISBN: 9781477830130
Price 14.95 paperback

A Gifted Grandmother's Fan Quilt

Some years ago a friend gave me his mother's quilts which had been used in the family cabin for years. The matching twin size quilts included fabrics that he recalled seeing in his mother's dresses.

The tops date to the late Depression Era, but were finished in the 1970s with a pre-quilted fabric in a preprinted calico flower appliqué pattern. The tops were machine quited along the blocks to the pre-quilted fabric. The pattern is a Grandmother's fan variation. Each fan has a red center with scrappy blades.  The center of the quilts show fading.

 

  

 There are cute figurative prints.

 

 There are lots of polka dots and plaids!

The Immortal Sherlock Holmes

In junior high I eagerly anticipated the arrival of the Scholastic Book order, especially when I had ordered novels upon which my favorite Classics Illustrated Comics were based. This is how I first came to read The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexander Dumas, Les Miserables by Victor Hugo, Ivanhoe by Walter Scott, and Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre. It is how I first came across The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy.

One Scholastic Book I read over and over was The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle. I loved it. Whenever the Basil Rathbone movie version was broadcast on television I watched it. (Watch it at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLETzw6c1XA ) That 'cheerful little spot," the misty moor with Stonehenge-like ruins, the mysterious killer dog, thrilled the girl me.

I grew up watching Twilight Zone and Alfred Hitchcock Presents and I had Alfred Hitchcock's 1962 Ghostly Gallery. I had discovered Edgar Allen Poe in my grandfather's library. (And wrote about it here.) I loved a tattered volume of ghost stories found somewhere. Especially The Water Ghost of Harrowby Hall, which can be read here. 

Eerie and weird and mysterious were my favorite things.

I read other Holmes stories over the years. And later I watched the PBS television Sherlock Homes series on Mystery!, read The Seven Percent Solution  by Nicholas Meyer and saw the movie, and even saw Sherlock Holmes Smarter Brother; I had married a Holmes fan.

But what did I really know about Holmes? Why does he persist until today inspiring novels, television shows, and movies based on his character?

I thought I'd find out by reading the new book by Zach Dundas,
The Great Detective:The Amazing Rise and Immortal Life of Sherlock Holmes 

Enthusiasm abounds in this volume. It is never stuffy and maintains a light voice. Dundas' writing is informal and rather like a roller coaster ride with all the information he packs into a chapter. He summarizes the Holmes stories, informs the reader of relevant background information, throws in personal background stories on Doyle, and talks about his personal investigation on London locals which inspired Holmes' London. We learn about Doyle's teacher who inspired the Holmesian scientific methods. We find out about Doyle's private life and his love/hate relationship with his creation.

Those of us who have not read the stories in decades will appreciate the summaries of the stories. I had planned on reading the stories along with this book. I read The Study in Scarlet. But decided not to continue reading the stories side-by-side with Dundas. His synopsis is so thorough there was no need.

Dundas considers the current media versions of Holmes including Benedict Cumberbatch's Sherlock, which will delight fans, and looks at the fan fiction imagining various pairings of Holmesian characters. He addresses how Doyle allowed adaptations and use of his characters during his life time. He became quite tired of Holmes and 'killed him off'. Some years later he caved in and wrote The Hound of the Baskervilles, a story quite unlike the previous ones.

In his conclusion Dundas offers reasons for the durability and continual relevance of the Holmes mythos.

The book will delight Holmes fans.

I thank the publisher and NetGalley for a free ebook in exchange for an unbiased review.

The Great Detective: The Amazing Rise and Immortal Life of Sherlock Holmes
by Zach Dundas
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Publication date June 2, 2015
ISBN: 9780544214040
$26 hard cover