KMQG Happenings and Upcoming Color Theory Lecture

We've had an amazing response to our first quilt show. It was such an inspiring evening and day, and if you weren't able to make it down to Striped Light, we are happy to announce that the show goes on! Our quilts will remain on display through the Open Streets celebration in North Knoxville this weekend. You can visit Striped Light Saturday, May 14, 12-5 and Sunday, May 15, 12-6. Please come down and support our beautiful show. We're also going to make this a yearly event!

At our May 21 meeting, Ashley Pace will also be joining us from the University of Tennessee with a lecture on Color Theory. We have invited guests from the quilt show to attend this meeting and join in on the fun. We'll also collect payments ($75) for our July Workshop with Shannon Brinkley. All payments for this workshop are due at the May meeting (paypal to modknoxville@gmail.com also accepted). We will vote on our favorite mini quilt from the TN mini quilt swap, and the winner will receive a gift card! Remember that the minis made for this swap need to shipped before the end of May, so show them off and then mail them out.   

During our meeting on June 18, Merikay Waldvogel will lecture on 200 years of Tennessee Quilts. You can find more about her here. Her lecture will be $6 per member and $10 for non-members, so bring your friends! The weekend of our June meeting coincides with the Smoky Mountain Quilters Quilt Show at the Expo Center.

And finally, July 16 will be our workshop, Scrappy Skyline with Shannon Brinkley. There are still spots available to all interested parties (click here to reserve your spot). The Knoxville Skyline pattern, available here for $8, must be purchased before the workshop.

We're excited about all of these amazing learning experiences coming down the line and hope you will take advantage of these great opportunities!

April Meeting Recap

Carving linoleum blocks

We had a wonderful workshop Saturday and enjoyed our printing time with Striped Light's Sarah and Bryan. We're excited to show off the handcrafted posters for our upcoming quilt show - stay tuned! If you are interested in learning more about the printing process or taking a class with them, their class schedule is available on their website, www.stripedlight.com. They've been so kind and generous sharing their time, supplies, tools, ink, paper, space, and expertise.

 

Sarah explains how to operate one of the presses

Sarah and Bryan get us started

The new QuiltCon East Charity Challenge for 2017 has been announced. You can find all the information here. Please start thinking about design ideas. We will be accepting design ideas through our June meeting. Please email us your ideas, with a sketch, so that we may put these in our meeting presentation. Then we'll vote to decide on which we'd like to become our quilt!

 

 

Local quilt shop Mammaw's Thimble continues its going-out-of-business sale, with 40% off and, at last check, still a good supply of solid fabrics.

Our quilt show, Traditional Craft, Modern Perspective, is just a couple weeks away, so be sure to get your hanging sleeves on your quilts. Mini quilts don't need sleeves, and we'd love to have as many minis on display as we can get. We want to fill a wall with minis! If your TN mini swap quilt is finished, it would be wonderful to have those as well! Quilts need to be delivered in a plastic bag or pillow case to Melissa's home or Emily's workplace (Educational Outfitters on Cedar Bluff Rd.) on Tuesday, May 3. (Contact Melissa at modknoxville@gmail.com for her address if you need it.) After the show, quilts need to be picked up Monday, May 9, from Melissa. Help us spread the word about the show so that we can share our quilts with a large audience! We'd love to turn this into an annual event.

Next meeting: Our next regular meeting will be May 21 back at Westminster Presbyterian. Bring your finished TN mini swap quilt for voting!

March Meeting Recap

Melissa's medallion quilt

We had a lovely meeting in March with a good size crowd sticking around afterward for the sew-in, during which Taylor assembled our 24" blocks for our long overdue Quilt of Valor.

KMQG Quilt of Valor

 

Jennifer reviewed the winning quilts from QuiltCon 2016. You can find that list with pictures here.

Pat's Gypsy Wife quilt in progress

The Smoky Mountain Quilters of Tennessee Quilt Show is coming up soon -- June 17 and 18. The deadline for entries is May 3; here's the form and more information. Unfortunately, there will not be a Modern category this year, but we will continue to show support by sponsoring one ribbon.

Rosalind's Crackle blocks (pattern by 13 Spools)

We've booked Shannon Brinkley for the Knoxville Skyline: Scrappy Applique Workshop on July 16 11:00 a.m.-6:00 p.m. Spots are still available and open to all interested parties. Please use the form here.

Melissa's king-size quarter log cabin quilt

NEXT MEETING: Our next meeting will not be at the usual day and location but rather will be on Saturday, April 9 at Striped Light in North Knoxville. We'll work on a project for our upcoming Quilt Show. Please arrive no later than 10:30 and plan on staying for 3 hours. Bring water and snacks (if you think you'll get hungry) and a jacket if it's supposed to be cold. This will be a free, creative class for KMQG members that we hope everyone will take advantage of.

February Meeting Recap

Melissa's gorgeous transparency quilt

Thank you to everyone who joined us for our February meeting! We had a fabulous turnout for the wool applique tutorial.  If you haven't made it down to Mountain Creek Quilt Shop in Greenback, we highly recommend it! Thank you, Samantha and Janet, for guiding us through a fun wool applique mug rug project (designed by our own Emily Doane) -- and for bringing a pop-up shop!

Sign-ups for the Thoroughly Modern Mini Swap have ended. This is a great community-building swap for MQGs across the state -- Memphis Area, Music City (Nashville), Knoxville, and Chattanooga. Minis are due at our May meeting and we will vote on our favorite modern quilt and award a prize before you ship your mini to your partner.

 

Sarah's friendship stars

Spots for our quilt show, "Traditional Craft, Modern Perspective," are filling up so please complete the form to submit your quilt for consideration. Thank you to everyone who is going to show a quilt and help with other aspects of the show. We'll have LOTS more info coming soon!

Elizabeth's value-based baby quilt

QuiltCon West was this weekend in Pasadena. We will recap all of the winners at our March meeting.

 

Quilt of Valor 24" blocks are due at our March meeting, and we'll assemble the tops during our sew-in. You can also bring personal projects to work on. We'll play LRC with 3 fat quarters with Easter/Spring feeling (think pastels, polka dots, flowers). We hope to see many familiar faces and a few new ones too.

 

Taylor's salvaged quilt top turned finished quilt

We are looking into hosting a workshop with Shannon Brinkley, who has a great technique called scrappy applique. You can find her on Instagram, @shannonebrinkley, and online at www.shannon-brinkley.com. We'll update the guild when we know a day and price for the workshop.

Rosalind's amazing (and huge!) Amish-inspired quilt

In January we were short on time and forgot to set our quilting resolutions for the year, so we did it this month. We'll pull out our resolutions in December to see how everyone did -- and prizes will be awarded, of course!

Pat finished her Meadow Quilt! Way to go, Pat!!!

Next meeting: Saturday, March 19

Visit our Facebook page to RSVP

 

2016 QUILTCON Charity Quilt

We are excited to announce that the Knoxville Modern Quilt Guild has a quilt hanging in the QuiltCon Charity Quilt challenge this week in Pasadena. This year’s theme, was “Improv with Intent.”

In July 2015, the KMQG entered into an artistic collaboration with local artist Sarah Shebaro, co-founder of Striped Light, a letterpress studio in Knoxville. During a delightful guild meeting at her studio, Sarah gave a demonstration of her printmaking process and introduced us to her most recent series of prints. 

 

 

 

 

Inspired by the shapes and forms of Sarah's work, the guild took a limited challenge palette of white, off-white, sunflower, tomato red, light teal, grey, and black and let each member try her hand at improvisational 11-x-17-inch blocks, echoing the form of Sarah's prints. Members incorporated elements of the prints, triangles, stripes to create poster-sized blocks that were clearly inspired by Sarah’s prints.

Over the next several months and through a retreat and conversations on Instagram, guild members assembled their own improvisational blocks.

We gathered in November to assemble the quilt and settled on a design that echoed the form of posters hanging on a wall. Jennifer Grace pieced all our blocks together, Pat Pike did the quilting, and Emily Doane bound and labeled it. Thank you to all who had a hand in this charity quilt!

Inspired by our process, Sarah Shebaro is undertaking another series of work based on our quilts, and the collaboration will continue until a local unveiling with our guild’s show at the Striped Light Studio in May2016. Stay tuned for details on our show!

January Meeting Recap

Thank you to everyone who joined us for our first meeting of 2016! We covered a lot of material and had a great discussion of our upcoming events for the year. If you were unable to join us, that's okay -- there's always next month! We will continue collecting dues via check or PayPal (modknoxville@gmail.com). We hope to see more new faces this year!

Our first order of business was to welcome our new officers:

• Chair: Michelle Bolt
• Special Events Coordinator: Melissa Everett
• Education Coordinator: Jennifer Grace
• Secretary: Elizabeth Rea
• Treasurer: Christy Cooper

Many members took home Quilts of Valor blocks to turn into larger 24" QOV blocks due back at our March meeting and sew-in.

Next month we will welcome special guest Terri Ayers of Mountain Creek Quilt Shop in Greenback, TN. Terri will teach us about wool applique, and member Emily Doane has designed a modern mug rug for the tutorial. We would like to be adequately prepared with materials, so please sign up in advance if you'd like to participate in the workshop. The guild would like to offset a portion of the cost of this event, with participants paying a nominal fee (no more than $10). Please bring cash or check to the meeting to cover your portion of the cost. All materials will be provided. Please sign up using this form: February Wool Applique Workshop.

One final order of business from the meeting: Our budget was approved for 2016, but it may need some adjusting for our Quilt Show collaboration with Striped Light, details of which came about after the budget was created. This show will take place May 6-8. We will be sending out a signup sheet for this event soon! Please be on the lookout, and get those modern quilts finished! You can enter one regular sized quilt and one mini quilt. If we don't have enough participants, we will then open up the floor for more submissions.

Fall Meetings Recap

As we kick off a new year with the Knoxville Modern Quilt Guild, we want to review some of our best moments and accomplishments from the second half of 2015. Check out our Facebook group page for more photos, including loads of show and tell.

Lynn Rinehart visited our November meeting and gave an informative presentation on quilt appraisals.

We completed seven Stars for Stephanie quilts and donated them to chemotherapy treatment rooms at UT Hospital in memory of member Stephanie Hicks.

We completed two more quilts for The Restoration House of East Tennessee, our local charity project. These quilts are presented to single mothers and their children when they leave the organization's transitional housing and begin new lives of hope and promise.

We pulled together to create "Improv with Intent" blocks for our guild's submission to the Modern Quilt Guild's Quilt Con 2016 show.

In October, some of our group enjoyed a few days of sewing at the Whistlestop Quilt Retreat in Sweetwater, TN. The Whistlestop made us feel so welcome and comfy, and everyone had a great time starting new projects, making progress on WIPs, and even adding to the "finished" pile. We look forward to another great retreat at Whistlestop in 2016!

We were so happy to welcome designer Lizzy House to Knoxville in September. Lizzy's Meadow Quilt Workshop was amazing and drew quilters from not only here in Knoxville but also Nashville, St. Louis, and North Carolina, among other locations. Our Meadow Quilts are in various states of completion, and we look forward to seeing more finishes in 2016. Each one is so unique!

Finally, on the business side of things, we revised our bylaws and created a 5-person board to guide our development and activities in the coming year. The board positions are Chairman and Community Relations; Education Coordinator; Programming and Special Events Coordinator; Secretary and Communications Manager; and Treasurer.