Arizona’s Centennial was February 14th of this year, and the Arizona Historical Society is celebrating with a fantastic installation; “100 Quilts–100 Years” as part of the Arizona Centennial Quilt Project.
Andrea Stanfield’s quilt, above, is called “Arizona’s Flag 2012” and is made of 2000 postage-stamp sized squares of fabric: it’s a great example of smart use of color, and is really stunning. I would’ve gotten a better photo but the museum was packed with people yesterday for the opening of the show.
Below is my piece which I made in 2006. After Libby Lehman saw it and observed that my piece appeared “ambitious”, I spent almost the entire following year removing the quilting stitches, and then I straightened it to the best of my ability and re-quilted it: I learned a painful lesson with this piece, and that is to NEVER combine raw silk, charmeuse silk, cotton and canvas in a quilt unless I am convinced I can densely machine quilt it to lay straight. Because silk loves to do nothing more than to drape… and while it’s usually an elegant drape, it’s still wavy:
The installation at the Arizona Historical Society Museum is very professional; clearly, they have experts in museum collections curating their shows. I really appreciate the thoughtful time and effort to make this show look fabulous.
Below is a group quilt made by the ladies in my art quilting group, known as the Sharp Women. I am very new to the group, having joined just a year ago; this is a row quilt they made several years ago. It looks fantastic:
Every quilt gets a placard next to it with the title, name of the quilter and a statement; sadly, you can’t read the text for the Sharp Women’s group quilt here, but at least you get the idea:
I encourage everyone to check museum hours for the Arizona Historical Society and view the show; there’s a great book of the exhibit which you can purchase as well! And there’s free parking.