And the Ugly Award Goes to . . .

I subscribe to a quilting website newsletter that is always sending me pics of award-winning quilts. First place this, Judge's Choice that. I'm not terribly impressed with these award winners; most look like they were factory made. Yes, they're intricate and flawless, but they're all starting to blend together now. They all look alike. I preferr to see something that is flawed, weird or just bizarre enough to stand out.

Why? I don't know. Maybe for me, perfection is overrated. :)

I have come across a lot of strange quilts since I started collecting them. This double wedding ring here, which I've yet to finish quilting, is probably the weirdest -- who would choose these colors for this pattern? But I like it because it is so strange. If I was giving out awards, this one would definitely win first place in Bizarrely Beautiful.

Thrifting a bundle of small quilts that I intended to cut up brought me a strange little art quilt. It's beautifully made, and I love the oddities the maker chose to incorporate, so this one went right into the collection. I'd give it first place in Strangely Adorable.

As for my own work, this art quilt I made back in 2021 has created a lot of debate between me and a quilter friend. She says it's hideously gorgeous, mainly because of my color choices and abstract compositions. No one, she assured me, would ever use peach moire satin like this. I agree, so I want first place in the So Ugly It's Pretty category.

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Old Loves & Such

My guy kindly bought me my favorite Chinese take out the other night, and my fortune cookie offered up an interesting story starter: This sounds sweet, right? Only the first thing I thought of was an old love coming back from the dead . . . . must be October. In other lovely news, my favorite hand-dyed thread artist, Lorraine from Colour Complements , is moving her business from Etsy to her own web site. Many of my favorite sellers on Etsy are leaving due to the whole "free shipping" coercion debacle, which has also soured me on the site. To show support I did a little shopping at Lorraine's web site and got in these: I love her threads and trims; you simply can't buy anything like them anywhere. Her work makes my specialty thread box look like a treasure chest: At night I'm spending just as hour working on quilting the scrap project runner, and I'm making slow progress: I'll keep quilting the runner while I try to decide on a design for t...

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Valerean

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