Bloggers Quilt Festival - like attending Festival without getting out of your jammies

Amy, you are brilliant, and I am thrilled to participate! (http://www.amyscreativeside.com/) Who couldn't love checking out a zillion fabulous quilts and reading about their histories? Answer - I guess people who don't love quilting, but how sad their lives must be. So for those who love quilting or found this by accident, read on!

My slice house quilt, variously named "Home Is Where the Heart Is" (for juried show usage) and "Home Is Where the Wine Glasses Are Kept at the Ready" (my preferred name) is not shown in my trunk show very often, but in my oh-so-humble opinion is one of the more fantastic quilts in my collection. I hope you enjoy learning more about it!

I was first introduced to the Slice House quilt concept when I was the guest lecturer at Thimble Pleasures Quilt Guild in Upton, MA, and some of the women were show and telling their slice house quilts. I was immediately salivating profusely and practically cornered Kathleen Murphy, who had a phenomenal slice house in her hands, to ask her how I might go about doing something like this in my own guild. Kathleen, who is an extremely talented designer herself, has a blog at http://www.kathleenmurphydesigns.blogspot.com/, and is just incredibly nice and helpful to boot, gave me some guidance and even came to my guild to talk about the process with us before we got started. She probably didn't appreciate several panicked emails sent by me as we tried to iron out some of the details of the photo printing with Ritchie my Staples boyfriend, but in the end it all worked out and I was able to get the project going with my guild.

We had groups of eight quilters who worked on one "slice", or 8 x 11 photo of a part of another members home, at a time, and switched projects (or homes, if you will) every one or two months until everyone had 8 finished "slices" made by 8 different quilters that when put together like a puzzle created their home. The results were completely stunning and at the reveal at our June meeting, I again was salivating profusely. There must be a medication for that.

Each member did their own front door, which was a nice way to keep the "heart of the home" as personal as possible. Here is a close up of my front door and all the thread painting I did for my landscaping. I had never thread painted before in my life, and I have to say I am pretty darn good at it for someone who never had a lesson. Go me! Go me!

Speaking of thread painted wonderment, see that forsythia bush in the lower right corner. Yeah, that's total fakery. I do not have a forsythia bush anywhere on my property. That's covering up the one place where the seams of the "slices" didn't come together very well and my driveway was off by what would in real life amount to about 5 feet. So I played God and threw in a pretend bush. Cute, huh?

I also love the stone walkway. My husband, who spent about 15 months on this weekend project (it's an epidemic in our house to way underestimate weekend projects), thinks I didn't do it justice. I think he is smoking something, because it is awesome, right down to the french knots between the "stones" to represent the gravel dust.

Anyone notice anything interesting hovering in the door? That wine glass fabric was exactly the color of my front door, but there wasn't any place on the fabric that didn't have print on it. So what the heck, I figured, we unashamedly drink wine in this house, why not have it on the door?

Here is some more thread painting, this time done by Jeanne Brown, a lovely woman from my guild who always does a beautiful job of any project she takes on. Jeanne actually had the top part of this photo as her slice, including the red red red fabric she put on, then thread painted this amazing tree, then looked horrifiedly at the photo and realized my house is brown brick, not red brick. I told her not to stress out about it, I loved the tree too much to have her redo it, but inside I was a bit nervous about how it would all come together. However, voila! Add some mortar in to make bricks, and it totally settled that red right down. What a save.

I'm well aware that garages are so not interesting, and mine is no exception. But check out that awesome verigated thread shingle-ing action. And I absolutely cannot complain about how careful everyone was about making sure my lines (roof, grass, etc) would all come together to make the house look like something that could withstand any blast of breath from the big bad wolf.

I absolutely love this quilt and it hangs proudly in my living room for all to admire. Many thanks to Michelle Banton, Rose Wuoti, Jeanne Brown, Linda Brooke, Margaret Conaway, Donna Rosander, and Norma King for all your hard work on the slices! The result is amazing and exactly what I was hoping for!