String Star

I received a great email the other day from Nancy Ray. Her name was instantly familiar to me since a whole bunch of her gorgeous quilts appear in Gwen Marston's book Liberated String Quilts, which I highly recommend. I've previously posted pics of some of Nancy's quilts, which is how she found me.

It was wonderful to exchange emails with Nancy and she gave me permission to show you this Lone Star:

Nancy explains: "I'm attaching a photo of another old string quilt for you (1940's, I estimate). ... It came from east Texas--but that's all I know of its background. Well, except that the quilting on it, and the care with which it was made, show us that this quilter could have made anything she wanted to. String quilts like this one are important, because they demonstrate that strings weren't used just for the most humble economy quilts. Unfortunately, that's a fairly well-entrenched misconception. "

She's right. Isn't the quilting incredible? I love the spider webs.

Nancy has joined the Lazy Gal Summer 2008 class and I'm looking forward to seeing her work. The class members have already made some great quilts, have you checked them out?

I mentioned Gwen Marston earlier. Two quilts made with solid fabric have recently been posted on her homepage - oooh, they're gorgeous. Fingers crossed we get pictures of them in the new book.

Nothing much interesting going on. I've been doing lots of hand quilting and washing and ironing fabric. No sewing, but I'll get back to that soon. Yup, rather boring here.