Arts Show Season Starts Soon

My first arts and crafts show of the 2009 summer season is just two months away. It’s the Festival of Arts and Crafts in beautiful Grand Lake, Colorado, June 6 and 7.

This is a sweet little event held in a gorgeous town park with views of the snow-covered peaks of Rocky Mountain National Park and the sparkling blue waters of Lake Granby. Area wildlife often walk through town and having to shovel moose or elk droppings out of your booth space before setting up is one unique element of this show. The organizers do their job well. The free pastries and coffee each morning are a nice touch.

I love using this show as the start of my season. It lets me test new products, play with my booth design and get feedback about both from returning customers and returning vendors who’ve become friends as well as friends who have become customers. Grand Lake is an easy and gorgeous 45-minute drive from my home.

Early June may seem late for just getting started with the summer show season, but this is Colorado, where weather in the mountains can range from hot sunshine to snow and wind any month of the year.

Three years ago, we awoke at Grand Lake to find six inches of snow on our booths. Many artists left, but a few of us brushed the snow away, bought dry socks at a nearby store and opened our booths with surprisingly good sales that afternoon. A year earlier, I spent the weekend in shorts and t-shirt, constantly fanning myself to cool off under the summer-like sun.

Early June also is the time that reverse-snowbirds from Texas, Oklahoma and Arizona start returning to their summer homes in the mountains and start looking for new ways to decorate those homes, providing the show with a build-in customer base.

Two months to go means evenings and weekends full of sewing. I customize my inventory of pillows, bags and other items for each show, reproducing vintage postcards and travel posters of that area on fabric and then quilting them into one-of-a-kind home décor items. Fortunately, Grand Lake and Rocky Mountain National Park have been popular tourist spots since the early 1900s and great postcards are easy to find.

For details about Grand Lake, go to http://www.grandlakechamber.com/index.html.

Everything Old is New Again

Everything old is new again. That adage isn’t just about fashion or architecture. It’s about my arts and crafts work. I take vintage textiles, antique quilt squares and old patchwork castoffs and turn them into new decorative quilts, pillows and totes.

The first photo here represents once such project. It’s a decorative quilt that started with a single late-1940s or early-1950s hand-pieced quilt square in a maple leaf pattern. The leaf is made from old plaid shirting fabric set in muslin. I found the old quilt block in the bottom of a basket of sewing supplies at the back of an antique store. It was wrinkled, uneven and had a nasty musty smell. But for 50 cents I took it home, washed it twice, pressed it flat and trimmed it square.

I set the refurbished quilt block on point with muslin corner triangles. To that I added a contemporary teal southwestern print that complemented the blue leaf. Borders, an appliquéd Kokopeli figure, beads, buttons and intricate hand-quilting finished the project. The eye-catching final product sold in the first hour of my next craft show.



The quilt in this photo required a little bit more work. The center pink star-and-ribbon piece is actually four antique quilt blocks that I connected to form one medallion. Three were in good shape but one required some repair work. I carefully removed two badly torn muslin pieces, cut new ones and re-stitched the block. But my new muslin was a much different color than the well-aged original muslin. I stitched the four squares together to form the medallion and then tea-dyed the entire piece, giving it a very aged look overall.

The finished center piece was then set on point with a vintage-looking reproduction print of children playing in the snow -- building snowmen, throwing snowballs, skiing. The pink in the print perfectly matched the tea-dyed pink fabric. This quilt, 38 inches square, is currently available at ArtFire.com: http://www.artfire.com/modules.php?name=ViewListing&product_id=148947.

The key to working with vintage quilt blocks or fabrics is to make sure they’re in good enough shape and durable enough for your project. Interfacing ironed onto the back of a fragile piece can give it more life. Don’t look for perfection in vintage fabrics -- enjoy the stains, spots, frays, discolorations, and mismatched seams for the stories they hold. I love taking something old and worn, and turning it into something new and useful. Now, if I could just find a way to do that with myself.