STLMQG at Quiltcon 2023!

The Weirding Hour - Community Outreach Quilt

Team St. Louis

Welcome to the Weirding Hour! It's a quirky time in the Southwest where the weird & wild comes to life. Featuring a desert landscape captured during that magical transition between night and day when nature shows her colors. To get our own one-of-a-kind gradient, we hand-dyed Kona White in ten different colors within the challenge's gradient. The gradient was the focus of our design; it created the illusion of sky's twilight appearance using all ten fabrics as well as the foreground landscape perspective using five "anchor" colors. The theme of the gradient was brought into the quilting several locations by changing the thread color. The Weirding Hour was created using a variety of techniques. The quilt features an improv-pieced sky which was pieced by various guild members during the St. Louis Modern Quilt Guild's annual "Sew Me St. Louis" retreat. Raw edge applique was used in the foreground to highlight different landscape details. Jessica, our Jackalope, is an original foundation paper pieced pattern containing 86 tiny pieces. Free motion quilting added texture and different densities to help distinguish each of the landscape layers. Standout quilted features were done in pink glow in the dark thread, such as the flying sauces, Tyrell the Triceratops, and the center setting sun. The quilt backing was tie-dyed in the primary landscape anchor colors to create a unique matching back. Annamaria Lu and Pam Waske led our team of 9 STLMQG memb

I would love to list everyone that worked on this. Can someone email me the names? secretary@stlmqg.org.

Twelfth of Never - Appliqué

Pam Hartig

This quilt was born several years ago from a picture my eleven year old grandson had of an optical illusion. I made a quick sketch and a mental note of it and filed it away. Fast forward five years and the "Twelfth of Never" was created. (The Twelfth of Never is used as the date of a future occurrence that will never come to pass.) Each circle is turned 1/12th place, like a clock. They're positioned to give a wave effect. The circles were cut from a fusible backed, white and midnight blue strip. 225 circles were cut with an Olfa Circle Cutter and 25 circles were fused and appliquéd to each square. (225 appliquéd circles that I thought I would NEVER finish!) This quilt was machine pieced, appliquéd and quilted by me on my domestic Bernina 750QE sewing machine. 

Matrin-3 Proteinopathy in Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis - Appliqué

Macy Sprunger

Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) or Lou Gherig's disease is a tragic lethal disease with no treatment or cure. Matrin-3 is a critically important protein involved in ALS that scientists do not understand very well. I have developed a simple yeast model and pure protein model of Matrin-3 during my Ph.D. studies in biochemistry at Washington University. The blocks of this quilt represent my main findings from both models (Sprunger et al., iScience, 2022). I hope that my findings will help scientists understand another piece of the ALS puzzle to bring us closer to life-altering treatments for patients. Top: western blot of protein expression, domain map and Foldindex prediction of Matrin-3. Middle: Yeast cells with Matrin-3 foci and toxicity of Matrin-3 yeast strains. Bottom: Protein gel of purification process, aggregation assay, visualization of aggregates, and phase separated droplets. See my instagram page for the science behind each block! @Macys_Makes

The Myriad Interpretations of Language - a Collaborative Embroidery Project - Group or Bee Quilts

Sam Hunter, Beaverton, Oregon

Group Members: 200+ participants created the blocks - most of them signed their blocks. Pieced into a quilt by Sam Hunter, quilted by Chris Batten

I issued a public challenge for submissions for this project. The following simple instructions were given: use solid-colored fabric, using contrasting thread, stitch a line; using a different thread, stitch a second line that crosses it; sign it. I have always thought that art can be considered a language of communication. Sometimes, when words and rhetoric get lost in the noise, art can cut through it by illustrating the concepts in different ways. As a person with a life-long fascination with how words function, I looked for a way to illustrate the idea that, while we all might hear the same words, what we make of them is often quite different. Just listen to opposing political views to see how language can be stretched to encompass fully contradictory meanings depending on who's listening. Thus, polarizing rhetoric aside, how could the interpretation of language be illustrated? Like this?

Participating STLMQG members; Octavia Pitts, Gina Shelley and Laura Patterson. Did we miss anyone? Contact secretary@stlmqg.org.

Snapshots!

Send any photos you would like to share to secretary@stlmqg.org.