Meet Anna Williams

Anna Williams was a Baton Rouge native and an amazing quilter whose quilts appear in collections across the world.  She died in 2010 and most Baton Rouge Quilters never heard of her.  Her quilts hang in the Smithsonian and are in the collections of AQS.  She is on the list of the Top100 Quilters.

Anna's quilts have influenced you and you didn't even know it!

At the River City Guild meeting last night, Katie Prescott gave a  very heartfelt presentation about Anna and her quilts.  Katie's mother was involved in helping to sell and preserve her body of work.

She hand pieced them, while raising 7 boys and 1 girl as a single black woman working as a domestic.  She was born on the Kleinpeter Plantation, which is lands not far from my house.  The Kleinpeters still are the prominent dairy farm in the area.  Around here, we all drink Kleinpeter Milk.
None of the quilts are square, they are just hand pieced, one at a time in any spare moment.

You can see photos of Anna Williams and a few of her quilts here.

Here are some of the quilts Katie showed at the meeting last night.  Make me want to keep MORE of my scrappies!  LOL

So tell me what you think of her quilts.

Bonnie Hunter classes, Whoo Hoo!

That is what she says, Whoo Hoo when she likes your blocks.  Of course she likes EVERYONE'S blocks, but that is beside the point. 

She said Whoo Hoo! when she saw MY blocks!

I will admit that you will have a prejudiced view because I recharged my battery last night from her class yesterday and the lecture with her wonderful quilt show and I failed to put the battery back in the camera.  I did, however, bring the camera to the class today, sans battery.

This is Bonnie's quilt:

So here are my wonderful blocks.  I see now that with the scrap fabrics I have that I need to use more corners of the light ilk than the darker beige or creams.  I can scatter these throughout the quilt and they will blend nicely.  But, the further you get away from it, the more you see the lights.  Just like Bonnie's quilt.  That little blur is Grand Dog Hugeaux's butt.

It needs cornerstones.  If you look at Bonnie's quilt you will see her cornerstones.  They are two inch strips of the scraps used in the quilt with a two inch square where the block corners meet.  That makes the little churn dash pattern and separates the blocks a bit more.

This is the Pineapple Blossom quilt on her website.  It goes really fast, so I would definitely recommend this quilt pattern.  And best of all it uses a good amount of scrap strips.

glen