Quilts Everywhere! All At Once!

Quilts will blanket Madison County this Saturday, but please don’t call quilts blankets. Don’t call them afghans, either. Quilts are quilts.

The big day for the Iowa Quilt Festival is the Airing of the Quilts on Saturday, June 7. Quilts will hang on fences, on porch railings, over church pews, and inside historic covered bridges.

“The Airing of the Quilts” from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Saturday, June 7, is the culmination and the big public day of Madison County’s annual Iowa Quilt Festival, a four-day event that includes single-day workshops, a multi-day sewing retreat, lectures, a gallery walk, a trivia night, and more.

This year, I’ll be on the south portico of the Madison County Courthouse!

I attempted to draw a fuchsia arrow pointing to the south portico of Madison County’s classic (and classy) 1876 courthouse, where I’ll be hanging out on Saturday.

We place bedsteads under the porticoes atop the steps on the north, east, south, and west sides, and assign a quiltmaker to each location. On Saturday morning I’ll stack six of my best quilts on the bed and from 10 to 4 peel them back one-by-one, describing the inspiration and process for each.

Here's a closer look at the steps and the space under the portico.

I’ll bring mostly full size quilts, but I promise to have along the smaller one I made to commemorate my famous shooting of a 42-inch timber rattler back in 1987.

You can read about my fame as a snake killer here.

Purchase a $25 ticket that includes a map and the ticketed locations all around town here. For just $5 more your ticket also covers the the Covered Bridge Quilters’ annual show at the elementary school, where you’ll see even more quilts.

For those of you in the Des Moines metro area, I’m displaying three of my large quilts tomorrow evening (Tuesday, June 3) at Willow on Grand on opening night of the Zenith Chamber Music Festival. The Indianapolis Quartet will be performing (also free) in Winterset a few days later, on Friday night, June 6, at 7 p.m. at the Iowa Theater.

The Iowa Theater’s gorgeous red velvet curtain, golden columns and keystoned arch will be the backdrop for the Indianapolis Quartet’s Friday, June 6, free concert.

American quiltmakers of the nineteenth century not only made thousands of quilts, they originated the patterns without graph paper or digital illustration programs, or even electricity. While they were at it, they gave the patterns awesome names like Log Cabin, Broken Dishes, Wandering Foot, Gentleman’s Fancy, and . . . Courthouse Steps.

Courthouse Steps is a Log Cabin Variation.

The closest to Courthouse Steps I’ve made is Texas Log Cabin. I probably won’t be bringing this one to the portico on Saturday, because taking it down from the wall involves a ladder.

Texas Log Cabin, 67 x 94 inches, 2006, by Marianne Fons, 100% cotton, machine pieced, appliquéd, and quilted.

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