Melissa Sobotka was awarded $1,000 by Sponsor, Carriage Country Quilts, for Santorini Sunset, in the category, Best Use of Color, at Road to California 2018.


Melissa Sobotka was awarded $1,000 by Sponsor, Carriage Country Quilts, for Santorini Sunset, in the category, Best Use of Color, at Road to California 2018.
in·no·va·tive (ˈinəˌvādiv/) adjective Featuring new methods; advanced and original.
Sponsored by BERNINA of America, Janet says, “I had to design this quilt after the title came to me first, while lying in bed one night. The color fabrics were all hand dyed by my very talented friend, Gilbert Muniz. It was originally going to be just a wall quilt, but it demanded to be bit larger. This is the 16th quilt in my alphabet quilt series.”
PROUD PEACOCK by Mrs. Antonia Hering
Antonia is a resident of The Netherlands. She came up with her original design because she always wanted to make a quilt with a peacock. Antonia said, “The challenge was to use very tiny stitches. It had to be a special one, different from all I had seen. Another challenge was the hand-piecing of the tiny triangles in the spirals.The rest of the quilt is inspired by old catalogs from the 1800’s showing all kinds of long forgotten crafts.” Leo9 Textiles sponsored this winning quilt.
Bailando en la Noche (Dancing in the Night) by Shelley Stokes
Kerry’s Kollectibles sponsored this winning quilt. Shelley describes her innovative design that “the colorful medallions evoke the swirling skirts of Mexican folk dancers under an exuberant night sky. Just as music and dance add delight to our lives, hand stitching breathes life into the painted images. The shapes in the medallions were painted on whole cloth black fabric with Shiva Artist’s Paintstiks. All surface stitching was done by hand with pearl cotton threads. It appears to be appliqué, but it’s not.”
Five Turns of the Wheel by Sandra F. Peterson
This quilt was designed using Sandra’s original “fractured wheels” because she was thinking about a design that fills in between circles. For Sandra, “the idea of playing with colors that move through the circles with an imaginary turn of each wheel was intriguing. Clockwise, follow yellow starting with the lower left corner circle and watch it move through the circles and burst out and consume the center circle.” Thank you Primitive Gatherings for sponsoring Sandra’s winning entry.
What innovative designs are you working on?
Lyric Kinard won $1,000.00 from Busy Bee Quilt Shop for her 1st Place: Art Abstract winning quilt, Remains of the Day
Have you ever tried to express your love of animals in a quilt design?
That’s exactly what Wendy Knight of San Diego, California did with her Road 2017 winning design, Here’s Lookin’ at You.
Blue Anemone. One week to create the pattern, then one month to hand paint the whole cloth design and finally 4 1/2 months to quilt and finish. The quilting was done on her Innova Stationary Longarm and Janome Horizon 8200 Sewing machine.
The biggest challenge of this quilt for Andrea was creating the subtle nuances of the color changes with the lights and shadows within the flower.
What inspired Andrea’s winning design? “I always loved the deep colors of blue anemone poppies and I knew that one day I would create one in fabric. I was visiting my mom in Oregon and one day we went to one of her favorite nurseries. They had some of the most beautiful red, orange and blue anemones growing. This quilt is based on one of those photographs.”
Andrea has been sewing since she was a child and had created a number of other needle crafts projects over the years. Her quilting journey began when she moved to Texas and joined a stitching group as a way to meet people with similar interests. One of the women in the group was a quilter and she convinced everyone to make a round robin style picnic quilt. After that project, Andrea wanted to make an applique quilt. She taught herself the technique from an applique book. When she finished that quilt, Andrea felt she had officially “caught the quilting bug” and has been creating in fabric ever since.
Blue Anemone was awarded $1,500.00 for Best Use of Color by sponsor, Carriage Country Quilts. With her prize money, Andrea took her husband out to dinner, bought some fabric and put the rest in the bank.
Andrea hopes to continue her journey to create realistic botanical imagery with fabric, thread and paint. She says that “with each quilt I make, I try to challenge myself to hone my artistic voice.” Andrea also looks forward to teaching her techniques at quilt shows, retreat style workshops, and at local quilt guilds.
To learn more about Andrea, you can follow her on her personal and business Facebook Pages.]]>
Joanne Baeth won two, prestigious $1,000 awards at Road to California 2017:
Sponsored by Brother International Corporation, Joanne received 1st Place: Art Naturescape for Country Roads Hiroko Miyama creates beautiful, award winning quilts from her home in Tokyo, Japan.
and 5601C Fabulous Trapunto Wallhanging on Friday and Saturday
Cindy Seitz-Krug specializes in using a home sewing machine for her heirloom quilting. She owes her love of quilting to her mother. When she was 28 years old, Cindy and her mom took a beginning quilting class, taught by Jenny Carr-Kinney, at the community college in Ventura, California. After that class, Cindy says, “I was completely hooked on quilting.” Unfortunately, today, Cindy’s mom suffers from Alzheimer’s and doesn’t remember that she “used to be quite the quilter.” Luckily for Cindy, both of her half-brothers’ wives quilt, so she is still able to quilt with some family.
An author and award-winning quilter, Cindy won $1,500.00 for Excellence In Machine Quilting at Road 2017 for her quilt, Blush. A wholecloth quilt, Cindy said that her biggest challenge was finding “just the right balance of larger motifs that will dazzle, and subtle but beautiful backgrounds to make the main motifs pop, and also make the viewer delight in the detail.”
Cindy says she gets inspiration for her quilts from quilt shows. “Seeing all those amazing quilts gets my wheels churning and gets me excited to create something beautiful of my own,” shared Cindy. She has also taken quilt classes from three different instructors that have had an impact on her quilting technique: Diane Gaudynski for Machine Quilting; Sally Collins for Piecing; and Elly Sienkiewicz for Applique.
What is the one quilting tool that Cindy can’t live without? “Well, I’d have to say a small, sharp pair of scissors, and a thimble (two tools). And of course, my BERNINA.”
Cindy’s best quilting tip is to persevere if you really want to be able to do something. “When people tell me, ‘I could never quilt like that!’, I say, ‘Yes you can; it just depends on how badly you want to do it. If you want it badly enough, you can!’
What does Cindy like best about teaching? “I love when my students tell me that my classes are the best they’ve ever taken! And amazingly, I hear that a lot. It makes me puff up with pride!”
Cindy hopes that after her students leave her classes that “they will feel empowered and confident in their ability to quilt their own quilts beautifully.”
In addition to her quilting, Cindy enjoys hunting and fishing in the Rocky Mountains. She holds a Bachelor of Science degree from Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, in Environmental and Systematic Biology, with a concentration in Fisheries Biology. For more than 20 years, Cindy and her husband owned their own aquaculture facility in Bakersfield, CA, raising catfish for sale to grocers and restaurants. They recently sold their fish farms and relocated to the White Mountains of Arizona.
To learn more about Cindy, please visit her website, Quintessential Quilting.
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