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<\/figure>\n\n\n\nWhat do you\ndo if you\u2019re a quilter who has attended Road to California many, many times and\nhave always admired seeing the winning quilts on display? Well, if you\u2019re Catherine\nDuCharme, you set out to make your own winning quilt!!! Not only did she\nachieve her goal, she tripled her expectations as she was recognized for three\nwinning quilts at Road 2019!!!<\/strong> <\/p>\n\n\n\n Ever since\nher late 20\u2019s, Catherine has admired quilts. She went on a trip to Canada and\ncame upon a quilt shop where she commissioned two quilts that were hand quilted\nby a Canadian woman who was in her 90s. As\nthe years went by, Catherine said that she \u201cyearned for a time in my life when\nI could try my hand at making a quilt.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n That time\ndidn\u2019t come until she was 54 years old when she found that she \u201chad a little\nextra time and I decided to make a quilt for my Mom\u2019s 75th birthday. I bought a\nbook and some fabric and dove in! I had no idea what I was doing and I was so\nfrustrated at first. My Mom had made a log cabin quilt, so she had some\nexperience. She was sure that we could make the quilt, so we worked on it\ntogether and voila! It came together! After that, I had a little more\nconfidence so I made a log cabin all by myself. \nThat began my journey into quilting and I\u2019ve been quilting almost every\nday since 2011.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n Catherine\nsays that she \u201cabsolutely\u201d loves quilting. Why does she love it so much? \u201cThe\ncraft is so varied with the multitude of techniques and approaches to the art\nthat I find myself continually engaged. \nI\u2019ve made embroidery designs, crazy quilt blocks, pieced quilts, and\nappliqu\u00e9. I think my favorite is appliqu\u00e9<\/strong> and I love the Baltimore style\nquilts.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The first of her winning designs was for Best Applique at Road 2019, Happy Trails. <\/em>What inspired this winning design? \u201cWhen I first saw Happy Trails designed by Pearl P. Pereira of P3 Designs, I fell in love. It is so different than anything I\u2019d seen before. Years ago, when I was a novice quilter, I had tried to make one of Pearl\u2019s quilts and it was just too difficult for me; it was beyond my skill level. But, I was determined to make Happy Trails. So I took my time, I gathered my tools, and I worked patiently. I also attended a retreat in Carlsbad, CA to learn Pearl\u2019s Off the Block technique for appliqu\u00e9. That really helped me to practice the technique for preparing turned edges on very small pieces. After I completed the quilt top, Diane Beauchamp quilted it. She is truly an artist and I love the quilting designs she used. For both of us, Happy Trails has been a labor of love.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n It took\nCatherine 6 months to collect all the fabrics for Happy Trails<\/em>. She said\nthat it was \u201ca lot of fun\u201d to choose her fabrics. She began stitching the quilt in February\n2018 and it took another six months to finish it. She used a Silhouette cutting\nmachine to cut all the freezer paper templates which \u201creally helped a lot!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n What does Catherine plane to do with her prize money for Best Applique at Road 2019? It will \u201cgo towards my quilting passion! I have at least 15 quilt tops hanging in my closet that need to be quilted, so I will use the prize money to pay for some of them to be quilted.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cHappy Trails\u201d by Catherine DuCharme, received $1,500 from Sponsor, Fiberworks Inc. What do you do if you\u2019re a quilter who has attended Road to California many, many times and have always admired seeing the winning quilts on display? Well, if you\u2019re Catherine DuCharme, you set out to make your own winning quilt!!! Not only did […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6722","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorised"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/road2ca.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6722","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/road2ca.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/road2ca.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/road2ca.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/road2ca.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6722"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/road2ca.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6722\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6726,"href":"https:\/\/road2ca.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6722\/revisions\/6726"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/road2ca.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6722"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/road2ca.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6722"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/road2ca.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6722"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"best](\"https:\/\/road2ca.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/08\/best-applique-820x1024.jpg\")
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