TQS Taping 10/9/2015

Hi all -

On Friday, I got to attend another taping of The Quilt Show. It was a lot of fun and I feel very fortunate that the tapings are done so close to home. As usual, two shows were taped. The first show was with Jenny Bowker, an Australian quilt artist who makes beautiful landscape and portrait quilts, among other things. The second show was with Charlotte Hickman who specializes in nature quilts.

On taping days, you start out by waiting in the lobby while they do some prep work on the set, like hanging the quilts. Then the audience gets to come in while they finish their prep work.

While we wait, John explains the rules and the procedure and then just keeps us entertained with jokes, interesting tidbits, surveys and anything else he comes up with.

We started off by shooting the intro with Justin in the audience:

Then we got to watch the taping of the intro. Jenny is a really sweet lady who I'd love to know in person! She's bright, kind and very interesting. Her husband is a retired diplomat, so she's traveled quite a bit. She's a very diverse quilter, making use of a lot of different techniques. One type of quilt she makes melds landscape quilts with traditional blocks:

I think this is a really cool technique that I would like to try sometime. She also does some incredible portrait quilts:

Isn't that incredible? For her first demo, she showed Ricky a technique where she takes a large print fabric and cuts a square that crops off some of the image. She then adds borders and quilts around the images in the print fabric, extending the images into the borders with the quilting. Here they are discussing things before taping the demo:

It's a very cool technique that I'd just read about in one of my magazines, so it was fun to realize that this was the lady who was doing this and to watch as she showed us how. Her second demo was something completely different. For this demo, she showed us how to design tile quilts like this one:

Did I mention how diverse her quilts are?? Here she is talking to Alex before this demo:

After the taping was finished, she came out to answer questions from the audience:

I was very enchanted with this sweet lady.

After lunch we came back in to a set decorated with all new quilts.

We found new seats and the second taping began. Charlotte is a knitter turned quilter, so she tries to use her knitting supplies in her quilts. She makes nature quilts with a lot of thread-painting and embellishments. She makes quilts with trees in them, where the tree trunks are created using wool roving:

Isn't that incredible? Her first demo was with Alex. She showed how she needle-punches roving into canvas and then cuts her tree trunk appliques from that. Very cool! Here is another one of her tree quilts and a close-up showing some of the great embellishments:

Can you see all of the beads and hand stitching she's added to create all of the details? She also does a lot of thread-painting in her quilts, but my pictures just didn't do justice to the texture that this adds. In her second demo, she showed us how she does her thread painting. After the taping, she, too, came forward to talk to the audience:

It really was a fun day with a lot of interesting techniques to learn.

Nancy