A quilt by Francestown resident and quilter Beth Frisbie Wallace won a spot in the American Quilt Society’s QuiltWeek show, which takes place this February in Daytona Beach, Florida. The quilt, featuring an original design by Frisbie Wallace and titled “Bird of Paradise,” will be one of 422 quilts on display out of hundreds of submissions from around the world.
“It’s exciting to share an art piece that you really love with others,” Frisbie Wallace said. She described creating a quilt as “a rather introverted process,” and said events like these serve as the social piece of the art process.
After completing the quilt in June, Frisbie Wallace entered it in the Vermont Quilt Festival, where she was encouraged by positive reviews from judges. “I love it a lot, so I figured I’d enter it nationally,” she said.
“It’s not just the bed quilt that you might think of,” she said. “Bird of Paradise” doesn’t involve the geometric designs associated with traditional quilts, instead focusing on a single blossom of a Bird of Paradise flower, and is just 44 by 57 inches. It involves 25 different yellow and oranges, 30 different green fabrics, as well as a number of shades of blue, brown, white, red, and pink. Frisbie Wallace said that she is drawn to rich colors and nature images in quilts. “I made two traditional quilts somewhere in the eighties and I didn’t look back,” she said, preferring to render colorful flowers, winter tree trunks against the sunrise, and clouds in different shades of gray and white in her work. “Some of my pieces of more detailed landscape images are comprised of 100-150 different fabrics.”
Frisbie Wallace said she has made quilts for fun for decades, periodically teaching and lecturing on technique. She participated in the juried League of New Hampshire Craftsmen show for a number of years. “I don’t have a very strong internet presence,” she said, but has done commissions in the past, and said she’s open to selling her work to people who express interest.
It’s difficult to characterize the number of hours it takes to produce a quilt like “Birds of Paradise,” she said. “It’s probably in the hundreds.” To create a quilt, Frisbie Wallace first develops a full size, “coloring book type” image from a photograph, complete with outlines of every piece of fabric she’ll need. She then cuts and arranges every piece of fabric, and finally stitches everything together with a regular domestic sewing machine.
The Quilt Week show in Daytona Beach runs from Feb. 26 to Feb. 29, one of six shows the American Quilter’s Society puts on this year. Although all exhibitors will send their quilts to the show, not all are able to attend the event themselves. Frisbie Wallace said she hopes to be able to see it there. “Especially at an international show like this, you’re seeing people’s best work from all over the country, and all over the world.” She said it’s inspiring to see the wide variety of sizes, techniques, and media used to create quilts at shows like this one.
“People prepare for this all year long,” said Alyssa Ragsdale of the American Quilter’s Society. “A lot of our contestants will spend a year or more making a quilt.” She said that although the submissions to the show are already juried, sponsoring sewing machine company Janomi awards cash prizes up to $20,000 for winning designs in seven quilt categories. The festival also features quilt appraisals and tutorials from professional quilters.
The event’s website features descriptions of sold-out workshops on topics ranging from longarm quilting techniques and a technique class called “Free-motion fills and frills,” to an introduction to Sashiko embroidery, to a class where attendees make a quilt square featuring a collaged image of a cactus.