This is one of my favorites of Chris's quilts. It is the first one she made out of dupioni silk. The center is from a book but the wavy lines out are Chris's design. 
Our speaker yesterday was our own Chris Wickert! As I mentioned, she is one of the most prolific quilters I have met and her quilts are all of the highest quality workmanship! Chris shared her journey from all types of needlework into quilting over the past 20-30 years! The quilt to the left is her very first quilt. It is actually machine quilted and it looked pretty good since at the time she didn't even know to baste the layers together!! I had never seen her do quilting on a machine so this was a surprise. Pretty nice first quilt!!
This is actually her second quilt and you can certainly see the forward progress as she hand quilted this one and thus began a love affair with hand quilting. Unbelievably she quilts with no hoop!! She starts in the middle after heavily basting and just quilts out to the edges!
Can you believe this was done as a commission! A friend asked her to do a quilt for her son's wedding. This is a king sized quilt and is exquisite. A month before the wedding, it was called off but the woman gave the quilt to her son anyway who moved to Montana. A few years later a box arrived at Chris's house with the quilt in it saying he loved the quilt but it didn't fit his house so he was giving it back. Chris currently has this quilt on her bed!
Finally Chris decided she needed to take a beginning quilting class from Susie Payne. Half the quilters in Rochester got their beginnings and drive from taking one of Susie's classes (I took two as did Chris). She shared that she was so apprehensive before taking the course that she made all the blocks in Susie's book before the class began!
Chris uses many commercially available patterns as the starting point for many of her quilts but adds her touches as well as fabulous fabric choices. She gives credit in her presentations to the source of her designs and shares how she has changed them.
This is a familiar Piece 'O Cake design but somehow in Chris's hands, it looks so much better!
This was totally Chris's design inspired by Paula Naderstern's wonderful quilts and techniques. It was one of several quilts that had been made to be contributed to charitable auctions. They always bring high dollars!
One of her many smaller tops.
Chris has in the past few years developed a love for working with silk dupioni and this is one of her creations made entirely in silk. Alternate blocks are appliqued. Double click on any of these quilts to get a better view of them. I was about 40 feet away and used a telephoto for all these pictures with a high ISO setting so I didn't have to use a flash.
This was from a Sally Collins workshop. Chris had very unexpected and severe medical problems at the time she was working on this quilt and could not use her stairs at all and therefore could not get to her sewing machine or cutting board or her stash. With help from friends, she got the fabric picked out and cut and she totally hand pieced and hand quilted this masterpiece during her recovery. She is totally back to her old self now but it was scary to see her thin and in a wheelchair wasting away. She doesn't think she will hand piece another quilt though!
Another of her beautiful quilts. Wonderful fabric choices and workmanship!
This is another of her silk dupioni appliqued quilts!I know I have seen many other quilts by Chris (and I haven't shown all she showed today even). We can only hope that we will see her quilting for another 25 years (at least)!
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