Jenny parked her BMW sedan in Harriet's circular driveway and carried her quilt into the studio.
"This isn't as fancy as Avanell's,” she said.
"It doesn't have to be fancy. I've seen a number of blue ribbon winners that were well executed traditional patterns. Workmanship and color choice make a big difference in a quilt."
"Avanell's are always well crafted and fancy,” Jenny countered. “Who would have thought to combine trapunto with traditional pieced blocks and then hand-dye the fabric to boot?"
"It is a nice quilt,” Harriet admitted.
"Lauren's nuts if she thinks anything she designed would outshine Avanell's work."
"I've never seen Lauren's."
"When you do, you'll see what I'm talking about. She has potential, but she just hurries too much, and she doesn't understand where the boundaries are between being inspired by someone's work and outright copying. Your aunt tried to explain to her that she couldn't trace pictures out of children's books and then sell them as her own patterns, but she doesn't understand."
"I hope she doesn't ask me to stitch anything like that,” Harriet said.
"You won't have to worry-she does her own quilting on her home sewing machine. You're the quilt depot, aren't you?"
Harriet nodded.
"You'll get to see it then even if she doesn't come to Loose Threads. Check it out when you do-you'll see what I mean. Avanell would have to keel over dead for Lauren to have a chance, and even then it wouldn't be certain."
"Let's have a look at yours,” Harriet said. She didn't want to be forced into taking sides before she'd even met Lauren.
Jenny's quilt was a simple double-four patch set on point. The basic form was four squares of fabric arranged to make a square. In a double-four patch, two diagonal squares were themselves made up of four smaller squares. She'd chosen a rich berry-toned floral as the focus fabric then combined it with pistachio and antique green batiks with a touch of dusty rose hand-dyed cotton. It was a queen-sized bed cover and was destined for the guestroom in Jenny's house after the show.
"This is very nice,” Harriet said. “Have you thought about what style of stitching you want on it?"
"Well, I've toyed with the idea of putting smallish feather patterns continuously in the sashing and then just having parallel lines in the four patch blocks. I'm not sure, though. I would rather have the double four patch blocks as the focus."
On a quilt, sashing pieces were the rectangles of fabric used to frame the main blocks. Harriet had seen a lot of them where the designer had intended the sashing to enhance the pattern but in fact it had done just the opposite. In Jenny's quilt, though, it definitely added to the overall effect.
"What if we put a flower pattern on the double-four patch blocks with mirror images in the matching squares, and then did a simpler version of the flower in the sashing?” she suggested. “That way, the blocks will stand out, but the sashing will still seem like it's framing each block."
She showed Jenny a stack of flower sample blocks, and Jenny chose two she liked. She agreed that Harriet would do a flower that incorporated elements from both samples.
Satisfied that they had a plan, Jenny left the quilt on the table and took her leave. Harriet went back to work on Avanell's.
It took her about two to three hours to do an average job after it had been loaded onto the frame of the long arm machine. She had allotted twice that amount of time for the show quilts-she didn't want to risk a misplaced stitch.
Aunt Beth had suggested she limit the time she ran the machine to about twenty hours a week because of all the bending and reaching the operator had to do. That might be reasonable during normal times, but for the next two weeks, Harriet expected to be working eight or more hours a day, especially if she were going to be stitching who-knew-what at the last minute for Sarah Ness. Besides, she could always get a massage for her aching back after the rush.
She grasped the controls of her machine, pressed the blue go-button and began stitching.