Antique and Contemporary Quilts on Display at Annual Show
By Bobbi Zane

Members of the Woman's Club with the 2007 Opportunity Quilt. Shown left to right is Maureen Brantley, Jan Mattias, Norma Quirk, Joni Hildreth, MaryEllen Thilken, Diana Garrett and Elenor Burns.

More than 100 antique and contemporary quilts will be on display at Julian's annual Heritage Quilt Show from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at Town Hall from June 20 through July Fourth.

The show is timed to coincide with the annual Fourth of July Parade celebration.

The event celebrates Julian's heritage with a display of quilts, created, pieced or collected by local quilt-lovers. While the display quilts are not for sale, there will be a small County Store featuring hand-made items such as aprons, potholders, stuffed animals, pillows, placemats and wall hangings.

This year, the show also celebrates "The Magic Vine," the recently published quilting book by Eleanor Burns, a Julian resident who has also helped local seamstresses design and produce a queen-size raffle quilt reflecting the book's patterns.

Quilting members of the Julian Woman's Club have worked on the raffle quilt, based on the namesake pattern featured in the book. "It's a beautiful quilt," says Diana Garrett, who helped create it.

It portrays 22 three-dimensional flowers - lilies, zinnias, cosmos, wild roses - appliquéd and set on point against a beige background. Proceeds from the drawing support the Woman's Club philanthropic activities.

Quilts featured in Burns' book date to the 1930s, when patterns appeared in a newspaper column written by Florence LaGanke Harris, according to information posted on Burns' Web site.

"As part of a series, LaGanke presented one new pattern each week." Readers saved and used these patterns to create their own Magic Vine quilts. Burns adapted the designs for her book.

Burns, founder of Quilt in a Day, explains it all at her annual Road Show being presented by the Julian Woman's Club for the second year in a row during the quilt show.

"You don't have to be a quilter to enjoy Eleanor's show," according to Diana Garrett, noting that the Quilt in a Day maven has been a television personality instructing and entertaining quilting enthusiasts on PBS for about 25 years. n Photo Courtesy of Maureen Brantley