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are copies of others so she has one to keep and
one to give away, and others are the same pattern
in multiple colors.
“I rarely work with muted colors,” she says. “It’s
reds, aquas, pinks, blues ... well, that just about
covers the whole color wheel! I completed a
Bargello quilt top pattern with 3,000 little pieces
of turquoise that I just love.”
Where some people may see eye-catching
photos or interplays of colors, Dr. Burk sees
potential quilt patterns.
“I take pictures of tile floors when I travel,” she
notes. Her pattern collection of hundreds of books
and magazines includes a file of unique ones
that she says may have a future. She can look at a
pattern and figure out how to make it, expressing
a fondness for optical illusions and tessellations.
“I just decided on a pattern with some focus
fabric (main fabric like a flower pattern) that I’ve
had for 10 years. I loved the fabric, but had been
looking for the right pattern and the accent fabric.
I added purple, orange and green to make it pop
with color.” (That's the New York Beauty, shown
bottom left.)
CH-CH-CH-CHANGES
(with apologies to David Bowie)
The quilt-making process Dr. Burk uses today is
much modernized since her mother made quilts
in the 1970s, when each fabric piece had to be cut
with scissors.
“With the availability of a sharp precision,
rotary cutter, I can cut out a whole quilt in an
hour or two,” she says, likening the cutter to a
sharp pizza cutter that can cut 10+ layers of fabric
at a time — no more tedious scissor cutting. The
invention of the rotary cutter catapulted me into
quilting. It avoids the hand cramps that would
result from drawing and cutting all the pieces.
“Once you’ve sewn all the pieces together, you
create the quilt sandwich, which is the pieced top,
batting and the fabric backing,” she explains. Then
it’s time to stitch it all together — by machine.
To make the quilt top takes about 40 hours,
with eight hours to machine quilt (or $250+ to
have it machine-quilted elsewhere) and two
hours to sew the binding onto the edges of the
quilt.
“Even at a measly $10 an hour for labor
($500), $120 for fabric and $250 for quilting,
you have an almost $900 investment. So,
when someone gives you a quilt, cherish it,
because it does take a long time to make.”
Hand quilting is increasingly rare; most
quilting is now done with a longarm
machine.
“I tried hand quilting, but my stitches
weren’t perfect and I couldn’t get my loops
just right, so I jumped into the digital
age and bought a computer attachment
that transfers my stitching designs to the
longarm” (shown below), Dr. Burk says. “I
just smile as it moves across the quilt in a
15-inch-wide path while I deal with dreaded
take-home chart work.”
Although many machine quilters could
stitch the layers together, Dr. Burk she
cautions against making the $10,000+
investment unless you’re a “committed”