Karla Alexander was the featured speaker at the July 28 MPS meeting. Karla, who lives in Salem, is a nationally known quilt designer, author, teacher, and designer of specialty rulers. Her patterns are available under the name Saginaw Street Quilt Company.
MPS members were treated to a trunk show featuring many of the quilts pictured in her eight books, including her latest book Stack, Shuffle and Slide: A New Technique for Stack the Deck Quilts (That Patchwork Place, 2014).
Karla’s “stack the deck” method of cutting layers of fabric and rearranging them in various clever ways results in colorful one-of-a-kind quilts. Some of the cutting is done freehand while others are made using rulers she has designed as part of the Creative Grids USA design team.
Here are a few highlights from Karla’s trunk show:
Rip Tide (60″ x 74″), the quilt shown below, is one of Karla’s latest designs. She will teach a class on this design while on a sea cruise in the Caribbean early next year.
You can see from the wall of quilts below that Karla loves working with a huge variety of fabrics and combining them in unexpected ways. Her secret to a scrappy quilt? She rarely buys more than 1/3 yard of any one fabric!
On the day following Karla’s presentation, she led an MPS-sponsored workshop called “Gentle Curved Piecing: Red Onion Quilt,” featuring a quilt from her book Stack a New Deck: More Great Quilts in Four Easy Steps (That Patchwork Place, 2004). Participants could make that quilt or choose one of the quilts in the book.
We are sure to see some colorful and unique quilts when participants in Karla’s workshop show their handiwork during Inspiration time at an MPS meeting in the near future.