Gyleen Fitgerald and Colourful Stitches

Are you familiar with Gyleen Fitzgerald of Colourful Stitches?  She was the guest speaker at the local guild meeting this week.  Gyleen is a scrappy quilter who uses color, pattern and texture to create contemporary versions of traditional quilts. An engineer by profession, she considers herself a technician and has created tools to simplify construction.  She is an author and national teacher who has appeared on The Quilt Show and Lifetime TV.

Gyleen is a wonderful "script-free" speaker.  Her lecture blended information on color and moving from traditional to modern.  Here are some of the quilts she shared.

In this pyramid quilt, the large diamonds are pieced with 4 smaller contrasting diamonds.  She showed us an earlier version where the diamonds were still pieced but more monochromatic. That one had a much more traditional look.

 This one is an original variation of the shoo-fly block, and done in grays with a spark of yellow gives it a very modern look.

From her Bricks, Cobblestones and Pebbles book, this is actually a color study to show how colors affect each other.  The blocks in opposite corners use the same fabrics, but the center squares and rectangles are different thus making the whole block look different.

Gyleen seldom uses solids, so the challenge for her here was to incorporate the appearance of texture in the solid fabrics.  The striped background contributes to that effort. 

Another twist on a traditional block, Gyleen added corner triangles to the knot blocks that create the squares in the center of the knots. It also uses color to move the eye around the quilt.

Gyleen is well known for her pineapple quilts and ruler tool.  This is a modern take on the traditional version where parts of the pineapple disappear into the white.

We're sure her workshops are every bit as informative and fun as her lectures!