Meadowlyon Trunk Show

What a fabulous time we had last night at our guild meeting, despite the 4" deluge of rain that descended on Pittsburg all afternoon and evening. Judy Lyon of Meadowlyon Designs in Lansing, KS and her daughter, Mary, braved the weather to drive the 130 miles or so and brought so many amazing quilts that I won't begin to be able to describe them all. Luckily I took quite a few pictures and share them here with Judy's permission. I knew from viewing the quilts on their website that it would be a great show when I booked them. But let's just say Judy far surpassed my expectations!


Judy is one-half of the partnership called Meadowlyon. She designs the continuous quilt patterns that can be used not only by longarm quilters, but can also be adapted for use by domestic machines on or off a frame and even for hand quilting. Angela Meadows is the other half and she does the quilting, although Judy has recently begun doing some of that as well. I'm sorry we didn't get to meet Angela and complement her fantastic quilting skills in person.


As the story goes (and I hope I'm remembering it correctly)... Judy designed and pieced this awesome quilt called "Rain Forest" for her son, James.

She gave it to Angela to quilt on her longarm and told her she wanted lots of different rain forest images quilted in it. Angela suggested Judy draw them since she didn't have anything like that in her repertoire. So Judy set about drawing lots of continuous images that would dance across the quilt. And the light bulb went off...no one else was offering these type of designs. And the rest, as they say, is history..a new business was born.



Here's the back of the Rain Forest quilt showing the designs.

While the quilts Judy shared with us show such creativity in their piecing designs, layout and special techniques used, the quilting designs are the stars of course. I wish you all could have been there to examine these quilts up close and truly appreciate them. I'd love to be able to tap into Judy's mind and discover how she dreams these designs. It's one thing to have the artistic talent to draw, it's something else to be able to make the designs continuous for machine quilting.

Two truly spectacular quilts were hanging in the front of the room.

This Mayan "Tree of Life" .............


And this "Safari Nights" were exquisite!

Judy not only designs marvelous continuous quilting patterns, she comes up with the most novel techniques to use on her quilts. One of these is "Top-lique" where she appliques fabric to fill an already quilted shape. You can see it used in the Pumpkin Kaleidoscope quilt. The cats are added using "top-lique".

In the penguin quilt she used fabric paints to color the already quilted penquin shapes. The same was done in "Dogpatch". What appears to be dog fabric is actually fabric paint within the quilted dog faces.

In the Safari Nights quilt she used a broken comb dipped in bleach to create the effect of a starry sky in the border fabric.

See what I mean?????? What a creative mind! I think I want to be her in my next life!

Please visit the Meadowlyon website and see more pictures and information on the quilts and the patterns available. You can learn more about the Tree of Life quilt by watching the video on the home page. Judy and Angela even offer some free pattern downloads as well.

If you want to book an interesting trunk show for your guild, I highly recommend them.

Enjoy the show!

(It occurs to me that I use the word "awesome" a LOT! But in the case of these quilts, it's necessary!)