Week #49 -- It's Mary Huey's Turn!

Hi, I’m Mary Huey – not just Mary, always Mary Huey even to my closest friends because there have always been so many “Mary’s” surrounding me.  I’ve been planning my takeover of @52quilters for a couple months and am looking forward to connecting with more quilters so thanks for checking out my introduction here at 52 quilters!!

I love to cut fabric up and sew it back together! 

During my 40-plus years of quilt making, I’ve owned a fabric shop for 26 years, taught for over 35 years, and made I don’t know how many quilts for my family, friends, and to bless people in tough situations.  When I’m not making a quilt, I’m watching birds and walking or knitting a small project like socks (love to turn the heel!), or working on my husband’s family genealogy. 

In the early days of my shop, I taught beginners how to quilt using Mary Ellen Hopkins book, It’s Okay If You Sit On My Quilt and since closing the shop, I’ve worked as an educator with Marti Michell’s expansive line of rotary cutting templates and tools.  Now I’m obsessed with set-in seams thanks to a clever student (another Mary) in upstate New York who spontaneously figured out how to chain piece through y-seams and shared her idea with me.  (Did she just say y-seams and chain piece in the same sentence? Maybe you better go back and read that sentence over.) Yep, that's what I said -- chain piece through y-seams!! I’ve spent the past five years perfecting and teaching this skill and will share some of that with you this week!

This is the first quilt I finished using what I have dubbed as the “set-in piecing simplified” technique.  I love scrappy quilts and sourced all of the fabric for this one out of my usually bulging 2½” strip box (the home of most leftovers in my studio).

This is the most detailed quilt I’ve made the technique – a reproduction of an antique quilt I saw displayed locally about 10 years ago. 

That's a lot of 1” hexagons, all machine pieced and machine quilted!!

I love 8-pointed stars and the y-seam technique is perfectly suited for those as well.  This quilt was inspired by the abundant and varied ferns of New Zealand on a long walking vacation there in 2007.

I’m always experimenting to see how the technique works with new block designs and tools so I’ll be sharing several of my recent experiments with you this week on Instagram!  My version of Jen Kingwell’s Glitter is a good example of one of my successful experiments. 

So come along over to @52quilters on Instagram and hang out with me this week!

Mary Huey