Fiesta Beauties

"Fiesta Beauties" is a collage quilt created by Alethea Ballard using a pattern from her book, "Maverick Quilts".

After publishing her book, Maverick Quilts, Alethea decided to create Fiesta Beauties out of one of the patterns from that book that featured a big panel and circles. The reason for making the quilt was that Alethea got the titular "Beauties" fabric featured throughout the quilt and wanted to utilize it. When she began to cut out this fabric for the quilt, she noticed that the ladies had weird hands or elbows sticking out in awkward places. To remedy this, she cut away some extra fabric and collaged it with the ladies fabric to mask the weird parts. But the collage kept going and going until the quilt was done. Ricky loves Alethea's quilt for its traditional appearance that "fades" into the non-traditional by the use of the fabric-collaged "Fiesta Beauties".