Streator quilt club member wins Best of Show Award in Bloomington

Local quilter Becky Berry was honored with the Best of Show Award at the Hands All Around Quilt Guild Quilt show April 5.

Best of Show is the top award given to a quilt that has been voted as the favorite. This show was held at the Interstate Center in Bloomington where there were 178 entries on display. The ribbon awarded to her was special. It was made with a 3-D printer.

This was Berry’s third year entering quilts into this show. Her previously submitted quilts were; wool applique, printed panels with digitized quilting, pieced quilts, embroidered quilts and a whole cloth quilt. Berry is a member of the Hands All Around Quilt Guild, which meets monthly in Normal. There are 165 members who meet to learn from expert designers and to share their knowledge of and enjoyment of quilting.

To create this award-winning quilt, Berry used a quilting pattern called “Longwood” designed by Emily Taylor of Collage Quilter. The fabric she used was from the Longwood fabric collection. This was a block of the month program that began last year. Collage quilting is the technique Berry used. She cut small pieces of various fabrics and bonded them with a fusible web to a piece of parchment paper, layering and building the animals and flowers. Once the designs were completed, they were peeled off the parchment paper and then fused to the background fabric. Collage quilting allows the creator to use their imagination with color and placement of fabrics, bringing a design to life.

Quilting of the quilt was more tedious than making each of the quilt blocks. Different colored threads were used to create the final quilting designs. Completion of this quilt occurred over the course of about four weeks.

Berry related a special moment during the process. Her mother wanted to help with creating the peacock. It seemed that for her mom, it brought back memories of when she had made a beautiful peacock wall hanging with sequins, beads and trapunto back in the 1970s.

Berry began quilting in the mid-1980s. With her mother’s assistance, her first quilt was a pinwheel design hand cut with scissors. She later started a traveling craft business called “The Cotton Wood Shoppe” with her brother, Glen Cole of Grand Ridge. They did various crafts shows locally and in the suburbs, until about 2001. After retiring from her paralegal career in 2019, she purchased her first digitized longarm quilting machine and began a new quilting business called “The Quilted Berry.” She now specializes in custom quilting for individual quilters, and she also makes quilts by request.

Berry is a member of a quilting group that meets at Holy Trinity Lutheran Church on Thursdays in Streator. Together, these quilters share their interests and accomplishments. They inspire each other, smiling while they quilt.