Many thanks to our friends in Toronto who gave me such a warm welcome at the Quilt Canada Festival this week!
My main reasons for attending were to be at the award ceremony (we sponsor the top Modern Quilt prize) and to photograph the quilts.
During the award ceremony, we gasped when we saw the winning quilt for “First Time Entrant” – a large complicated quilt with tons of intricate embroidery and applique by Colette Dumont. “Wow, that’s her first time in this show – amazing!” we whispered to each other.
Then at the end of the awards when the Best of Show was announced – it was Colette Dumont again! I don’t know how the judges chose between her two quilts for the Best of Show. They were both absolutely stunning.
I had lunch with Colette on my last day there, and I told her she better get ready for the quilting world to be knocking at her door. She didn’t exactly come from out of nowhere, although it might seem like it because she and her husband run a dairy farm in the countryside Quebec. (Her first language is French.)
This evening I am posting photos of Colette and her quilts on my photo page, so I want to try to answer the inevitable question: How did she do it?
Colette sews on a BERNINA 830, and she designed her own embroideries with the Bernina Designer Plus Embroidery Software. (Which I am trying to learn right now.) She took the basic class on the embroidery software, and figured out the rest on her own. (Impressive!!!) She has a background in industrial sewing, and grew up in a household where her mom was always sewing, so she was always sewing clothes for her dolls…and the rest is history.
I also fell in love with several other pieces, including “Mother Earth” by Galyna Grotto. This piece reminds me of the Icon paintings in Russian churches, but is dedicated to our planet under siege. I had a delightful coffee chat with Galyna, who is a Russian artist who moved to the Ukraine for more artistic freedom, but then moved to France with her husband because of the unrest in Ukraine. She sent her quilt to Canada, creating quite an international quilting story!
Quilt Canada will be in Vancouver BC next year, and I plan to be there!
sharing your Passion for Fabric…
Luana
