This morning I caught
a 6 am flight home from Nashville, after attending the Award Ceremonies and 2
days of QuiltCon. The weather was drizzly and cold but the colorful quilts and
enthusiastic high spirits made up for the weather outside! Each year that I go
to this event, I delight in seeing how the Modern Quilt movement, and this
event, continue to change and grow…often in unexpected ways.
The Best of Show was a colorful and truly fantastic GROUP QUILT, which just
underlines my theory that if quilters ruled the world we could solve all of our
problems. This genius quilt is a study in how to bring creatively independent
spontaneous elements together into one harmonious joyful expression.
Congratulations to Leanne Lethbridge and her group!
One of the other top awards was the eQuilter Machine Quilting Award made by
Marge Tucker from Massachusetts. My BERNINA Ambassador mentor Jeanne and I had
fun admiring Marge’s machine work together. There was a lot of Kantha-style
handwork and stitching at the exhibit, but there was also a lot of masterful
machine quilting which filled up the ubiquitous Negative Spaces in many Modern
Quilts.
One of my favorite quilts in the show was a multicolor Group Quilt from Russia,
which had a similar feel to the Best of Show quilt. You may recall several
years ago I talked about Group Quilts being a strong trend, after a
particularly inspiring Group Quilt exhibit at the Birmingham UK Festival of
Quilts. The Charity Guild Group Quilts which are sent in to QuiltCon from all
over the US, and indeed from all over the world, are a case in point. Now more
than ever, we need to come together to create beautiful synchronicity.
You may also recall me mentioning a year ago about the activist quilts by the
Social Justice Sewing Academy. This year their quilts in the Youth category
were the talk of the show, and I was lucky enough to spend some time with their
organizers. I’ll be sharing photos from the Mexico City quilt festival and
QuiltCon on my photo
page this weekend.
Now I need to go get ready for Lynn
Koolish‘s CQC workshop in our eQuilter Classroom tomorrow morning. Hope to
see some of you there!
sharing your Passion for Fabric…
Luana and Paul
