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
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eQuilter Classroom & Travel Calendar:
Feb 24 – Lynn Koolish for CQC – in eQuilter Classroom
Mar 9 – Charity Sewing Day – Please RSVP
Mar 14-17 – Carter Center – Atlanta
Mar 28-30 – ‘Love Your Mother‘ exhibit at Spring Quilt Festival in Chicago
Apr 1 – Quilting Arts TV, Cleveland
Apr 12-14 – Jean Wells for FRCQ workshop – in eQuilter Classroom
Apr 22-29 – Pour Lamour Du Fil – Nantes France (lecture Fri Apr 26)
