Stack and Whack Progress

The quilt is looking good! I'm still working on piecing it, obviously. I need about twice as many pieces as I have. I'm not sure I'm going to get there, though. It will be as big as it can be! Hopefully, that'll be big enough.

Quilt Con Day Three

My final day. *sniff* It's such an exciting event, so full of ideas and energy! It's so nice to see other people my age quilting, and seeing how great the span of ages of women who are interested in modern quilts is. And to hear from speakers who are predominantly women, talking about their quilts, their businesses, and how they 'made it'. It's pretty inspiring.

Here's the Best in Show. Color me puzzled (though maybe I would be singing its praises if it weren't green!).

Here is the Best Machine Quilting winner, and no disagreements from me. It's beautiful.

Here are some of the cool quilts that caught my eye today. I did make it through the whole show.

I love this one. I am not a big user of solids (which is one of the things that sets me apart from being a 'modern quilter'), but this is pretty fantastic. I do have a bunch of solids that were prizes at a shop hop to use up....

This is a quilt by one of the speakers that I saw yesterday, Heather Jones. She talked about how she likes to take traditional squares and just blow them up to be on a huge scale. It's actually probably the same thought behind the above quilt. I wonder if they are by the same maker?

I didn't get a straight-on picture of this quilt-more's the pity. I didn't notice it until today, though I must have passed it in the lecture hall multiple times! I do love the churn dash block.

The promised Conan quilt. Fantastic, right?

I just love this one:

More of the disintegrating block idea that I mentioned yesterday, and so well done. I think it would have been good if the quilting could have mimicked the motion of the pieces floating away somehow. Or maybe of them being drawn toward the block and into place.

Here are the quilting ideas I captured to ponder:

I love the way the quilting works in tandem with this quilt.

The very best lecture I went to was given by Casey York earlier today on seeking out inspiration for modern quilts and quilting by examining art. Her favorite art period was 17th century, so we saw several paintings from that time period, but also a whole menagerie of time periods and types of art. It was so good. A couple of times she walked through the elements of a painting with us, exploring some specific aspect, say color palette or value, and then showing how to draw a relation to that, say pulling out five swatches of color from an El Greco painting to form a great palette for a modern quilt or explaining how the value differences in an Impressionist painting differ from the value differences in a Neo-Classical (?) painting and how that effects the drama of the whole composition, be it painting or quilt. She showed us a picture of an Aztec (?) tunic, some pottery with really pretty ornamentation on it, and a piece of fabric from a gown during a similar time period, and then showed us a quilt pattern and associated quilting design that pulled elements from all three items that were harmonious and unique and still had a relationship to the original art pieces. Another quilt design and quilting pattern were drawn from a ceremonial signature from someone (didn't catch who) and a ewer from a similar time period, resulting in a truly stunning quilt that she has actually made, rather than just a sketched idea. It was a great lecture.

You're very welcome, MQG. Thank you!

Quilt Con Day Two

Today was chock-full of lectures with time squeezed in here and there to 1. View more quilts in the show; 2. Buy some fabric; and 3. Charge my phone.

This is my choice for best in show so far:

So stunning. I love the fade, I love the blues, I love the funky, wild blocks. This is in contention for the guest room quilt for sure. It is also not actually the prize winner for best in show. The one that won it has very little negative space and I find its winning Best in Show a bit puzzling.

Anyway.

This is another fave:

I can't do it for the guest room quilt because I have already bought the background fabric and I definitely didn't get enough to make it this much of the quilt. But I see making a version of this as a baby quilt - come on, somebody I know, get pregnant!

I'm always a sucker for rainbow quilts.

A glacier? Africa? What's with the newspaper-y boat at the bottom? Such pretty blues.

I do like this pattern but I think what I really like is the calming colors.

Another quilt following the oval-and-wedge script, I think.

This one was titled "That Twitch".

"You other bruthas can't deny...."

Some blocks I saw that I particularly liked:

The way this block goes together with its identical twins to form the whole quilt was fantastic.

I suppose this might drive me crazy to actually make, particularly if I make a whole quiltful of them, but it looks so cool!!

As you can tell, this quilt had a bunch of these blocks in different colors. I like the quilting, too.

I took pictures of a lot of blue quilts! But I'm pretty sure I like the format of them all, and not just the color choice.

Here are some quilting patterns I particularly liked and want to try out;

I like the back and forth lines with the little knob on the end. Although now that I'm posting it I'm wondering if it's not a bit overtly phallic?

I like the big loop-de-loos.

I like the swirl in the middle with the feather effect sweeping up off of it.

Swirls mixed with pebbles to great effect.

And this is the kicker as far as the quilting I saw today. How great is this!?

I took a picture of this one just to send to the couple of Benedict Cumberbatch fans I know. It is an amazing likeness:

There was one of Jared Padalecki that was not nearly as recognizable. There is one of Conan O'Brien that is recognizable - I'll try to get a pic tomorrow. It's fantastic. Of course, when I saw it today, my phone had died.

Today's QuiltCon experience was truncated due to a sick husband and needy children. Luckily, I have had a friend agree to watch the kids tomorrow so I can go back. I won't get to go early as I had planned and I think I'll miss my first lecture, but hey! I'm going! I think I've been through almost all of the show. I'm still hunting for a cutting doohickey that I saw my very first day. I hope I can find it tomorrow. I also spoke with a Sulky rep and have been looking covetously at the metallic thread being used to quilt with. I've seen it used sparingly, here and there in certain areas of a quilt on several of them in the show and I love how that works. But I don't want to buy just to buy. I need an idea in mind that I intend to carry out! So, I'm trying to come up with a valid idea by tomorrow. :-)

Quilt Con Day One

Oh my gosh, I saw so many pretty things today, and I didn't make it even a third of the way through the quilt show! I have so many ideas for quilts! I have been planning to do a quilt for the guest room for so long, but haven't made the time to do it since it's for me, but now I am thinking I should do something other than what I had planned! Too many ideas....

Isn't this great? It's Drunkard's Path, which is a major PITA, but the glorious part of modern quilting is the minimalism, so instead of being an entire quilt of blood, sweat, and tears, it is a select few put to fantastic use! Guest room?

A couple beautiful blocks I saw:

I LOVE this one. They pieced the background first with those muted colors and then cut squares of it and sewed it with the white to make the star. Absolutely fantastic. This is one of my new thoughts for the guest room quilt.

I went to a lecture all about improvisational quilting - well, it was really the lecturer taking us through the details of her new book that is debuting at QuiltCon which is about improvisational quilting - that was interesting. If only I was better at curves! Anyway, in her new book, she has improv "scripts", which are her version of "patterns" but which are supposed to indicate less rigidity of form. Anyway, one of the scripts is to do ovals and wedges, and there were some examples of quilts made using her script. Is this one not fantastic?

Not so much with the wedges, but the black-lined ovals are stunning.

Here are a couple of whole quilts that I thought were great:

The note called this a sunburst pattern - oh-so-pretty!!

The black makes this one so dramatic, despite somewhat subdued colors.

The note on this one said it was made with scraps.

This was in the lecture hall, versus the show, and my eye just kept being drawn to it. I was disappointed that the quilting wasn't more elaborate....

How fabulous is this one?!?

Similar to the previous, I love the specks of colored fabric peppered in the background.

And then there's this one. It is spectacular:

The picture does not properly convey the feelings it evokes in person - it is so haunting, disjointed and sad, with a smudge of hopefulness along the edges (or is that just me?). But so pretty.

I saw lots of examples of quilting to emulate:

I particularly like the curved vertical lines that are above the feather.

Pretty chain idea for a long strip.

Love the lines in the corner at the bottom, like the base of a roller coaster.

These stars mirror pieced stars found elsewhere on the quilt. Aren't they amazing? I wonder if it is programmed or free-motion?

Another mirror, in this case a Dresden Plate.

I think I will use this on my next quilt. Also, it would be pretty as a design on a wedding cake.

Okay, at this point, my phone died. In the last hour I was there, I saw at least five more quilts to document for later inspiration! Tomorrow I'm taking my phone charger with me.