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!