More from MQX

Three more quilts -- again, by no means the most stunning ones -- rather ones I like for my own quirky reasons. Above is Lyn MacAffrey's "Girl By the Sea" which I liked for it's simple picture [I said, "I could do that"] I heard Lyn speak and show slides of many of her quilts a few years ago. At the time she was doing highly romantic scenes, princesses and so on, painting the faces very realistically and putting them in flowery forest glades. I like the straight forwardness of this quilt. Here the quilting was skillfully in keeping with the simplicity of the subject -- a real, wholesome, likable looking young woman.

Martha C. Hall's "A Little Peace" was one of the few in the show that did something other than normal rectangles. I like the cheeriness of her colors and the scattering of circles. I didn't understand the name but that's okay. I was glad to come upon a quilt with a contemporary feeling. Again the quilting was fairly dense but not distracting..

Cathy Spenina's "Ribbons of Hope" caught my attention because again, I thought, "I could do that." The ribbons are not actual ribbons, they are fabric cut and appliqued very neatly. It looked like a wonderful exercise in mark making as practiced in a sketch book. One could play at sketching a lot of motifs until one was pleasing. Again, my refrain, quite a lot of machine quilting, but nothing that distracted.

These choices of quilts to photograph say much more about my taste than about what was at the show. I am still concerned that some quilters are so entranced with what big, new, very expensive machines allow them to do so that the self-expression that comes across to me is not aesthetic pleasure but too, too much, quilting for its own sake, not to express oneself -- being controlled by the machine rather than truly controlling the machine to your end of creating something beautiful. By the way, in the heavily quilted pieces, often a great many small crystals had been added [hot glued in most cases] Sometimes the quilt became a piece of bling, sometimes it was restrained enough to add richness as I think the quilter intended.