Beautiful Thread Painting

From A Quilters Gathering in Manchester, NH two examples of wonderful thread painting by Jodi Scaltreto of Hillsboro, NH. The fox is called "El Zoro" and the cat is called "Fig". As you see Zoro was awarded a ribbon. I think both were delightful.

This show seemed smaller than in the past and had fewer venders. The attendance was scanty, I thought.  However many very craftsmanly, beautifully made quilts were on view.  Most were "contemporary traditional", the majority of the colors were bright, nearly all were heavily machine quilted -- some very elegantly and far too many too heavily, adding nothing to the over all concept of the quilt. 

There were a few that could be called "modern" quilts in the fairly minimalist vein but the two that come to mind were the same design suggesting to me that both quilters took the same workshop  and copied the workshop leader's design. This is seen frequently in this kind of quilt show. 

Besides the very busy long arm quilting, many designs were fussy, too much happening, too busy.  This is a pervasive problem whenever I look at winners from the big shows -- it's the style-de-jour. I like that the fox and the cat have fairly simple backgrounds and the quilting in the foreground of the cat is simply done on a home machine as is the background, nothing to distract from the focus. 

My quilt Marginalized Poets was the only piece that was a bit bewilderingly "arty". Some people read the explanation and "got it" many did not give it more than a glance. That's to be expected.  The theme was Poetry but there was very little nod toward poetry.  I expected quilts that were inspired by specific poems -- I expected at least a couple of quilts with diverging roads in the woods -- but there were none. The theme did not inspire.  Poetry is exciting only to a handful of people.  I'm glad I know a handful although of the many people I know who write "poetry" few have an interest in reading or hearing poetry read beyond their own exercise of expression.  Nothing wrong with expressing yourself in a form that looks on the page like poetry.  But ... well that's another subject.