New England Quilter's Gathering

A Quilter's Gathering is an annual quilt show inviting a number of New England quilters and quilt guilds to participate.  For the past couple of years it has been held in Manchester, Vermont at a convention/exhibition Radisson hotel. I went with the Bayberry Quilter's guild yesterday, boarding a bus at 7:30 and returning about 6:30.  The quilts shown here are not typical of those at the exhibit; they are ones I managed to  get photos of before the battery of my camera  quit.  I was flustered by the camera problem and didn't write down the name of the quilter.  I like the Warhol-inspired set of  faces , the colors and the skill using different fabrics.  I recently tried such an effort and found it devilishly difficult.

I like the selvage use in the tree -- this tree was trimmed with Halloween symbols because superstition was one theme of a groups of quilts and because the show was Thursday, Friday and today (Saturday) spanning Halloween.  This is not a holiday I care to celebrate so I was turned off by the embellishments.  But I was happy to see the selvages used. The same woman also made a cloak and a hood using selvages.  I am regular reader of Karen Griska's blog, (see side bar).  And I enjoy using selvages in quilts and am dreaming of making one later in the winter.  

The show has an aura of New England about it; the earth, sky, forest tones of the fabrics, the frequent traditional block styles, a certain quiet strength and reticence. For me the most beautiful quilt was called "The Shell Collector" by Bethanne Nemesh of Allentown, PA, almost a whole cloth quilt, a central panel of quilting that showed her two children at the ocean and a border that showed seashells and such -- all in light blue and sandy beige, all expertly home machine quilted.  The only pieces were an interior border of triangles to separate the central square from the border. 

An astonishing quilt was called "Insanity" a compulsively pieced, reversible quilt with tiny stars about 3 inchs square in gold and dark blue, made by Dan and Carol Perkins of Rangeley, Maine. Dan did the piecing and Carol the quilting.  It had 13,500 pieces of fabric, none of it paper pieced, points of the stars perfect (I think, I certainly did not examine every one).  I just hope they had time to get out of the house and have a social life last winter when the quilt was being made.  It was jaw dropping, I'll admit.  But the overall pattern was too much like printed wall paper for my taste.

From a vender I purchased the catalog/book of  the 2013 Quilt National exhibit and spent the drive home reading the artists statements and looking at those important art quilts and thinking about the quilt world where in textiles are used so variously -- all the  fairly "quilty" quilts I saw during the day and all the works of art, each attempting to make a statement of some profundity, at Quilt National.

Quilt National 2009

Nearly a year late in this comment about Quilt National 2009 -- but I am full of excuses. I try to get to the Midwest to see family on Quilt National years. It's about 150 miles from my brother's home in Indiana but a very nice drive to Athens, Ohio once I get around Cincinnati. But last year I had just moved from NYC to Cape Cod and was settling in here. I'm sorry I didn't get to Indiana because I missed seeing my favorite aunt who died just before Christmas. Of course, I also didn't get to Quilt National.

Recently when ordering another quilt book from Amazon the "you might also enjoy..." screen had the QN catalog and of course I knew I'd "also enjoy" -- as well as enjoy the discounted price. It arrived yesterday. I spent the evening with it. I've purchased all the former catalogs, usually at the time I saw the show. In those cases I carried the vision of the actual quils in my mind as I looked at the catalog. I find that size is usually a matter of mental adjustment because most pictures in the book give me the impression most of the quilts are the same size -- I read the dimension info carefully and try to adjust my mental picture but I'm not very good at doing that.

Of course texture is a big difficulty. Some art quilt books include smaller detail photos but QN's catalogs never do, so the viewer is almost forced to see the quilts as two dimensional objects which none of them are. Photographs are a very poor way to view art quilts. I think even sculptural objects are more satisfactorily seen in photographs than are quilts.

Because the great majority of the quilts in this show were abstract I feel even more that I missed an important experience by not seeing the show. In abstract works texture, material qualities of transparency or heaviness, as well as the complexity of the quilting are all extremely important. A book simply is no substitute.

I was very impressed at the geographical variety of quilters -- 16 of 80+ were from outside the US. Only a three or four of them were quilters whose works have been in former QN shows, a remarkable 3 were from Israel -- a small country with no quilting tradition. Happy as I am to have the book -- and I will return to it as I do to the catalogs of former QNs -- I am very sad that I didn't push myself to go see it.

Quilt National

Printer and scanner are back in business -- truly hot, humid weather makes me unable to do the simplest things, like fix a paper jam. Today the humidity is lower and temperature summertime pleasant and the job was a snap. SO.... a few remarks, not a review or critique. Above is the odd-ball quilt of the year. Every year there is one: One year it was a stick bed with a quilt on it, another yeat it was magnificent wooden squares, another year it was a quilt made of matchsticks. This year it is Julie John Upshaw's Ironing Board with the female figure drawn and quilted on it. It's as if every year the judges have to include one far out "quilt" -- this is a quilt, there are the requisite three layers, etc. {not always true}

Quilts I really liked: many of the ones that depended on color and quilting to make their statements: quilts by Kent Williams, Regina V. Benson, Sharon Bell (three long strips of simply quilted, dyed blue fabrics), Mary E. Stoudt (remaniscent of Klimt, Charlotte Patera, Marie Jensen. I have a great weakness for beautiful color beautifully quilted and simply presented. Nancy Erickson's animal quilts are always very powerful and ring primitive chords, her wolf was no exception. Of the pictoral quilts, I was struck by Carol Elrod's "Table for Two" [below} for both the humor and the verisimilitude.

There are so many other wonderful quilts. One must either see the show or purchase the catalog which uses Susan Shie's "The Tower" [of pressure cookers] as it's cover design. her godesses not only have the traditional third eye above the nose but a fourth eye in the hollow of the throat! and it is, as always heavily covered with the diary of a the month in which it was made. There are familiar and well known artists and a few unknown names, humor and deep seriousness. Finally there is a laugh out loud quilt, a large one in tones of gray/black and white, a portrait of George W. Bush -- entirely of fabric yoyos!!! This is subversive art at its very best.

Quilt National [Ohio} and Indiana

I'm actually not going to write about Quilt National until tomorrow in the belief that my scanner which is being stubborj today will work like a dream tomorrow and then I'll be able to show one or two quilts of the 83 fantastic ones -- well, I didn't think all 83 were fantastic because a few were the sort that one says "How did that make the cut? Must have been a misleading slide set." But that's a matter of my taste. This picture, above is the Dairy Barn, home of QN as well as other art events during the rest of the time -- Athens is not a town one thinks of when one thinks of Ohio, but it is a very happening place -- an Ohio Univ. branch is there and so, it seems, is a thriving art community. It's in a lovely part of the state -- beautiful rolling hills, as is true mostly along the Ohio River where the most recent ice age ended, having pushed a lot of debris down this far and that debris has weathered to gentle hills and valleys.

I had a mostly beautiful drive on Rt. 32 which is otherwise known as the Appalachain Highway. From my "home" [i.e, where I grew up although the house I grew up in is not longer where it was -- purchased and moved when the road was widened -- so it is to my brother's home that I go] -- I had about 50 miles of driving around Cincinnati on busy highway, but once off it and beyond the suburban sprawl area, the highway opened out into those green, green wooded hills and some picturesque farm land. The road was not heavily trafficed so I could just drive along enjoying the rare opportunity to drive a car and be out in the country. The following pictture is a rest area with beds of day lilies.

Altogether my trip was green -- a wonderful break from the gray of concrete. I especially enjoy sitting on the patio at Joan and J.B.'s house; there are potted flowers and cacti, a huge maple tree that seems to be owned by one particulary vocal red bird, and surrounding the yard abundant woods with a variety of animals they see, but I haven't ... but okay, I know the deer, and raccoons, possums and maybe coyotes are there. I wish I had brought back a picture of the raccoon they photographed during an ice storm last winter. It stared in their windows, looking for food. "He ate with the cats," I was assured. So tomorrow, I'll write about Quilt National and I'll try not to harp on my usual theme -- that the photos and the real things are very different ... BUT IT'S SO TRUE. I have the catalog and have been through it 4 or 5 times since the show. It's published by Lark and is worth purchasing ... but it can't compare, finally to the real thing.

Off to Quilt National

To my great delight, I am off to the Midwest this afternoon -- visiting family in Indiana and then driving east to Athens, Ohio to the Dairy Barn to see Quilt National. I'm very excited about seeing 80-some of the most interesting new quilts from quilters all around the world. This is a biennial show which I've managed to attend twice. And it was a wonderful experience. I did not see the 2005 show but bought the catalog, and then was able to see a portion of it on display in Lowell, Massachussets -- oh, how different the quilts are "for real"! I spend a lot of time looking at pictures of quilts but the real experience is so much richer, so much more interesting ... it's the difference of seeing a picture of a person and then actually meeting that person, hearing his or her voice, watching the face change during a conversation, seeing the changing postures and gestures. Yes, people are more complicated than quilts but the analog holds. It'll be a week before I can add comments and some pictures. I'm off.