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.