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.

Machine Quilting Expo - Providence, R.I.

The Machine Quilting Expo in Providence, R.I. which I saw Thursday was one of the best shows I've attended for several reasons: the venue was just the right size for the show, the lighting was the best I've seen and there were not too many quilts to really look at and enjoy. On the other hand, I consider machine quilting such as is practiced now and was very, very much on show there, a totally different genre of quilting -- one I do not aspire to but can look at with astonishment while I try to balance my aesthetic reactions. Mostly I think, as a new technology, many people are going overboard and not balancing the graphic appeal of the quilt with the extreme quilting. More about that another time.

The above quilt is by Barbara McKie whose pictorial quilts I've been looking at for 25 years. She embraces technology and strives to make the most of it to create a picture. Sometimes I've felt she has more technical expertise than aesthetic taste. In the case of "White Winged Dove" she has thread painted the head and breast brilliantly [click to enlarge and then click again to double enlarge]. The background of the piece is machine quilted in a way I found distracting. There were half a dozen bird quilts done the same way, with intricately thread painted and/or quilted birds and a background of leaves that was distracting, they were by various people. This was the most magnificent of the birds.
This vase of flowers is aesthetically blah, it was done by a group. The workmanship was fascinating, the flowers are three dimensional of lighter weight fabrics. My camera is not sensitive enough to capture the dimensionality which I thought was masterful. Again two clicks will help you appreciate it. And you'll see some of the fairly typical dense machine quilting on the background.
I took a dozen pictures [a lot for me - partly because the audience was sparse enough so I didn't have to juggle space to take a picture]. This is an example of white work done entirely by machine with no 1/8 of an inch not quilted -- it's impossible to show the astonishing amount of work by Cindy Needham who was the featured quilter with many white work quilts each more elaborate than the other -- all in a tasteful way. They are masterpieces of over-quilting. What Cindy, and quite a few other quilters. are doing with whole cloth quilts is mind bloggling. Just thinking of the hours they spent being extremely precise! For my part, I cannot conceive why anyone would do this but obviously there are people who must enjoy it.

Besides many white work, whole cloth quilts in intricate patterns, there were many black and dark colored ones on which great varieties of colored and metallic threads were used. Miles!!! Truly, miles of thread. Not many appealed to me and I knew I could not hope to capture them on my camera so I took no pictures of them.

Likewise many traditional or contemporary quilts were heavily machine quilted, sometimes to good effect and sometimes the quilting so overshadowed the quilt itself one felt sad about all that work to an ugly end. This is all a matter of people finding a balance as this new technology is available. More on that another day.