Bayberry Quilt Show, current

The annual Bayberry Quilt Guild show is currently taking place at the conference center in Hyannis  (quite close to where I live) Over 250 quilts are on display.  They are an example of the art of modern quilting; there are some traditional bed quilts and many untraditional quilts both meant for bed and for display. Workmanship is mostly excellent, choice of color and design is bright, beautiful and sometimes surprising. Techniques go from a few (just a  few) quilts which are entirely hand made to many new designs and techniques using the latest sewing and quilting machines and the high quality, brilliantly designed modern fabric. I have not take photographs that show the range of what is on display.  Today the Cape Cod Times featured  three color photos from the show.  Below are some photos -- largely from the small art quilt group called Uncommon Threads of which I'm a member.
Our most artistically brilliant member, Robin McGuire is the "featured quilter of the year" with  display of nearly twenty quilts have astonished visitors and brought praise from the curator of Cape
Cod's major art museum. These photos are poor quality and only hint at what the work looks like. I will attempt to get more and better photos tomorrow.

 These are two of three exhibits of work by the Uncommon Threads group. To tell the truth in the top photo, I have forgotten who did the two on the let. The big sunflower with a button center in mine.  In quilts in the bottom photo were from a challenge in the group to make a piece inspired by a well known artist. The top is by Meredith called "Georgia's landscape." The dark middle piece was also inspired by O'Keefe although I don't remember what painting, the colorful piece on the right is Elaine inspired by Matisse. The bottom pieces which are seashells are mine and also inspired by O'Keefe, and Kathleen did the piece on the right inspired by Peter Maxx.

There  is a third small exhibit of some of he  postcards we made in a postcard challenge.  (We meet approximately once a month and  make something to a "challenge" or prompt with no rules about style, size, material.

Below are a couple of quilts from  the show. The bicycle wheels are astonishingly complex quilt piecing as well as clever use of the bicycle theme. The other is a more traditional quilt with an ocean theme -- there are several quilts in the show with reference to the ocean.  Possibly I will have more photos to post tomorrow. This is not at all an adequate sampling.  Remember a click on the photo enlarges it.

Favorite Quilt

Rachel and I went to the Mancusco World Quilt Show in Manchester, VT last weekend.  From past years we knew it's  a show so big it needs two days.  So this year we took two days and saw the hundreds of wonderful quilts -- a very good portion of them being art quilts.  The major country show was from Israel -- over 40 wonderful quilts from different quilters in that small country, most were art quilts and they were wonderful.  We loved most of the show and took our time since we, for a change, weren't hurrying to get back home at a reasonable hour.  I did not take very many photos because I usually feel too overwhelmed afterwards and always wish I had take this or that.

The quilt here is "The Squirrel's Speech" by Barbara McKie.  I fell totally in love with it. The various squirrels (and they are different ones) are photos, but their wonderful tails are thread painted.  As you see it follows the eating of the corn off the cob. Each squirrel seems to have an expression on it face. I discovered Barbara McKie at the time I discovered art quilting, in approximately 1981 at a show in the American Folk Art Museum in NYC.  At that time manipulating photos on fabric with a computer was just beginning and McKie was the first person whose work did that, as far as I knew.  I've watched her over the years and felt she was always a meticulous quilter, adventurously trying new things.  I did not always like her quilts but I always admired her perfectionist approach. 

Last year at the World Quilt Show she had two quilts, a bird and a little white dog, both mostly thread painted.  They were beautifully done, I admire them very much.  But this year I find something I have not seen in her work previously -- a sense of humor, a sense of play.  These squirrels and their "attitude" shows that.  I will print a second quilt of hers in the show another day along with a few other photos I took.

Art Quilt Masters, Volume II

Martha Seilman has put together abother volume of magnificent art quilts. I love and often return to volume I of Masters, Art Quilts, and Volume II is another brilliant display of quilt artists' work -- about six pages per artist so that one can study variations and changes in the work of these artists. Seilman includes a brief but well written, very informative, statement about each artist. Very, very brief comments about intent, theme and method by the artists themselves are included. The materials, as well as the designs, are often new and interestingly used. Anyone interested in quilts as art will be as intrigued by these beautiful photos as I am and will wish, as I wish, that it were possible to see each quilt "for real" in order to know the textures which cannot be photographed and understand in an immediate way how size and shape add their importance to the works.

Unfortunately one cannot go to every show, see every piece of art, in lieu of that ability looking at pictures excellent photographs is an available substitute, especially when the book lie on the coffee table and can be paged through at random -- but a book will always be only a substitute.

Art Quilts at Play, Davila and Waterston

All the books at Joanne's were 30% off yesterday which made this too expensive, i.e., 29.95, book only $20 which I'm willing to pay for something full of ideas, how-tos, and inspiration. A whole part of me wants to do a lot of art quilts, another part of me is totally fascinated by more traditional quilts. I often compromise with my own take on traditional. The whole art quilt movement has totally fascinated me from the its inception because I have been reading and following quilting in the US since the 1970s.

I deeply admire a whole bunch of talented and innovative women whose names are almost legendary by now. I am a little appalled by the proliferation of "stuff" for art quilters. A little appalled because things like paint sticks look like great, great fun, so are all the dyes and paints and new methods of altering cloth. But they are expensive and are touted in magazines in a very hucksterish manner. And yet I think anyone with a creative urge ought to have available interesting and inspiring tools.

The extreme embellishment that is so popular right now seems to me a symptom of the consumerism that has left the American economy in a terrible mess. I feel there is a psychic connection in the over-the-top-ness of consumerism whether it's bankers with obscene bonuses or middle class families building McMansions they can't afford, or the quilter who believes encrusting a quilt with all kinds of embellishment is a personal expression.

This book offers a lot of examples that are relatively simple, things that give me a feeling for how to use techniques I have not used to produce a small quilt that says something, perhaps one that could be a visual expression of a poem I would add to it. My ideas are tumbling about. We'll see what might come up.

Quilt Related Books

When I was at the Folk Art Museum some weeks ago I purchased UNCOMMON THREADS, Ohio's Art Quilt Revolution (Gayle A.Pritchard, Ohio University Press,2006) and have only reached it in the pile of nonfiction reading I had accumulated. It is a a broad view of how it happened that Ohio was the breeding ground for the art quilt movement in America. I enjoy the comprehensive, socio-political chapters and having the quilt artists of whom I've been aware for years put into perspective. Of course I knew Nancy Crow was a force to be reckoned with, but I also had seen Terrie Hancock Mangat's work for many years. I was unaware for some reason that Susan Shie was a part of the Ohio group -- perhaps because the quilts she and her partner, Jame Acord, produce seem entirely sui generis. Among the surprises in this book is that Susan Shie's grandmother who taught her to sew was a Mennonite seamstress -- what a shock Susan's kitchen goddesses and other pagan figures would be to that prim lady in a picture in this book!

At this point I am trying to purchase quilt books for inforamtion and UNCOMMON THREADS is a fine example. I try not to purchase books with new techniques and shiny ideas for inspiration. At this point I have too much inspiration -- and not nearly enough time, alas!!

This book sent me to the catalog of Nancy Crow's one-woman show that I saw at the American Craft Museum in 1993 -- the catalog is a farily recent purchase-- a repint (I think) by the America Quilters Society. I remember spending a very long time in front of several of the pieces in the show, trying to soak in why simple one-patch designs were so powerful. I don't think I understood it, really. There is joy in the colors, both complexity and simplicity in the patchwork and a fascinating tactile surface creaetd by the hand quilting -- which Nancy Crow has done by certain quilters she works with. very different from one another -- they use different techniques, different color palettes, and have very diferent ways of working ... still it all grew from that fertile Ohio soil, thanks to the particular Midwestern atmosphere of the 20th century which culminated in the explosion of ideas and understanding that quilts may be many things and all of that -- and more to come -- is art.

A Tree and More Butterflie

Here we are in the depths of winter and all it took was a few hours escape from the Island of Manhattan to give me food for thought for days on end! I'm not sure if that's sad or wonderful. Anyway the above quilt of a tree made by Wendy Butler Berns of Wisconsin was at the Quiltfest in NJ. It's a very interesting quilt, more so "for real" than in a photo. But what amazed me is that I had been looking at that quilt for a whole week, Feb. 19th to 25th. Yes, really. I keep a desk calendar published by the American Quilters Society on my desk at work and when my mind wanders as I do automatic typiing, I look at the quilt of the week. [Alternatively I look at a picture of Mt. Everest taken from Namche Bazaar on a sparkling cold morning - the picture shows part of the trail I would take the next day as I walked toward Everest - everything about that pictures makes me happy!] Anyway I was surprised to see this quilt on display -- I don't know why.

What did I find at a vender's booth! Among other things, I found ANOTHER butterfly design book -- plus this one which lacks the color illustrations of Bea Oglesby's does have MOTHS! There are 8 or 10 moths and I'm eager to make a quilt with them. I have an idea percolating. I also have a couple of projects to finish before I plunge into moths and a possible [short term?] UFO that's been started and put on hold but not for too long... I hope. Well, come to think of it maybe there are three UFOs I really want to finish before they becoming semi-permanent UFOs ... Ah ... if I but had world enough and time ... Perhaps an inappropriate quote. Andrew Marvel was trying to seduce someone. I have been seduced by a mass of moths. More about that in months to come.

Quilt Artist, Jeanne Beck

For me the best part of the New Jersey Quilt Fest was seeing the one woman show of quilts by Jeanne Beck, a quilter/fiber artist who lives in the Finger Lakes section of New York. Her works are about texture with inspiration -- for most of the quilts shown, although she has another series about people/places -- from natural textures. She manipulates fabric in all the ways that are being written about lately, dyes with various techniques, painting, adding layers of different textiles, felting, gilding, plus quilting and embroidery. Complex surfaces draw one in to study all the variations, the use of interesting embroidery stitches and threads as well as subtle color changes and textures. [I believe the picture at the top should be rotated once to the left -- I thought I did that in my edit program but apparently not]


I've gone to Jeanne Beck's website, www.jeannebeck.com, [if I had learned the technique the guy at Apple tried to teach me you'd be able to click that but I don't understand how to add it that way]. It's a lovely website with excellent pictures but no picture can show the texture, the complexity of the surface. While these are quilts, with three requisite layers [and more] a backing and binding, they would not be recognizably quilts to anyone who does not know about the modern movement of art quilts. In fact, for my enjoyment, they don't need to be quilts at all. I don't care if they are backed or bound, the important part is the surface.


I cannot say that any one was my favorite. I found the embroidery especially fascinating. For instance the cream/black one in the middle had a great many French knots for texture in the middle section. They are a simple enough stitch but were used very effectively. And the top quilt had lines of embroidery stitches I had not seen before, not so complex, but remaniscent of Oriental calligraphy.

Sometimes i wish I were a wealthy lady with a big house with many walls on which I could display art. It would be wonderful to have many pieces and to change them every few weeks so I never stopped really seeing them as one does if something becomes too familiar. But I have no space to spare, nor money for art purchases. Perhaps that makes me look all the more intensely when I come upon someting like Jeanne Beck's work which I looked at closely, and wandered on and then an hour later returned and looked at all over again. They not only good enough to look at twice but to live with as well. And I had a few pangs of serious envy. I wish I could do that. I don't believe I will ever attempt that sort of art quilting, it's the accomplishment of self-expression that I envy.