Quilt Con- 2023!!!

This past week, I had the pleasure of spending two days at …..

When you entered the room, the excitement and anticipation was palpable!!!

The first quilts that you saw were the BIG award winners, so here they are!!!

The Best of Show was….

“Bullseye” by Barbara Strick

She started with the traditional Drunkards Path pattern and played with color to make the circles “shimmer, shake and roll”!!!

The MQG Award of Excellence went to…..

She said that the quilt was based on a traditional “Courthouse Steps” pattern but added the improvisational sawtooth design in each of the “steps”!

Best Machine Quilting (frameless) was this piece…..

“Commotion” by Claire Victor

They hung these award quilts so that both sides could be seen and that was a definite plus with this one. Just look at this gorgeous quilting…..

Best Machine Quilting on a frame machine (long-arm) was…..

“Almond Country Beauty” by Rana Heredia and quilted by Tiffany Barcus

Have a look at the quilting…..

Fitting with the “Modern” aesthetic, much of the quilting on display were simple straight lines so it was fun to see something with a little more pizzaz!!!

As you can imagine, I took LOTS of photos and will be working thru my favorite categories in the next week.

I hope you will join me on the journey!!!

Until tomorrow……

MQG Conference

Back in October, I signed up for Modern Quilt Guild “Sessions”…..a 4-day online conference and it has been such a great investment!!

The first session that caught my eye was using ProCreate in quilting (by Karen Lewis). I have talked previously about using Procreate to plan quilting designs but I had never seen it used for actual quilt design!!

She showed me how to design a block…..

Duplicate it….

….and quickly have a quilt designed…..

Great…..now I have ANOTHER way of designing quilts to add to my To-Do List!!

Kim Soper (@lelandavestudios) had a wonderful workshop about Stash Management. One of my favorite things from her talk was about how to know when you have too much fabric…..is that even a thing???

And then there was this slide…..

Sue Bouchard talked about using Directional fabrics,

and Diana Fitzgerald had a very interesting program about”The Perception of Visual Randomness”. She worked thru an example where the right-hand piece is completely random (fabrics pulled out of a bag) and the left one is a “False Random” where she used a series of rules as she placed the fabrics…..

I don’t know about you, but I like the “False Random” better!!

Cindy Grisdela (@cindygrisdelaquilts) gave a wonderful lecture about color and my favorite (go figure) was “How do I quilt it?” from Christa Watson (@christaquilts).

In particular, she spent a lot of time talking about making patterns easier. Look at this alternative to matchstick quilting…..

Interestingly, much of her quilting can be done with a walking foot!!!

I am excited to be taking a “How to design a quilting plan” workshop from her at the Houston Show….actually when this post comes out, I will have ALREADY taken the workshop.

You can expect to hear more from her!!

If you haven’t checked out the Modern Quilt Guild, I would HIGHLY encourage you to do so!! It is an online guild and they have SO many resources available. I don’t consider myself a “modern” quilter, but I have learned so much from their weekly newsletters, online tutorials and conferences.

At $35 a year, it seems like a deal to me!!