Yesterday, I attended the Northern Star Quilters' annual show. I haven't been able to attend for the last 2 years, so I was eager to see the exhibit. There seemed to be less quilts exhibited this year and the majority of them were art quilts. Mixed in was a good number of Baltimore Album style quilts and some traditional quilts. I was surprised at how few quilts were what I would consider "modern style."
There also seemed to be fewer vendors with less merchandise. Many of them were selling embellishments for art and crazy quilts. I did come home with a pattern and a few pieces of fabric needed to complete some current quilts in the final planning stage. I also came home with 4 empty fabric bolts that my husband quickly cut in half so that I could use them for storage.
Besides having fewer quilts, many of the quilts were not hung to show them to their best advantage. As I walked past a group of miniatures that was too high to really appreciate, a woman stopped me. She asked if I could tell that the quilt in front of us had 120 hours of hand work. She went on to point out some of the stitching. It was then, that I realized she was the quilter and she noticed that I did not stop very long in front of her quilt. She was very upset at the way it was hung and I had to agree with her (she was actually a little scary). It is a shame the quilt was not hung at a more advantageous level. I would have liked to examine the stitching more closely. Here is a picture of the quilter and her handiwork. The white area forming the center of each of the flowers was made of of hundreds of tiny button hole stitches.
Below is a the front
and back of a quilt by
Mary Anne Ciccotelli who is currently soliciting photos of interesting quilt backs for her new lecture and trunk show, "Fun Backs - Going the Extra Mile." It's not surprising that she won a ribbon.
