Quilt Con 2013

Quilt Con 2013, the first modern quilt show, was held on my birthday this year!  So, of course, I had to go.  I went with my friend and we brought our littlest ones.

Here are my bountiful photos... In no particular order... unfortunately.  I would have liked to organized them by type or something but I'm finding it to be too tedious to work with arranging photos in blogger.  So, here you have it.

In order to give credit to the makers of these quilts I've included photos of the tags.  You can click on them to see them larger.  This post was just being overwhelmed by them when I made them big enough to read in the window. I apologize because some of them are not the highest quality but you can make out the name of the quilt maker and that's most important to me, although many of them are interesting to read as well.

I love the idea of a pirate map quilt but wasn't as thrilled with this one as I felt I should have been.  Still, it was inspirational.  I started a quilt that was supposed to be my own take on a pirate ship but then ended up deciding to take it another direction.  And I have another idea for a sea-themed quilt but I haven't figured out what my pirate map will look like yet.

Here's my friend and my son.

and my son and my friend's daughter.

I mostly loved the quilting done with the embroidery floss around the squares in coordinating colors on this one.

Again, it's the quilting that I love.  I plan to incorporate it in some of mine somehow.

I loved this and thought it would be fun to try something similar.  Tedious though, I'm guessing.

I just love rainbows.  The gradation in color in this one just amazes me.

I wish I had detail photos of this one.  It was each individual block that I was more impressed with than the quilt as a whole.  They each had a fairy tale theme.  It was so sweet up close.

And the back was pretty.

Just generally stunning work here.

Stark black and white as well as pixels seemed to be one of the "in" things with modern quilters this year. But more so than the image I was impressed with the quilting on this one.  I used to make doodles in my notebooks that were similar patterns to the quilting done here.

I'm still not sure how I feel about this one except that I'm drawn to it inspite of, or maybe because of my mixed feelings.

This one seemed a little gimmicky or something at first but the more I look at it the more I like it.  I think I passed it a few times before going back and taking this picture and I'm glad I did.

I don't really love this one but it's a technique that I'd like to try.

This was truly beautiful but it wasn't inspirational in the sense that I feel like I could achieve anything like it any time soon.  The quilting had to be done on one of the big machines.  The thing I was inspired by was the use of variegated thread.  Now that I can do.

 This quilt was almost too much for my friend.  She's a very tactile person and being around all these gorgeous quilts that you can't touch was like torture for her.  And then there was this quilt.  I love it but it also made me really uncomfortable.  We couldn't figure out if it was actually meant to be touched or if we'd get in trouble.  Maybe that was the whole point.

One of our breaks was outside on a balcony... which my son tried to climb off of.

The other was in a room we found up on the third floor with changing colored lighting.

I have a think for bees.  I wasn't overly impressed with the quilt but couldn't help but take a picture.

Just loved this one.  My photo doesn't do the colors justice.  I don't think I got the white balance quite right.  It looked like sea glass to me and then I read the tag and found it to be something else.  I liked that about it though.

This is the back of one of the best in show quilts.  I loved the back but the front wasn't all that exciting to me.  I have a photo of it below anyway.

And here's the entire back.

This is one of those that made me think "I might be able to do something like that... in a much simpler fashion." Who knows if that will ever happen though.

It's just cool, right?

I think that the following quilts were all done by this woman.  I'm not sure.  It was a little confusing.

This quilt was tiny and I just loved all the white on white detail of the quilting.

This quilt had a bunch of these circles on it but I was just obsessed with this one circle and the detail of it for some reason.

Here you can see more of the other circles.

This one was so intense with it's concentric circles and bold, raw-edged cross in the middle.

I'm not sure if this was made by the same woman but I couldn't figure anything else out.  It's another that I loved and hated.  I was drawn back to it and yet repulsed.

Technology issues.

I also don't know who the following quilts were by but I like them.

It's funny that I liked the previous one but didn't like this one with its trendy chevron pattern... until I saw the back of it.  I am in love with the multi-colored quilting on the gray.  And how intense that must have been to change the color so often.

Again, I think it's the bright colors on the grey that gets me.  I adore this quilt.

My photos don't do this one justice.  It was gentle and serene and oh so beautiful.

I didn't actually like this one too much but I loved the quilting pattern documented below with the line and then a few circles and then a line again.  I'll definitely be using that on something.

The color grey is a big thing in modern quilting and it's one of the things I love most.  I love how it can make colors really pop.  Especially this blue.  This blue is one of my favorite blues.

I can't explain why I have this but I love it.  I didn't love the quilt but just this one square by itself was amazing to me.

The best shade of purple ever! I almost bought some of this hand-dyed fabric but I'd already spent more than I'd planned on some other stuff so I didn't.  I'm slightly regretting it.

There has to be a controversial quilt at ever show, apparently. I liked this one alot.

What's not to love? And I'm getting tired of blogging so my comments will probably become more lame hereafter.

I'm impressed with the overall effect of the neutral background even though the individual pieces seems so random and weird.

It's the caltrans quilt.  I just had to document it.

I would like to do a labyrinth quilt some day and this one reminded me of that.

A true piece of art.  Enough said.

I liked the varied quilting in each section.  I liked that it wasn't super precise either. It looks more real to me, not like something that could have just been programmed into a machine.

I really enjoy many aspects of this quilt.  It has the greys, albeit fewer of them than some.  It has the bright yellow.  It does the thing where pieces coalesce into something even though this something is like a pile of trash instead of, oh say, birds flying away. I like fabrics that have print on it.  It's just cool.

As was the show in general.  Next time I hope to take some of the classes and go without any children.  But this was good enough for me for sure.