IQF 2013

I'm at the International Quilt Festival in Houston right now. It's been pretty awesome. I have a ton of photos that I've just started filtering through. I wanted to jot down some notes from today before I forget what I was thinking:

An artist whose work I really admired but wasn't able to photograph was Kathy Nida from El cajon California. Especially her piece titled: I was not wearing a life jacket.

I listened to Kaffe Fassett talk about his quilts (while the ones he and a woman do together). He was very arrogant. I was drawn to some of the language he used when talking about the quilts: close tones or camouflage mixed with bold, vibrating colors. muddy wine colors.

Cyndi Souder did a short talk on creating celebration and memory quilts. She said one should never make a quilt that one doesn't want to just to please the recipient. She showed a mini quilt that was given to her that had a vintage postcard in the middle that was held on with buttons on the corners so that in could be removed and replaced. Or the quilt could be cleaned or fixed without ruining the postcard. This could be done with the intent of it being a photo frame.

Martha DeLeonardis did a talk on t-shirt quilts. I was impressed with hers but would never do mine the same. she had many useful tips. For colors of cotton bordering and mixed with the t-shirts, use black and white and one other color. Don't even try to match the color of the t-shirts, just use something that will work well with it as a border. Use charm squares with the t-shrits. Use the disappearing nine-patch pattern. I need to look up partial seams, something she uses but can't explain. I think I've already done it from a little bit of research on my phone. The shirts can be put in columns with mini grids included in the blocks to break up the column look.

Hsin-Chen Lin had the most inpirational quilt of a tree. The branches were triangular greens with slivers of brown for branches sticking through. The trunk was wavy browns. The ground was wavy different greens and browns. I couldn't take pictures of it and I'm having trouble finding anything online or even in books. Very frustrating.

In non-quilt related notes, I got to pet a Golden Doodle dog and now I really want one.

Also, I'm staying in a a hostel in the historical neighborhood called the Sixth Ward.

I saw the coolest demonstration with wood block printing. She would spread out a mixture of inks onto a jelly block (that was $70) then use a block to pick up some ink and print onto a fabric. That wasn't the end intent though. She would carefully pick up some more ink from a different part of the jelly block over and over to create a pattern from the missing ink. She then pressed a piece of artists fabric/canvas onto the jelly block to make the most beautiful pattern of mixed color with a negative pattern from the wood block. I'd like to see if I can do it with other printing techniques and without a jelly block.

I'm too tired to write up my notes about Katrina Walker and Marlene Glickman. They'll have to wait for tomorrow.