Sunday, February 26, 2006

Looking at Quilts

Yesterday I took an excursion to look at the Pajaro Valley annual quilt show in Watsonville. I make it a point to go every year, for the pleasure of looking at the creative ways people use fabric to explore color and design. Quilting can either be quite formal and traditional, or it can jump the boundaries and become very free form. It is also a deeply personal art. It is mostly (but not exclusively) made by women, and many of the quilts spring from deeply felt emotion, tell stories important to family history, and commemorate big occasions. I aspire to make a quilt someday, when I have that kind of time available. I took some photos. Here are some of the things I saw, just a tiny taste of the 3 buildings full of quilts on display:

My favorite - Australian Dreamscape by Thom Atkins. This is made with lots of beading, and shows the Australian landscape, with platypus', koala bears, gum trees, and a wonderful river.






Loved this bookcase, (My Bookshelf, by Dotty Newick) a quilt with titles embroidered on the books, photos on the shelves.


Another favorite (above), a quilt of Carnegie Hall made by Linda Murphy, to commerate her daughter winning a poetry competition and being selected to read her poems at Carnegie Hall.
Watermelon quilt by Mickey Beebe.

2 comments:

robin andrea said...

OMG-- Those are fantastic! I have never seen such amazing quilts. So creative, so colorful and unique. Wow. I'll never think of quilting as boring again. Thank you.

Adagio said...

(thanks for your email sigrid. the thoughts i expressed simply got the better of me that day. c'est la vie).

the book quilt is great. i also liked the black and white one beneath it; the colours in the one below that; and the intricacy of the last one.

following a drizzly early morning, we have a sunny, albeit somewhat windy, day here.

kind regards
adagio