Day 3 Manchester Quilt Show

We spent Friday in Manchester at the World Quilt New England show, one of the Mancuso shows.  This is a smaller show (compared to Mid-Atlantic) but nice in a different way.  It features show entries from quilters around the world, and the quilts are grouped by country.  There is a prize for Best of Country for each group in addition to the usual prize categories.  We found there to be a great mix of techniques in the show quilts.  Rather than just show our favorite quilts, we decided to each choose four that we thought most interesting because of their techniques. 

"Bloom - Remember the Honey Bees" won Best of Country for New Zealand, and is made by Mary Transom.  It has a hand painted background, raw edge applique, collage, couching, stamping, and machine embroidery.  The bees were painted and then machine embroidered.  It is an original design.

"Migrating Birds" was also a Best of Country winner for Israel and it's maker, Rachel Steiner.  The impressive thing about this piece is that it is done with discharge.  It is a whole cloth quilt, meaning it started out as a piece of black fabric that the maker took color out of by using a Q-tip dipped in bleach!  In other words, lots of painstaking work created all those birds!  Discharging black fabric usually results in varying shades of rust or brown.  There is also lots of stitching which helps create the color story.

"Ode to Banksias 7" is by Susan Mathews of Australia.  This quilt is from a series featuring native Australian plants.  We liked the sunny yellow and the fact that the background fabrics are lino printed and hand dyed, and the plant images are screen printed.  Techniques that are right up our alley!  It's fun to see how other people use these techniques.

Raita Sawyer of the United Kingdom created "Tangram Activity".  A tangram is an ancient Chinese puzzle creating a square out of 7 pieces.  The tangram figures are bursting with energy.  It is machine pieced, appliqued and quilted and an original design.

Winning honorable mention in the Innovative category is "Skyscraper Sunflowers" by Kathryn Harmer Fox of South Africa (full image on the left). The base fabric is cotton duck canvas and she has used snippets of many fabrics that are scribble stitched to the background to create her design.  There are also pieces of colored netting incorporated into the work.

"Memories of Scotland" is by Kathleen Matthews of the United Kingdom.  The center panel of this quilt was first painted with acrylic paints.  The bordering pictures are photos printed on fabric.  All are heavily stitched and thread painted.  Below is a collage of some close ups of various parts of the quilt.

"Hundreds and Thousands - Little Green Squares" is by Sue Bax of South Africa.  Sue says she started this quilt in a workshop and was inspired by a green jelly roll of Kaffe Fassett fabrics to which she added many other fabrics.  You have to look at the detail photo (enlarge by clicking) to see how small some of these squares really are!

One of the special exhibits at the show was HERstory Quilts: A Celebration of Strong Women curated by our friend Suzanne Miller Jones.  The quilt above is one of the quilts in the exhibit, "Ruby Bridges", made by Willa Downes.  Willa is also a friend of ours - in fact, we made the thermofax screen she used to print the desk images on her quilt.  It's always fun to see work by a customer, especially when it's hanging in a show!