Australasian Quilt Convention

AQC time again! There is so much to look at, and it all becomes a bit overwhelming after a while. But what a wonderful show it was this year! And it was fun to catch up with a few friends old and new as I wandered around.

It was fantastic to see Kat Jones's "Bling" in person:

No one will believe me now, but one of the challenge pieces I'm working on this year is somewhat similar in concept to this. But I really did start working on it before I had ever seen pictures of Bling.

I found a podcast of an interview with Kat Jones here, recorded at Quiltcon. It was interesting to hear some details about how she created her masterpiece.

I loved the Mexican "Flora and Fauna" quilts. This Jacobean lily popped out at me:

But of course it is not a Jacobean Lily; in Mexico, where it comes from, it is an Aztec lily!

The Taiwanese art quilts were wonderful, although I don't have any photos of them. But the labels were problematic. I don't know if they were translated with Google Translate, or by a human who wasn't very proficient in English. It would have been nice if they had been edited by an English speaker somewhere in the process to improve the flow of the comments. Some seemed as if they may have been quite poetic originally, but the English was clunky and semi-literate. The same problem occurred a few years ago in a display of Japanese quilts. Better editing is required on future international quilt displays.

Elsewhere there were a few larger-than-life quilts like these beautiful Zinnias by Velda Newman:

But the biggest of them all was Norma Slabbert's Year 60 Quilt:

It is 11 metres long, so that's just part of it. It was displayed wrapped around an octagonal shape, so you could walk around it and see small sections at a time. Norma made one block every day for a year, starting on her 60th birthday. (Which I think would actually make it a "year 61" quilt but that probably makes me sound like a pedant.) Here's a close-up view of one small section so you can see the incredible amount of work that went into the daily blocks:

A couple of other quilts that caught my attention:

This is Vertigo, also by Katherine (Kat) Jones. In the podcast I linked to above, she talks about this quilt as well, explaining the colour graduation sections. Close-up of the quilting and the colour graduations on the sail:

And lastly, Modern Movement by Rachelle Denneny:

I loved the colour and the quilting in this. Close-up:

Rachelle used the same quilting design all over, changing thread colour for each column of squares:

I was not at all surprised to find out later that this quilt was awarded the National Quilt Award.