Quilt Envy

The Stitch and Craft show was host to two quilting exhibitions I think.

Spread around most of the top floor were hundreds of quilted pennants from Quilts 4 London (although I'm currently listening to Ed Reardon's Week I'm going to resist the urge to comment on that 4). Apparently the aim is to give one to everyone competing in the olympics and paralymics. The pennants were a real mix of styles and clearly came from quilters with a wide range of skill. The volume was impressive and I can't even imagine how much work must have gone into organising a project of that scale.

Almost half the floor was devoted to the A Gift of Quilts exhibition, which was more impressive in size, scale and skill. Also for the olympics, this project will give one quilt to every team competing the games. 

I'll admit that I'm a late recruit to quilting and I should probably confess that I'm enjoying the process of making the thing more than I'm going to enjoy the final product. More often than not, all I can see in a quilt is a bunch of different fabrics that don't quite go together in a pattern that I can't quite make out. Or a set of boring fabrics in a pattern that is so regimented that it may as well just be printed.

Wandering round the exhibition, the point of several of the quilts still passed me by. I can appreciate the amount of work that goes into them (hand sewing hundreds of little squares of fabric will give you real appreciation of the amount of work a quilt takes) but the over-all effect of some were lost on me.

Only some, though. The rest were a lesson in how it should be done and the vast gulf that lies between my beginner's efforts and the beautiful quilts that approach works of art. Some of the best had too many people admiring them to get a photo. 

Here are some pictures of quilts made by people with excellent fabric-based imaginations:

This is how blue should be done

Unlike me, the person behind this quilt knows how to make rectangles not-boring

Just in case I'd been doubting my lesson in how contrasting colours work in quilts

This is the only quilt that made me laugh out loud

And this quilt is a physical manifestation of the gulf between my skill and true quilting