A Recent Trend

There were a lot of comments from friends I bumped into at the Langley show about the tendency lately to "overquilt" quilts, especially when sending them out for longarm quilting.  These professional quilters are producing amazing work which obviously takes hours and hours to do but it seemed to compete with rather than complement most of the exquisite quilts on which it appeared.  Here is an example:

Beautiful hand applique overpowered by elaborate machine quilting.

Too much texture?

Here is another quilt, quilted in the ditch which lately seems to be frowned upon.  I loved this quilt and the story behind it.  Julia Nutter, the quilter found its inspiration in a bag of small triangles found at a thrift store.  She liked the colours so turned them into hourglasses and then built them up from there adding from her stash as needed.  She said she enjoyed making something coherent from so many tiny scraps, most of which were someone else's discards.

The final photo is of a prize winning collaboration from eight quilters who were each given a vertical slice of a photo and asked to produce a vertical panel representing what they saw in the photo.  Here is the result of this fun collaboration: