Quilt Con 2015

This past weekend I drove my mom and a friend if her's down to Austin to attend Quilt Con 2015. This was put on by the International Modern Quilt Guild. There was a juried show of modern quilts, workshops, and lectures....and, of course, vendors. We all attended a couple of different lectures and spent a great deal of time looking at the quilts and spending way too much money at the vendor booths. 

Here are just some of the quilts that were on display: 

Face #1 by Melissa Averinos

Grove by Casey York

Outside the Box by Jenny Voss

Barn Remnant by Kim Eichler-Messmer

The keynote speakers were some of the women from the Gees Bend Quilt Collective. I highly recommend checking them out as they are a very interesting group. They provided stories about their coming up in the world and how they learned to quilt but the best part was that they spent a lot of their time on stage gracing us with some beautiful sung spirituals. It was very moving. 

The song they opened with and kept referring back to was a rendition of "Give Me Flowers While I Yet Live". This is a wonderful song about giving thanks and compliments to those in our lives while they are alive; that we should wait until somebody has left our lives to give them the praise that we have for them. 

Flights of Fantasy - Whimsy

The most recent challenge for AQATW is called "Flights of Fantasy" with the expectation to delve into the various worlds of fantasy for inspiration. My inspiration was my friend, Angelia, who makes fairy wings for costumes and is also a wonderful fairy named Whimsy. Here is my quilt:

I did this by painting on fabric using Derwent Inktense blocks and added a tulle skirt. Here is the finished painting with skirt: 

I then went back in with embroidery thread and fancied her up:

For some reason, her hair and bodice make me very happy. 

And for reference, here is a picture of my inspiration:

You also need to check out her website On Gossamer Wings.  

Mom Trip - Day 3

We arrived at the location for our art quilt workshop and are pretty beat, so this will be a short post. 

We drove pretty much all day from Bowling Green, KY to Wooster, OH. We got stuck in construction traffic in Louisville, KY and game traffic in Cincinnati and then accident traffic in Columbus. 

The folks that we are staying with and learning from are really interesting and I'm looking forward to unleashing the creativity, but first I need to get to sleep and get rested. 

A couple of high points for the day, though were 1. Neither the subject or I realized that we would be driving into a different time zone so imagine our confusion when I looked AT&T the clock in the car and noticed that we had lost an hour. And 2. My dog walker, house sitter extraordinaire may have acquired another stray dog for me....but we will just have to see if he is still around when I return....

In the meantime, off for some much needed shut eye.