QuiltCon 2020

by Power Tools With Thread · February 21, 2020

My buddy Lisa and I and our husbands trekked up to Austin, Texas with “Media Creds” to check out QuiltCon 2020. QuiltCon gets its name as a take off from Comic-Con which is where all the comic book groupies join up for a comic book convention every year – usually in LasVegas. So QuiltCon is a quilt convention but it is the quilt convention for the Modern Quilt Guild (MQG). You can read about the MQG here. This year, there were 1,600 quilts entered into the show to be juried and 432 were chosen to be judged. Sorry about image quality throughout this post. I snagged the pictures as screen shots while editing the videos.

My previous experience with QuiltCon is limited. I’ve read about it on blogs over the years and have come across posts where quilters have had quilts accepted for judging. I was very excited to interview the Executive Director, Karen Cooper, and come to find out, we live about 20 miles from each other. From what I could tell, she did an amazing job and the show itself was very well-organized and flowed very smoothly.

I loved the Welcome Quilt.

We saw some very lovely work at this show. This quilt took 2nd place in Piecing.

We also saw some quilts that were designed to shock. I guess that comes with the territory of the modern quilting movement. There were political messages and other themed quilts that were very “in your face” about the divisive issues of our time regarding politicians, guns, oppression, political anarchy, immigration…you name it. We saw it all including profanity delicately hand stitched and pieced into fabric. Beauty and art is in the eye of the beholder.

Here is a glimpse of the Best In Show by Peter of Toronto, Canada. This is a screenshot of my interview with him in front of his winning quilt.

This one took Judge’s Choice.

There were also some we saw with no message but just a work of art.

So that’s a glimpse of what we did yesterday. Today we are off to another quilt show in Brenham, Texas that I’m pretty sure will lean more to the side of “traditional quilting”. Happy Trails!