Houston Quilt Festival - the Experience

Houston Quilt Festival - the Experience

Between the election and the after convention "hang-over", it has taken me a few days to put this post together.  I have been recovering from intense lack of sleep and my annual post-Houston illness which involves the respiratory crud (that in all fairness started in Austin), and losing my voice.  I had a difficult time sleeping while at the quilt festival because of the huge amounts of adrenaline, powered by a year of hard work alone in my studio (or mostly alone) and then a giant onslaught of good times with old friends and new and then winning awards and my special exhibit!!!!! To say that it is too much, is an understatement; but like a moth to the flame, I am drawn there.

Highlights of the show include winning two awards this year:

i Quilt wins an Honorable Mention!!

One Earth wins a Second Place!!

Dinner@Eight exhibit, Patterns:

Cover girl! Mistyfuse has added my face to the cover of the package for 10 yards of Mistyfuse!  Thanks Iris!

Iris and I at the Dinner@Eight dinner

Posing with Jamie Fingal and our cover girl packages on Mistyfuse!

The opening of Turmoil & Tranquility, a new exhibit from SAQA.

The Deep End

My special exhibit:

My hand made guest book with the color pens.  My sweet wonderful amazing guests filled 20 blank pages full of wonderful comments and messages to me.  Absolutely fabulous!  Thank you so much!!!!

Falling, Vertigo, Doors Across Austin, Park Place

Park Place, Planned Obsolescence, Windows

Windows, A Few of My Favorite Things, Urban Tree

Out of the Box, Just Around the Corner, Bridge

Bridge, Dot, Suburbs

Central Park, Home

Self Portrait '08, Blue Towers

Community Gardens, Winter to Spring, Gift

Urban Daisy, Building UP

Duck and Cover, High Rise

High Rise, You Are What You Eat

And, one of my biggest highlights was having my mother come to see my exhibit!

After I got home, a dear friend forwarded me a newsletter from The Quilt Show.  Surprise!! They made a beautiful slide show of my exhibit and you can see it here.

I also found out on the last day of the show, that my exhibit, Inspired by Color will be traveling to
INTERNATIONAL QUILT FESTIVAL/CHICAGO, April 6-8, 2017.  Whoo hoo!!

And, if that is not enough, there were a total of 49 different quilt exhibits in Houston this year.  Only one of them is the World of Beauty.  I could spend weeks looking at all the quilts, but I didn't have that much time!  My favorites were the Modern Quilt Exhibit (sorry I didn't get photos!), Quilt National, Viewpoints 9, Dinner@Eight Patterns, SAQA Turmoil and Tranquility, and the Susan Carlson exhibit.  There was also a number of other fascinating exhibits like the quilts made to honor the moon and the missions to the moon, the Dear Jane exhibit, and Tactile Architecture.  

Many, many, wonderful times with friends, and so happy to have gotten photos of some of them, and sad I forgot to get photos with others....such is the nature of a highly distracted and adrenaline fueled experience!

Deborah Boschert, Suzan Engler

Kristen La Flamme, Deborah Boschert

Heather Pregger

Jamie Fingal

Becky Navarro and me

Selfie with Helen Godden and her quilt!

Selfie with Judy Coates Perez

Me and Paula Kovarik

Me and Sue Bleiweiss

Selfie with Lisa Chin

Me and Mikyung Jang

Sherri McCauley and me

Heidi Proffetty and Victoria Findlay Wolfe

The beautiful view from the Hilton:

A rather frequent view from the escalators at the George Brown Convention Center:

Behind the scenes, take down of the exhibits.  Love the tables.  Love the attention to detail in quality care of our quilts!! Look at all those white gloves! Thanks!

At home, cherishing my guest book!

The most frequently asked question:
How long did it take you to make all of these quilts?
I still don't know.  It took a lifetime to find my artist voice and get the skills I needed.  I am a professional artist.  I work full time at making my art, just like other people who work their full time jobs.  If you think these art quilts take a long time to make, you are right, but hey, it's what I do. And, I would like to thank those of you who make it possible by supporting the arts!  Whether you donate to our organizations or buy our work directly, we couldn't do it without you!!!

Outtakes:
Getting a little silly with no food, exhaustion, and adrenaline, the night I dropped and fatally cracked the screen of my iphone.  Waiting, waiting, and more waiting, but the techs at the Apple Store came to my rescue and finished the repair even though they worked past closing time!  Kudos! 

Spending a very brief amount of time each night doodling with watercolors to amuse with texts to my daughter back at home:

dedicated to the raccoon (or other animal of the night) who made a tasty meal from her Jack-O-Lantern

Houston International Quilt Festival 2016

Houston International Quilt Festival 2016

It is getting to be that time of year again!  It is almost 2 weeks until the International Quilt Festival in Houston.  This year, in particular, is a very special year for me.  In addition to having two quilts in A World of Beauty, a quilt in Patterns (Dinner @ Eight special exhibit), a quilt in Tranquility (a SAQA special exhibit), I will also have 25 quilts in my very own special exhibit called Inspired by Color: Art Quilts by Kathy York!  It is really fantastic to have my work recognized in this way, and it is also a bit humbling. A big thank you to Becky Navarro over at IQF for reaching out to me, all her hard work, and Karey Bresenhan for her support and encouragement!

And as if that's not enough, I found out a few weeks ago that both of my entries in A World of Beauty got awards!! I will have to wait until after the Awards Ceremony on Nov 1 to find out what they are.
I entered i Quilt in the Innovative Pieced category,

and One Earth in the small Art Abstract category.

You can see my quilt for the Dinner@Eight exhibit, Patterns:

And last, my quilt at the SAQA exhibit, Tranquility:

I hope to see you there!  I will be there for most of Festival this year, dividing my time between manning the SAQA booth as a volunteer, hanging out in my exhibit, and looking at the thousands of quilts on display in the 49 different exhibits of quilts. I am anticipating lots of inspiration, because the skill level and artistry is simply amazing. And I really look forward to seeing many old friends and meeting new ones! It is going to be spectacular!!! I  can   hardly      wait!!

Boulder Field

Boulder Field
69" x 68.5"

This quilt is a response to a new fabric line, Urban Artifacts, by Leslie Jenison.  If you don't know Leslie yet, hop over to her website and have a look around.  She is simply an amazing, kind, and multi-faceted woman and very engaging and interesting artist.  She is also a curator (along with Jamie Fingal) for the exhibit, Dinner @ Eight, which premiers in Houston  at IQF every year for the last 8 years.  Leslie has been doing surface design for a long time and has quite a talent for it!  This is her first venture into designing a fabric line that the rest of us will get to play with.  It is produced by RJR Fabrics and will be available for stores to purchase at Quilt Market in Houston in a few weeks, and then it will be in quilt stores, available to you, in Feb, 2017.   I was happy to volunteer to play with it!

Urban Artifacts, a selected few

When I saw the patterns and colors, I just new I wanted to make some boulders, and yes, these boulders are just a bit abstracted, but I like the way they appear to be looking in different directions!  I also think the little squares and rectangles add to the modern appeal of this design. I can also tell you that this pattern has been kid approved, as my son strolled through my studio one morning (in the early design stages), and told me to make some of the boulders bigger.  I think he was right about that! The boulder on the lower right corner is 2 feet by 2 feet!

Some lovely closeups for you to both admire the fabric and see the quilting!

These were all made with the magic of the log cabin block and freezer paper templates.  I started with a central square or rectangle and then sewed strips on all four sides of a contrasting color to make the block bigger.  Then I ironed freezer paper to the front side, drew some free handed curves on the corners.  Then by gently peeling back the paper at the corners, I was able to cut the pattern for the corners.  And, by re-pressing the rest of the boulder back onto the block, I cut out the boulder, leaving a 1/4" seam allowance.  The whole quilt started looking something like this:

(Note: for someone more skilled than I, this could have been done more easily by using a technique of improvisational curves.  And, I just don't have a firm command of that technique yet, though I have tried many times.  sigh....  )
Next, I took all of those little scraps of corners (all properly labeled), and pressed them to a neutral background, a solid off white, and began cutting them out.

The illusion of boulders was completed by quilting around the boulder in organic circles right off the edge if necessary.

I really enjoyed sewing with these fabrics.  The patterns and textures were food for my imagination!  The hand of the fabric was very soft and wonderful to touch. And the colors were rich and vibrant! And, one of the things I loved about this line so much was the inclusion of different values of each colorway and a really nice palette of neutrals to help the colors pop! Look how awesome this goes on my deck (though I would NEVER leave it there!)

This has been my project for the month of September, and I am so happy to finally be able to share it with you!  Thanks for stopping by!