Quilt Show in Siren

[lydamorehouse]

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Image: Traditional strip quilt (machine sewn) on hanging on display in a small town quilt show.

We are up in Siren, Wisconsin this weekend visiting our friends' cabin. It's a little cold for a dip in the lake, but we had been seeing signs for a Quilt Show this weekend in the nearby town of Weber. The four of us piled into the car, grabbed our masks, and headed to the Weber High School gym to check out the fabric art.

I had a BLAST.

I am often really fond of these kinds of small town events. We actually had to leave immediately after we arrived because the ladies taking the $5 admission didn't have a way to take credit cards. We should have thought of that, honestly, but it was no problem to hop into the town and stop by the local bank's ATM.


Image a small quilt of a circle of stylized houses.

Each quilt came with an artist's statement. Some quilters noted things like, "There is one piece where I used the 'wrong' side of the pattern. Can you find it?" to telling meaningful stories about who the quilt was made for.


Image: example of artist statements. This one ends with a very Midwestern commentary, "...I think this turned okay. Even if it is a bit loud."

There were lots and lots of lovely traditional quilts, but I took a few pictures of the more unique one. One of my favorites (which of course means I got a somewhat blurry picture of) was a "portrait of Frankenstein's Monster."


The quilt

My favorite part of this quilt is the detail. It doesn't look like much from a distance, but if you get close you can see that the quilter stitched in words relating to the novel:



Image: The words written into the quilting of the Frankenstein's monster included "monstrosity" and "deformed."

Here's one of a parade of geisha:

Image: The kimono are all overly lovely.

And, one of my favorites was one that had been quilted for a nerdy nephew because it featured a number of his favorite t-shirts and flourished with a bunch of dragons because he was a big D&D player. In the center, the quilter had even included the D&D logo:


Image: D&D quilt

Anyway, we spent a lot of time wandering the gym. We happened to come on the day when visitors could vote for favorites, so we walked around with a pencil and a slip on which we could vote for small, medium, large favorites. There was an odd size and a "challenging" category, too. That kind of made the whole thing extra fun, because you looked at each one wondering if you could bestow a winning ribbon on one of these. 

It was tremendous. Highly recommend doing something wonderfully mundane like this every once and a while.

Comments

[lydamorehouse]

I took, like, a hundred more pictures, but I didn't want to clutter up the whole blog with them. There were some really amazing ones.