Handwork at Quilt Con 2025
There was a lot of it…
Edit: thank you to reader Maia who supplied the info on the titles and makers of the quilts. Also, she corrected my mistake on the Quilt of golden Delights.)
No I did not attend Quilt Con. But there were two reliable reporters from my Dorcas Hand Quilters who went and supplied me with plenty of photos to share with you.
My friend Janet texted me when she got there saying those’re was a whole section of the show that was focused on handwork. I asked her to take photos for me and she obliged. Janet has an excellent “eye”. She and I go to shows together quite often and analyze the quality of the quilts in the car on the drive home. I knew she would send me pictures of the best of the best.
But first we have to take a look at the hand quilting winner.
Heidi Parks and Zak Foster are both award winning quilters with very good design skills. They make well done improve quilts and use hand piecing and hand quilting to enhance their designs in ways that not only push the envelope but create, I wouldn’t say beautiful, but extremely interesting quilts. You always have to look at their quilts close up and far away to understand them. And my hat is off to their efforts to make handwork the center of their work. They both do hard work to remind quilters that hand work can do a lot to individualize a quilt design in ways that machine work cannot. I thank them for that.
But when I saw the Hand Quilting winner at Quilt Con my heart sank down into my boots. That quilt was many shades of ugly and not a good representative of hand quilting at its finest.
Yes it had a good message, it was playful and eye catching, and it probably expressed the emotions of both quilters. The colors are nice. But an award for hand quilting? No. It is just too much. This quilt has flipped over to the side of too rustic, too busy, and really thumbs its nose at technique. Even to a quilter who enjoys thumbing her nose at the rules of quilting, it’s just too much. There I said it and that is my opinion. Your’s might be different.
But some really nice quilts with some innovative handwork did show up at the show.
I really like the whole design of this quilt with the way the black and white area in the center reminds me of the bottom of a woven basket. And the couching of the green thread gives the quilt that “come look at me up close” message. (Isomeric by Danielle Stanfill).
Here is another hand quilted piece I really liked. The colors are beautiful and the miles of hand quilting really show off the composition in the way it curves around the quilt. The black embroidered star is a nice touch. I would have been in heaven spending all that time working on the hand quilting. (Moving On by Pachy Sarmiento).
This is a ribbon winner and the embroidery on the strips is a new innovation and I’m sure it will be copied by other quilters. (Jordan Year (Quilt of Golden Delights) by Laura Hatrich. She decided to embroider positive things that happened to her day by day on the log cabin strips).
Here are a couple more nice quilts. You have to enlarge the one on the left to see the quilting, again right up my alley. The one on the right with the houses was my friend Janet’s favorite and she voted for it for Viewer’s Choice. A big thank you to Janet McDonald and Nancy Ko for sharing their photos.
I am not completely in disagreement with the judges at this show. The best in show quilt pictured at the very top of this post is one I agree with wholeheartedly. It is a copy of a sculpture and is two sided. What a knockout of a quilt. For more pictures of the winners, you can go to the Quilt Con website Link. But I have to agree with Janet, I’m sure tired of matchstick quilting patterns on modern quilts.
It’s time for self promotion. If you have taken any of my Beginning Sashiko classes, you have the skills to slip slide into my Hana Fukin class at New Pieces on March 8 from 10:30 to 1:30 to apply your new skills to a Japanese Dishcloth and make the beautifully stitched hand cloth pictured above. Link