This past weekend my mom and I attended a quilt show. My mom is an avid quilter and I’m an avid user of quilts so we thought it would be a good time. And it was. I took a lot of pictures so I think that I’m going to break them up into three different parts.

When we got there we started out by walking around and looking at all of the quilts. There were a lot of them!

I liked the colors in this one.

It’s interesting to see all of the different styles and techniques that are employed in making quilts.

This quilted wall hanging was made with old handkerchiefs.

I actually thought that this was a cute way to display antique hankies. They were tacked down with a few stitches at the points.

There were quite a few quilts that had hand-appliqued designs. Then they were extravagantly quilted. I’ll show some better examples later on.

This quilt really wasn’t made with colors that I liked, but it was an interesting interpretation with lots of hearts.

As soon as we saw this quilt my mom exclaimed, “That’s a Bonnie Hunter quilt!” Apparently Bonnie Hunter is one of my mom’s favorite quilters. A quick glance at her website shows me that she does a lot with scrap quilting. So if you like Eleanor Burns, you’ll like Bonnie Hunter. Actually, this pattern showed up at the quilt show a LOT. My mom said that it was last year’s Mystery Block quilt.

The best thing about a scrap quilt is that as you stand back the colors all make a pretty pattern…

… but when you look up close that’s when you notice more details. Looking at the picture of the full pattern you didn’t notice the fabric with music on it until you got up close.

Then you look at a different part of the quilt and you can see that somebody’s favorite football team made it into the quilt, too.

This is a good way to get your husband to not grumble about a quilt being too ‘girly’ for the bedroom. Just throw his favorite team’s material in there!

Here’s another quilt using the same Bonnie Hunter pattern as the one above.

It has a similar feel, but this person used a darker border so that I feel like my eyes are drawn right into the middle. The other one draws my eyes out to the edges.

There was one other thing that interested me about this quilt..

The actual quilting that was done on this was very round and traditional. Looking at it in person made it feel very comfortable and traditional.

Right next to this quilt was yet another Bonnie Hunter pattern quilt. Again, the same pattern. Standing in front of this quilt I felt like there was something different about it, but I couldn’t really put my finger on it at first. Yes, the border is a little louder than in the previous one, but that wasn’t it. It felt more angular to me. Hmm…

That’s when I looked closer and saw that the quilting was done with angles and lines instead of curves.

As I walked throughout the show I took notice of the actual quilting on these pieces. The quilting could make or break a quilt. Is it too much? Not enough? Does it set off the pattern nicely?

Here is a great example of this. This piece was quilted to really let the quilting accent the pattern.

Take a moment to really look it over. The person who quilted this did a wonderful job. Without that detail this would just be another wall hanging with square blocks.

This quilt is a good example of how best to do very extravagant quilting without taking away from the pattern. I didn’t take a picture of it, but there was another quilt that was made with a LOT of busy fabric plus they had a lot of quilting like this one. My mom and I didn’t like it at all. Not only were the colors so muted that you couldn’t really see the pattern, but there was just too much going on. It was not easy on the eyes.

One of the displays was of quilts that will be donated to local charities. I took a picture of this Fidget Quilt, though, because I had just learned about these last week. Fidget quilts are used for Alzheimer’s patients and also those with autism. The different textures and activities on these pieces helps to calm and soothe people with these issues. I really can’t do justice in explaining this so please check out the links that I’ve posted in this paragraph.

Anyway, I think that’s enough for now. I still have a LOT more pictures, though, so stay tuned!