QuiltCon 2022 – Thoughts, Favorites, + Trends

It was so good to be back to in person QuiltCon! After a virtual event in 2021 we were all ready for some live interactions with our quilty friends.

I was honored to receive second place in Modern Traditionalism for my quilt, Mended Mountains. It is always a wonderful surprise and honor to get a ribbon at QuiltCon. Especially when there are so many beautiful quilts in the show.

This year I was a faculty member and taught several workshops. I taught a 6 hour workshop, Mind’s Eye View, that was a last minute add to the QuiltCon agenda because of another faculty member not attending due to a personal situation. And I was able to teach both sections of my Stepping Into Improv 3 hour workshop. I had wonderful students and everyone was just excited to be there and be together. I also gave the last lecture of the weekend. I love my lecture and I’m slightly sad that so many people have to use Sunday as a travel day and they couldn’t attend it.

Of course, the best part about QuiltCon is always the community. Connecting with new and old friends, friends we have only had virtual relationships with, and people we live near but traveled cross-country to run into. I really tried to be present in the moments and I honestly didn’t take many personal photos. Because I was the official catalog photographer, I was already photographing quilts for several hours each day so I wanted to stay out from behind the camera when I was interacting with people. Luckily, I quilty friends are the best and I got a couple photos shared with me.

Favorites

We all come away from a show like this with our favorites. I am sharing just my top 3 favorite quilts. It is so hard to choose but each of these quilts spoke to me. I love the use of pink in all of them. Hillary’s quilt speaks to my love of modern traditional design and her use of applique was brilliant in person. A photo does not do it justice. Laura’s improv is beautiful and the scrappy navy background is fabulous. There are also wonderful hand quilting lines on her piece. I find I almost always have a minimalist quilt amongst my favorites. This is a style that mystifies me and no matter how many times I try for something minimal it almost always ends up maximal. The simplicity of the geometric design and the color blocking really drew me to this quilt. If you want to see a few more of my favorites, you can check out my Instagram posts from after the show.

Trends

Every year that I have attended QuiltCon I like to take a look at the show as a whole and try to pick out the trends that I see or that I am drawn to. This year was no exception when it came to underlying trends. Every other quilt was made as a response to COVID/quarantine/lockdown/social isolation. Because of this, the mood of the show was very different than years past. I felt that there were a lot more neutral quilts, grays, beige, tans, creams, etc… I also noticed a trend of all dark quilts, monochromatic charcoal/black/navy, and a greater prevalence of dark backgrounds.

The next trend I always try to take note of is about color. Obviously, not every quilt in the show was going to be a neutral quilt. The color trend I noticed this year was all about warm colors, pink, peach, orange, etc…

The last few trends that I am including here have been trending upwards in the past few years. Facing instead of binding and handwork/hand quilting. The other trend was less noticeable at the show but I definitely noticed it as I was going through and editing photos. I noticed a number of quilts that included some kind of binding detail or small piecing in the binding. I think I will credit this trend to the more time that we have had a home in the past couple years. This gives us the opportunity to pay close attention to the small details. We are also using our stash more and maybe ended up just shy of the amount of binding that was needed. I also credit the immense amount of hand quilting and handwork to this “abundance” of time.

Thanks for reading about my QuiltCon 2022 experience. If you want to see all the quilts that were juried into the show you can purchase a catalog from the MQG. I just happen to be the catalog photographer but I get no commission for catalog sales. It’s a great commemorative book of all the quilts and the community outreach guild quilts.