The 4th Genevieve Awards: Festival of Quilts 2024
Hello everybody!
There has been another Festival of Quilts! And I exhibited again - with one solo quilt, and one block in a group quilt. I was only able to go for one day this year, but in that day I managed to pack in watching the 'Wearable Quilt Creations' catwalk, and an embroidery workshop, as well as getting around all the quilts and some of the vendors. Again, I managed to max out the storage on my phone and its SD card with photographs as there were just so many beautiful quilts to see.
Me in front of my quilt 'Focussed Rainbow' |
Me pointing to my block in #teambearpaw24 2 - conceived and pieced by Chris English |
So to the awards! The Genevieve Awards are awards I give to the quilts on display at the Festival of Quilts. The only prize for them is the knowledge that I like your quilt. I make up the categories, I decide which quilts go in to the categories, I decide who wins. These are now the fourth Awards (you can also read the ones for 2023, 2022 and 2019) and the categories change depending on what quilts are at the show. There are few quilts not eligible for the Genevieve awards: My quilts (because I am way too biassed), the quilts in the Visitor's Choice awards retrospective showcase that I have commented on before (because they already had their chance) and the Joy of Quilting section (because the whole point of that category is that the quilts are not judged). Other than that, all quilts on display, including individual artist exhibitions, graduate showcases, historical collections and guild challenge quilts could potentially receive a Genevieve Award! Links to artists' Instagrams or websites will be given where I can find them. If they gave their IG handle or website in the Festival programme, that link is preferred.
So here are the Awards!
Quilts with Faces
A new category for this year. Portrait quilts and quilts highlighting faces of people and animals were a big theme this year. While collaged raw-edge appliqué is the most popular technique used to create faces in patchwork, there were a variety of interesting techniques on display. Here is my selection of them.
Entry 1 - 'Kukuppalik (he has a big hood) Inuit dictionary' by Ria Mille and Anne Liliholm
This quilt is such a fun idea, I love the big shaggy sheepskin fabric used for the hood. The face is created by a technique called collage quilting. Here's a close up of the face so you can see the patchwork style, and the beautiful long-arm quilting.
Entry 2 - 'Stitch Lyrical' by GillyMai O'Brien
This is quite a small quilt, with 16 embroidered portraits of musical artists. Here are some close-ups of some of the iconic figures to show you the embroidery.
Entry 3 - Peaky Blinders by Amelia Hanratty
A beautiful, muted portrait of Cillian Murphy's character in the TV show Peaky Blinders. The portrait element is based on a paper-cut image and has been created by appliquéd strips over a black background, as you can see in this close-up image.
Entry 4 - "Behind the Leaves" by Esther Delgado Pico
This is another collage portrait. I particularly liked the very fine lines of the quilting, made to highlight the different shapes, as you can see in this close-up.
Entry 5 - 'Mr Levy' by Laura Graham
There's just so much character in this guy's face! The use of colour to show the shadows the face is particularly nicely done, and I like the whole 'sketchbook' feel of this quilt. According to the program, the subject of the quilt, Mr Levy, was the founder of Visage Textiles in Manchester, and the quilt is a tribute to the man, the fabrics and the company. Here's a close-up of around the pipe, so you can see the collage technique used to create this.
Entry 6 - 'Amy' by Devida Bushrod and Amy Freyn
A tribute to the iconic Amy Whitehouse, made in a pixel style (lots of small squares of fabric sewn together. Not only is the face beautifully done, but there were lots of nice touches, including song lyrics embroidered and hidden in the quilting, as you can see in the pics below.
Entry 7 - 'The Emotion of Colours' by Teresa Fusalba
This is a striking collage quilt, with an amazing sense of colour. I love the strong contrast between the black and white face, and the colourful hair. The artist has cleverly emphasised this with the quilting, by using circles on the face and straight lines on the hair, as you can see in this close-up.
Entry 8 - 'Shadow' by Scott Culley
Standing close-up you can't see the face shape at all, you need to stand back or look through the lens of a camera and then it jumps out at you. This is a beautifully clever technique, the entire quilt is actually pieced log cabin spirals, and the face shape is made by varying the thickness of some of the lines. Here's a close-up image so you can see the technique used.
Entry 9 - 'The Beginning' by Genesis Hall
This self-portrait by a 14-year-old quilter was the worthy winner of the Young Quilter Aged 14-18 Category. It is made in a pixel quilt style. The title and words on the quilt are a play on the young quilter's name 'Genesis'.
This beautiful allegorical portrait of the artist's daughters is collaged, but done so beautifully that it almost appears to be crazy-pieced in close-up pictures as you can see in the detail pics below. The quilting in this is particularly well-done, in my opinion.
And the winner is ...
'Mr Levy' by Laura Graham! The composition and use of colour made this one the clear winner for me.
Rainbow Quilts
This category is returning for the fourth time, because I still love rainbows. Indeed my own entry this year was a rainbow quilt.
Entry 1 - 'Hope flows' by Angela Southey
This quilt is a glorious explosion of colour, made up of many tiny EPP hexagons. It is entirely hand-pieced and hand quilted. The amount of time and patience it must have taken to achieve this is incredible. Here is a close-up section of the middle of the quilt.
Entry 2 - 'Soft Pride' by Amy Pabst
Amy Pabst had an exhibition showcasing her teeny-tiny log cabins. These are Foundation Paper Pieced - indeed, that's the only technique that allows you to work with pieces this ridiculously small. This particular quilt is 41cm/16 inches square and contains 11,925 pieces. Here's a close up so you can see how the pieces fit together - each piece is only 2-3mm wide.
Entry 3 - 'Bargello Summer Time Floral' by Karen L Jackson
Entry 4 - Fruit Salad by Jo Avery
Entry 5 - Enchanted Forest 2 by Helen Howes
Entry 6 - Arcadia Avenue by Val Brooks
Entry 7 - 'Kinship 100 Block Fusion Sampler' by Diana Rolland and Mairi Burns
Entry 8 - 'The Bargello Coat of Many Colours' by Karen L Jackson
Entry 10 - 'Wings of Pride' by Matt Wilding
Thanks to the Steward who took this photo for me, annoyingly, I didn't get a photo of the whole thing without me in it. This beautiful piece was in the Quilted Creations section, and clearly designed to be Instragrammable, which is always fun. The artist used strip piecing with thin brown/grey pieces interspersed within the rainbow colours to create a feather effect.
And the winner is...
Another new, albeit small, category this year, for quilts and quilt creations where the artists looked beyond traditional fabrics and incorporated something different into their quilts. The Sustainable Category ran for the second time this year, which actively requires quilters to use recycled products, and inspires some people to reach for unusual materials.
This quilt is a seemingly simple image of flowers. But if you look closely, the flowers are made from recycled footballs.
You can still see the England symbols on the blue flowers.
I was also a fan of the artist's use of shoe laces to attach the border and create the flower stems.
Entry 3 - 'Oppression is not a Game' by Gill Taylor
From the Quilted Creation section, this artist has literally sewn Barbie Dolls and masks onto a quilted apron, to create this feminist protest artwork.
And the winner is...
'To All the Goals We've Loved Before' by Richard Kenyon. Because the idea of using footballs to create flowers is just genius.
Entry 7 - 'The Chaos of Loss' by Jennifer Stokes
And the winner is...
Animal quilts
This beautiful collage quilt features the artist's Aussie-Doodle dog. I love the use of the purple colours to create the shading on the dog, and the fun additional details in the landscape, like the little signs.
Entry 2 - 'Pride' by Kerry Hook
The artist's own cat was the model for this beautiful quilt. There's just so much to love about it, from the gorgeous lighting effect in the background, to the 3D appliquéd cogs. And there's a cat in a hat!
Entry 4 - 'Chanticleer and Pertelote' by Catherine Millar and Timothy Millar
Entry 5 - 'Pawsitive Vibes' by Lauren Connor
Entry 6 - 'LOOK AT ME(N)OW!' by Carol McFadzean
'Micha and the gear of time' by Maria Eugenia Corbella! What's not to love about a steampunk cat.
Joy of Sharing Highlights
The Joy of Sharing Category is for people who want to enter quilts without them being judged. This allows for a greater range of quilts on display, with people entering quilts that fit in between the size requirements for the Miniature and Regular categories, as well as experimental quilts and quilts that don't fall into any other category neatly. In accordance with the wishes of the artists not to be judged, I have not selected a winner for this section.
Quilt 1 - 'Thanks Ma'am For Everything' by Devida Bushrod
Quilt 2 - 'Climate Change 2023' by Sandra Evans
This is a 'temperature quilt'. The quilter records the high and low temperature of the day in their location and assigns specific fabrics to ranges of temperature, so you can see how the temperature varies throughout the year. This means weather in the real world dictates the final look of the quilt.
Quilt 3 - 'FMQ Dahlia' by Grit Seidel
Genevieve's Favourites
This is the big category! What were my favourites this year? There were a lot of beautiful quilts to choose from, but I have narrowed it down to this selection.
Entry 1 - 'Protecting the Precious' by Alec Worth
Entry 2 - 'A Treat for the Feet' and 'Favourite Things' by Lesley Hutchinson
A Treat for the Feet:
I love it when an artist has two related pieces in different categories! Hutchinson entered the footstool into Quilt Creation, and the quilt in Miniatures. And Tunnocks Caramel Wafers is such a fun choice of subject to celebrate.
Entry 3 - 'Challenge' by Sylwia Ignotowska
I absolutely love the clever effect of depth and perspective in this quilt, you completely believe that the two figures are standing on a floor. The artist based the figures on a photo of her husband and daughter.
Entry 5 - 'White Bubbles' by Irina Timofeeva and Natalia Moskaleva
This enormous quilt earns its place her from the beautiful precision of its shapes, and the blue ombré colour effect. I kept coming back to this one hanging at the Festival.
Entry 7 - 'Mightier' by Lauren Connor
I wish I'd got a better photo of this mighty, crashing wave, which again comes from Connor's Graduate Showcase. It's the many colours in the wave that I particularly love.
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