Quilt Festival is over; feet rejoice

Besides being the biggest yearly convention in the city of Houston and the biggest quilt show on Earth, the Quilt Festival is awfully tough on a photo buff.  Standing next to a popular quilt was like being by the rail at the Grand Canyon.

Like most everyone else, I needed four full days to see everything properly and shop too.  I walked around all day every day until I had more blisters than I did on my first backpacking trip, and at the end of each day I was, in my stupor, greeting friends with fresh new names they'd never been called before. "Hi, Ginny!"

A lot of quilts were for sale, for a few hundred dollars up to $38,000.  That's low for a high.  Other years, quilters have asked for $50,000 and even $100,000, or so I was told at the information desk.

One of my favorites was "Cutting Down the Tall Poppies." It was a pictorial of a half-dozen brilliant multicolor poppies with tiny shadow figures trying to cut through their stems. Turns out there's an Australian custom of putting standout people back in their place, and the title is what they call it. The quilter had lots of fans among her neighbors down there. You heard more Australian accents in that corner than you would at an actors' workshop.  It was priced at $3,000.

The top prize went to another pictorial quilt showing an exhibit by an artist named Chihuly at a public garden festival.  Chihuly piled colored glass balls into small boats and set them adrift on the water there. The quilt showed one on a deep black background, and it was very pretty, but I heard a lot of complaints about it because, really, you couldn't see the workmanship. The pieces were much too small, so you couldn't see what made it a quilt. At least I couldn't.  With the ropes, you'd need binoculars to see it up close.

I had my nose three inches from the exhibits wherever the barriers let me.  No one touched them.  Quilters are all so well behaved.

Photos were another story.  SAQA, the Studio Artists Quilters Association, barred photography of its members' quilts. They'd like to make money from their work, but is someone going to go and make kitsch from their ideas?  Not likely. You'd have to be too good at manipulating cheesecloth or painting fabric to reproduce them.

Some of the SAQA quilts that were reproducible, though, would make great quilt patterns.  Flight Deck, showing skateboarders with their arms raised like birds taking off, was a standout.  A couple of quilts were throwbacks to a brassy style that showed grotesqueries representing how the quilter saw the world. Some were a lot like paintings. They were paintings.

Are visitors going to print and post these photos? Would that really be such a bad thing, to bring the artist a bit of publicity?

Other quilts in the show were barred from photography too, largely the ones from a single South Korean artist and some others in that area of the exhibits.  In any case, the quilt guardians just about tackled anyone who took a photo, and then stood there waiting while the embarrassed photographer deleted it.  I actually saw a guardian run across the wide walkway that ran down the exhibit hall shouting "Ma'am!  Ma'am!  You can't take photos there!" so that everyone turned around and looked.

Not that I'd trim those tall poppies of SAQA, but the photo thing did seem a bit giddy.