Tuesday 19 April 2011

Meet Two Quilters: Christine Porter and Susan Denton

Happy 2nd Blogiversary to me!  I'll be drawing the winner of my giveaway tomorrow so you have time to enter if you haven't already.  Click back to the original giveaway post here, or enter at the end of this post full of yumminess.  Good luck, now sit back and enjoy some wonderful quilts.
Two of the lectures I attended at the Quilters' Guild conference last weekend were particularly inspiring.  Christine Porter (who will probably be familiar with from The Quilt Show spoke on tessellations and patterns in pavements and illustrated her talk with some pictures of stunning tiled floors in cathedrals here in England and others in Italy.  She has published a book about these, "Viva Venezia"  She had two of her quilts with her so that we could get a closer look.  This lovely one of irises was criticised by the quilt police for focussing too much on green!
This is her floor tiles sampler quilt, with a close-up of one of the blocks, isn't it wonderful?

The work of the other quilter who I found especially inspiring was already known to me as I had seen some of Susan Denton's work at Festival of Quilts last year.  A self-taught quilter, Susan obviously enjoys the process of combining colour, fabric and shape.  She has developed a lot of bargello style pieces, such as Musk Melons From Samarkand below and has now moved into wonderful landscape quilts with large hand quilting adorning them.  It was a delight to listen to her describe her quilting journey, closely related to her life journey and to her travels.  Oreiginally from Australia, she lives in beautiful Penwith in Cornwall and much of her current work is inspired by the landscape there.  I'll let the quilts speak for themselves:
Towednack Treasure
and detail

Treasure


Burren
and detail

Musk Melons From Samarkand

Green, Greener, Greenest
and details


Auvergne Potager
and detail

 St Ives Harbour 2
and details





I hope you enjoyed all those wonderful quilts and that your computer coped with this photo heavy post.  Don't forget to enter my 2nd blogiversary giveaway:

The dress code at the QGBI Gala Dinner was black and white.  
What is your favourite combination of colours and why?

To see what you can win, click back to the original giveaway post here.  Good luck. 

7 comments:

  1. Love the floor tile sampler and the Musk Melons. On the other hand - a self-taught quilter can has a much free-er reign to be creative than those restricted by convention and learning.
    Teresa x

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  2. Geeze Laweeze! You sure showed some beauties! Love the colors, and the quilting - you can just see the wind in the sky with clouds. You take some really great pictures, too. It's not easy to get pics of the quilting. Good job!

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  3. How dare they criticize that gorgeous iris quilt for being too green. Isn't that what you want in a garden, and I think it was accomplished very well with a variety of different greens - like in nature. Some people are just so jealous of a beautiful thing that they are not capable of making themselves, so they have to belittle it.(Sorry to make a second comment, but I forgot how angry I was with the quilt police!)

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  4. Hi Lis, fancy reading this on FB! Congratulations on your second year of blogging woo hoo! I hope I can win something for Easter haha! Happy Easter my friend - Hugs Nat

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  5. Wow! That St Ives quilt is stunning! Thank you so much for blogging about the AGM I wasn't able to go. I first saw Susan Denton's work at FOQ too and I was fascinated by it. It's been great to see your photos. Congratulations on your blogversary belatedly.

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  6. These are amazing--I'm inspired! Thanks for sharing such great photos of these wonderful quilts.

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  7. Sorry I missed your party, I've been in a funk the past several months...lol! I look forward to your 3rd year!!!

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I really appreciate your lovely comments, ideas and opinions, they make my day. Thank you for visiting Piece'n'Peace,
hugs, Lis x