Gee's Bend Quilts

Luckily my friend Marion emailed me to tell me that the quilts of Gee's Bend were making an appearance in a Canadian city that would be within driving distance of my house. I was quite interested to see the quilts and convinced my husband that it would be a nice outing for me us, and he agreed to take me! Having heard about these quilts for many years, I was happy to be able to see some of these quilts and even more delighted that we were permitted to take photographs. (There are few things that annoy me as much as not being allowed to take photos at a quilt show...I understand all the copyright issues, but it still really annoys the photographer part of me!)
So I won't show the quilts in this blog post because I don't have permission to do that and I am too scared of the copyright police, but you can see about 80,000 photos if you google Gee's Bend quilt images.
I thought I might be able to get away with showing a couple of the  close up photos that I took to show why I love these quilts so much...

1) the riotous (exuberant, lush, luxuriant, profuse) use of colour in many of the quilts...








2) amazing, free form hand quilting....

3) hand quilting through denim and corduroy...








4) complete disregard for matching seams and no worrying about missing points...




5) use of all the little scrappy bits...

I was totally inspired to not worry so much about the things that I have been told make a quilt "show worthy", and instead to focus on the things that make a quilt meaningful.  I was totally pumped to rush home and do some hand quilting...and to remember that the stitches don't have to be tiny or perfect to give great texture on a quilt.

But, it's been about a month since I pin basted this quilt for machine quilting, so I thought I better get to work on that one!