Leave peeping - and quilt seeing

No, the leaves weren't this bright. But they were lovely Thursday when I went with the Bayberry guild to see the New England Quilt Show in Manchester, VT.  North of Boston the leaves were not torn from the trees by Hurricane Sandy's winds. There were displays of red and yellow that even this relatively unusual fall hasn't produced -- before the storm -- here on Cape Cod. 

The trip was a work out for my senses.  Besides the leaves the bus was one of the noisiest places I've been in ages.  40+ women all vibrantly glad to get away after three days of storm worry and chattering like a hen house when the fox has just sneaked in. Plus a bus driver who never stopped talking and he had a booming baritone as the bass cleft to all the sopranos. 

The show was pretty -- that was the overwhelming feeling.  Pretty which is both complimentary and derogatory.  Lots of flowers and beautiful colors.  This quilt was decidedly an exception.  Like a blast of a heat gun in the lukewarm room.  I love these complex red squares with the blacks and grays, like charred bits of log in the fireplace.  (I've put a few other exceptional quilts on my other blog.)
I've been a private kind of quilting world critic, watching trends, deploring some of them, enjoying others.  Each part of the country has it's own gestalt in quilting as it everything else. But the omnipresent media, quilt books, quilting blogs and the increasing number of big regional shows, tend to homogenize new trends and people's tastes. So, too much is pretty, too much is over decorated, over quilted.  Not many people make bold statements like this quilter.  I look and mutter to myself; no outlet exists for a quilting trend watcher.  No outlet except, of course, this, my own blog.

Apologies for not getting the quilter's name.  She deserves that attention.