The month of February was quilt crazy!  The East Bay Modern Quilt Guild’s second annual show, Stitch Modern, was a huge success.  We hung the show again in the lovely Piedmont Center for the Arts and had so many wonderful quilts that we almost ran out of wall space!

We started the month-long show with a big opening night party and everyone was invited.  The food was almost as amazing as the quilts!

In conjunction with the show, the guild decided to host some quilt-related events.  We began with a lecture and trunk show by the artist, Sherri Lynn Wood.  She spoke about her work with textiles and her method of improvisational quilting.  Her talk was inspirational and thought-provoking and her presentation was a gorgeous riot of color.  I know that quite a few of us left with new ideas about how to approach our own projects.

Our next event was a Fabric and Textile Panel Discussion with Pati Fried, Jennifer Moore, Sandy Klop, Carol Van Zandt, and Ellen Heck and moderated by Kim Andersson.  It was such a success that we almost ran out of space in the gallery to seat everyone!   It was a great honor having these women come and share their knowledge and experience.  We all learned so much about the design process and some of us even won fabric from the designers!  It was a great afternoon!

The following afternoon, we were back in the gallery for Family Day.  Kids and grown-ups alike stopped by to play with fabric, glitter and glue to make Valentine’s Day cards.  The kids that couldn’t sit still long enough to make a card ran about the gallery on a quilt scavenger hunt.

The next event was a lecture by Kristine Vejar about her work in India studying the appliqué quilts of a nomadic group called Rabari.  She showed us many amazing pictures from her time there and shared her even more amazing Rabari textile collection.  Wow.  The attention to detail in the hand-work is unbelievable.  I can’t wait to take her Rabari appliqué class and give it a try!

Our final event was to host our monthly Sew Saturday in the gallery.  (In case you want to attend in the future, we usually have these meetings at the North Berkeley Public Library.  Check our events listing for specific details!)

If you missed Stitch Modern at the Piedmont Center for the Arts, you can still catch it on March 9 and 10th at the SF Quilt Guild’s annual show at the Concourse Exhibition Center in San Francisco.  If you miss it there, you can see what you missed over on the Stitch Modern Flickr group!

Thank you so much to all of the speakers, volunteers, and of course, the makers who all helped to make Stitch Modern 2013 such a spectacular quilt show!

*Most of the photos shown above were taken by Joel Ignacio. Thank you, Joel!