Festival of Quilts: Pia Welsch

As well as the open quilt competitions at the Festival of quilts there are several exhibitions by individual quilters. This year I think my favourite of these was by German art quilter Pia Welsch. I was first attracted by this quilt on the outside of her stand.  I was blown away by the colours and patterns. Click on the photo to see a larger view.

Pia uses hand dyed and painted fabrics with a range of stitches, fabulous quilting and machine embroidered motifs to create some stunning quilts. Here are a few more:

I haven't been at all keen on computerised machine embroidery on quilts in the past but seeing some of the ways contemporary quilters, such as Pia and Linda and Laura Kemshall are using their embroidery units has made me think again. I went to the Kemshalls' lecture at the FoQ and I was really interested to hear Linda and Laura talk about scanning images and digitizing them to use on quilts. They use them in a subtle way to add embroidered images after quilting. It sounds great but the software for digitizing is really expensive - hundreds of pounds. I really can't justify that expense but I could try using free designs and those that came with my machine to give it a go. When I have some free time..................!

Pia has written a short bio with a couple of quilt pictures here and you can view more of her quilts here. I'll e looking out for more of her work in future!