Kansas City Regional Quilt Festival puts a modern take on a vintage art form

We were giggling like a bunch of schoolgirls, the festival organizers and I, as we stood before Yu Chang’s “Accept or Reject” sculpture at the Overland Park Arboretum one morning.

We had carefully draped one of Mary Langenberg’s quilts over the bare breasts of the controversial work of art so Star photographer John Sleezer could take a wholesome picture of the quilt. A corner of the quilt covered the statue’s bare nether regions.

Langenberg, of Overland Park, had remembered just a minute before that the handmade coverlet was in the bottom of her tote bag.

It was perfect: A quilt called “Texting,” comprising blocks emblazoned with LOL, OMG, TTYL and other messaging acronyms, finding its way to the “sexting” statue. It was also symbolic of just how far the quaint craft of piecing together fabric has evolved over the years.

Today’s quilting isn’t your grandma’s quilting. That fact will be on display Friday through June 21 at the first Kansas City Regional Quilt Festival at the Overland Park Convention Center.

The festival, which organizers hope will become a biannual event, will feature 700 quilts from across the country, including 150 designs created from the book “Inspired by the Beatles: An Art Quilt Challenge,” the 18 best from the Modern Quilt Guild’s QuiltCon 2015 and 15 creations from Kansas City Star quilt patterns.

Fifteen regional quilt guilds have come together to host the event. “A couple of years ago we realized that every guild was having their own show, and we got together and decided to put on one big, fantastic show,” said Lynn Droege, co-chair of the event.

In addition to quilts, the festival will include more than 30 workshops and lectures and more than 100 vendor booths.

The shows go far beyond the traditional patchwork and paper-pieced quilts from the early 20th century and before.

Today, other popular forms of quilting include art quilts, which are often free-form designs and illustrations created by the quilter, and modern quilts, which encompass different styles and aesthetics but always include, according to the Modern Quilt Guild website, a mix of highly contrasting and bold colors, graphic areas of solid color, improvisational piecing, minimalism, expansive negative space and alternate grid work.

Some quilts are embellished with painted images, embroidery, metallic threads, felt, fringy yarn, crystals, sequins and buttons. They range in size from single blocks for displaying to king-size bed covers.

“When you talk about traditional quilting, in the good old days it was for bedding,” said Janette Sheldon, co-chair of the quilt fest. “Now you see a whole lot of wall quilts that are smaller in size.”

Sheldon’s colorful quilt shown covering Lu Zengkang’s Michael Jackson sculpture at the arboretum is a paper-pieced quilt created from a New York Beauty pattern.

“I took a class in paper piecing and that was the pattern. I misunderstood the instructor and instead of making one block a week, I did it all in three days. It was my very first quilt,” Sheldon said.

You could call it a modern quilt using a traditional technique, she said.

Quilting has grown in recent years, and its demographics have changed dramatically. In 2014, a Quilting in America survey found that more than 16 million quilters in the United States spend $3.76 billion a year on supplies and machinery.

The survey also found that the most dedicated quilters, those who spend more than $500 a year on the craft, are female, about 64, well-educated (79 percent attended college) and have a household income over $100,000. On average, she owns about $13,000 worth of tools and supplies and always has a stash of fabrics worth about $6,000 that she keeps in a dedicated room or studio.

“I know women who hide fabric in the trunks of their cars and sneak it into their house so their husbands don’t see it,” Droege said.

And it isn’t just boomers who are quilting. Young people like it too, which bodes well for the future.

“You see a lot of students quilting now at the Kansas City Art Institute and the Johnson County Community College textile arts programs. And 4-H clubs are still quite active in quilting,” Droege said.

A lot of today’s quilters don’t actually quilt: They piece together the top layer and then hire someone else to do the sandwiching.

And business is steady enough that, a couple of years ago, Stephanie Dodson of Olathe took the leap and invested several thousand dollars in a hand-guided long-arm quilting machine and opened Summerwind Studio. It stitches together the quilt layers in patterns. There are long-arm machines with computerized stitching patterns, Dodson noted, that cost up to $35,000.

She and her fellow organizers aren’t putting on the festival for profit, she said. “We are doing it because we want to share our love of quilting.”

Quilters still gather for quilting bees (with names like Prince’s Harem, Quilty Girls and Thread Heads) and participate in challenges, which require them to make a quilt with a specific theme or elements. A lot of them are sponsored by fabric companies or quilt shops to promote use of their products.

Then there are round robins, in which several quilters make a block for the center of a quilt following guidelines for size, color and theme. The pieced-together blocks are then passed to a member of the group, who adds a border then passes it on to another member to create a second border, and so on.

That’s how Sheldon got started. She had been teaching sewing to 4-H clubs and was a machine knitter and spinner when she agreed to do a round robin 18 years ago. She was hooked instantly and took the class where she made the quilt in one week.

“People like to unplug from technology, and quilting allows them to step away from it and work with their hands,” Dodson said.

“If our grandmas did it for practical purposes,” Droege added, “we do it for relaxation and recreation.”

This story was originally published June 12, 2015 at 4:00 AM with the headline "Kansas City Regional Quilt Festival puts a modern take on a vintage art form."