St. Jean de Luz, Quilt en Sud.

Every two years a patchwork and textile art show is held in St. Jean de Luz, a beautiful old harbor city at the Atlantic coast between Spain and Biarritz. It was sunny but not to hot, so it was a great pleasure to walk from show to show.

It was the 8th Biennale d’Art textile et de Patchwork, as it was named in French. The French Fancy Flowers together with the PIM (Patchwork in Marciac) decided to organize a bus trip to St. Jean to visit the shows. At seven o’clock the trip started and we arrived at half past ten in St. Jean. The sun was shining and we bought passes for all the shows and the group broke into parts and everybody went where they wanted to go.

We started at the American-collection of monsieur Jacques Légeret. The quilts were hanging in a former old church, completely empty of church inventory and now the wall were hanged with beautiful colored traditional quilts of the Amish and Mennonites, old and contemporary.

A detail photo of the quilt above, to show the simple horizontal and vertical quilting stitches to give the quilt another relief.

After this first visit we shared that the day cannot be wrong, because these quilts were absolutely toppers!  Loes and me bought even a quillow! A pillow that can be changed in a simple way in a quilt with a sac to warm your feet.

We walked in the sunshine to the next exhibition at the south part of the harbor. We visited there also an old church with a rich interior, a beautiful pulpit  and an Holy Mary crowned by angels.

The Spanish quilts in the’ Salle St. Michel’ were very colourful. A vase with appliqué flowers was very beautifully quilted.

I guess that Gustaf Klimt was the inspiration for this quilt. Beautiful diverse squares in bright colours. It is also a topper! We have only visited two exhibition halls and there were still twelve others to go… Happily some we did not like, so we went very fast through the hall.

The photo above is from the work of Hélène Soubern. Very interesting: she folded textile and put it in plexiglass. One object is really nice to see, but there were lots of it and all the same, all the same colours or more or less in the same tone. I thought it boring.

In a beautiful building we saw work of Liz Jones. She beautifully quilted the design of the fabrics.

We admired more the ceiling of the room,

which was painted with flowers and in the middle an angel.

Even the entree of this building was wonderful.

It has an old oaken staircase and nice beams

The corridor has a splendid tiled floor.

It looks on the photo like patchwork, but they are tiles.

In another building we saw the concours with the theme:

chocolate, chocolate. The public could vote for the public’s prize. It was very difficult, because I really have not seen a winning quilt or object. I voted for the quilted tablets of chocolate, because it was various and technically nice.

In this building there was also embroidery to see and that was fantastic!

I like the designs of Marie Thérèse Saint Aubin very much and she was there with a lot of her oeuvre.

I show only one piece of her embroidery here:

In a nice beachbuilding showed Marianne Cresson her artwork of textile.

Beautiful objects.

In the same building hang some work of a man:

Pascal Jaouen. Impressing beautiful and fine embroidery.

On the beach rackets with faces made of textile were placed
They were made by school children. It was surprising and looked great.

We had just half an hour to see two more exhibitions,

because the bus waited at 17H00 to bring us back to the Gers. One building

was not big and there were a few nice pieces of quilt art, inspired on boats.

At the last exhibition we visited,we were flabbergasted of admiration. Inge Mardal and Steen Hougs, a couple from Denmark worked together to create stunning quilts. It looks like realistic painting. He paints colours on the fabric, she made applications and does the machine quilting.

The quilts are big and closely quilted with a machine, but the stitches are used like very small touches of a brush. Wonderful!

                                                                                                          This is quilted fabric. Amazing!

Really it looks like a photo, but it is quilted fabric. On the detail photo you can see the application with the fine quilting.

We had no time to see the embroidery from Laghmani and Afghanistan where women embroidered a piece and European women created a quilt around the embroidery. We missed it.

This day was such a success, we want to go next time again! But next time in 2013 I like to make a reservation for a few nights in an hotel so we can see every thing a little bit more quiet and relaxed. I look already forward to that event.

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