Marie has titled this year’s entry “A Touch of Glass”. It contains 12 different designs with appliquéd paperweight patterns on a deeply quilted background with a garland of ivy around the border. To give the quilt a closer connection to glass, she sewed tiny glass beads around each paperweight design. The paperweight collector viewing the piece may recognize some of the paperweights Marie used! And some of the paperweight artists may want to copy some of Marie's other designs! It is a masterpiece combining ingenuity and extreme talent, and must be seen to fully be appreciated. Marie has elevated her quilts into a fabric art form.
A longtime close friend of the Elders, Marie has been quilting for 20 years, and now specializes in miniature quilts, using appliqué techniques. Miniature quilts are only 24 X 20 inches in size, and are considered particularly challenging because they contain the same construction and dedication as a full size quilt, but in miniature. Nancy O’Bryant, one of the founders of the International Quilt Association said, “A miniature quilt must still come across to the viewer as a quilt. These are small masterpieces. They must have sharp corners, well-executed designs and a pleasing coordination of colors. Marie has done wonderfully well in accomplishing this.”
The International Quilt Festival is held in Houston each year and has over 53,000 visitors in just four days. This year, the exhibit was from October 31-November 3, 2002. The exhibit shows 1,500 quilts, and offered prizes of $72,500 in juried competition. It is truly an international show, and one of the most competitive. Even having a quilt accepted for the competition is an honor! In this competition, Marie has won first, second, third, and honorable mention awards in the past four years. Unfortunately, this year Marie’s entry did not win an award, perhaps because the paperweight format was not understood by the judges.
Marie has won other awards, including the Best of Show in the international “Miniatures from the Heart” contest sponsored by Miniature Quilts magazine.
She says, “I love the beginning and the ending. I look through books a lot to see a pattern I like. Then I find just the right fabric. It is the actual stitching of the little pieces on for each little flower that takes the time.”
This represents a very successful application of using the paperweight format in design, as well as the recognition of the paperweight as an art form and the use of this form in other artistic media.
Most paperweight images courtesy L. H. Selman
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