PORTRAITS & OPTICAL ILLUSIONS @ QUILTCON (Cheri)

How I wish I had a better picture of this extraordinary quilt!

"Frances," made entirely by hand, won the People's Choice award.  In addition to hand-piecing all of the portrait and hand-quilting it, the artist added exquisite embroidered detail:

Most, if not all, of the other portrait quilts at QuiltCon were optical illusions.  The most interesting aspect was the variety of shapes used to create them.

This quilt was created with triangle blocks, each of which was composed of about three to six (sometimes more) pieces.  Here is a row of those triangles:

What I didn't realize until I saw the pictures close together in my computer folder was that this quilt may have been inspired by the same stock photo:

In this case it was created with a series of photo-impressions, in various sizes:

Here are close-up and at-a-distance views of a quilt picturing Volodymyr Zelenskyy:

(I should have taken the second picture from a little greater distance, because when viewed at the proper remove, the image is quite crisp.

I particularly appreciated the sunflowers machine-quilted across the surface of the portrait.

These quilts have a presence unlike any others.  I don't remember when, but elsewhere on the blog I included a picture of a optical illusion quilt of Maya Angelou.  I swear that I felt her presence before I consciously registered that it was her picture that was the subject of an immense quilt that I was standing by, after rounding a corner at another quilt show that I attended.

This last quilt utilizes an entirely different method:

Check out the detail on this quilt, which won First Place in the Applique section:

What dedication!