The winning quilt at this year’s International Quilt Festival is a mere 17 inches tall and 18 inches wide, but it left judges breathless in their descriptions of its stitched beauty. Citing its unusual craftsmanship, they called it “truly remarkable” and “beyond a work of art.”

The quilt, titled “Still Life” and created by Chen Jing of Beijing, China, was made using both manually controlled and free-motion quilting methods, achieving a paint-like effect with stitching, embroidery, and appliqué. The stitching is so intricate that the composition, a teapot, ginger jar, and bowl of oranges, appear almost real inside their quilted frame. Flip it over and its back side is as tidy as the front, revealing hidden images of two cat faces.

Attendees will be able to view it October 31 to November 3 at the George R. Brown Convention Center in downtown Houston, at what is today the largest quilt show, sale, and school in the world.

Quilts Inc. founder and CEO Karey Bresenhan likely never imagined she’d someday get an entry from China or any other far-away country, let alone one with such detail, when the International Quilt Festival launched 50 years ago. At the time, fifth-generation Texas quilter Bresenhan was a young bride working as a teacher and writer to put her husband through his master’s degree. She was civic-minded, so in the early ’70s, she ran for a seat in the Texas legislature.

She lost the election, but wanted to repay friends and family who’d funded her campaign, so she and her mother-in-law opened an antique shop in the Memorial area called Great Expectations with family quilts hanging on the walls. For their store’s one-year anniversary, they invited a pair of traveling quilt dealers to display and sell their wares, hoping they could get 200 people to attend.

Some 2,000 attended, the dealers nearly sold out, and Bresenhan dubbed her event a success.

In the years following, the festival grew and moved to various venues, finally ending up at the George R. Brown Convention Center, where today it uses space on all three floors. Quilt entries come in from all over the world for the judged show, as do quilters participating in special exhibits. At one time visitors topped 55,000, but post-COVID, the crowd has leveled off at about 35,000 visitors from 30 countries.

Over the years, manufacturers have become part of the lineup for an accompanying market and quilt shop, where retailers come to see the latest fabrics, thread, gadgets, and sewing machines. Quilters and others shop the market, often stocking up for their next years’ quilting materials.

Nearly 300 classes keep quilters busy learning everything from beginner block quilts to more advanced techniques that manipulate fabric and thread into ingenious forms, elevating skills among an ever-growing audience.

Quilts Inc. doesn’t have recent economic impact studies to quantify the show’s effect on our local economy, but plenty of hotels and restaurants fill up with out-of-towners here for the event.

“The general public perception is still that quilts are mostly old-timey geometric shapes,” says Bob Ruggiero, Quilts Inc.’s vice president of communications. “The number one thing we hear from nonquilters is, ‘wow, that’s a quilt?’ We premiere a lot of exhibits in Houston that then go on to other shows or art museums.”

In addition to winners of the juried show, some exhibits are sponsored by industry manufacturers, such as Cherrywood Fabrics, which for 10 years has sponsored a quilt contest with a specific challenge, and the top quilts are shown together at the festival. This year’s challenge is poppies and the color palette is filled with reds and oranges. Other exhibits are put together by quilters simply interested in a topic. They could be personal or topical, touching on the COVID pandemic, politics (without citing party names or any elected officials), women’s suffrage, and Black history.

Two women have done the nearly unthinkable: They won the top prize, Best in Show, three times each.

Cynthia England lived most of her life in the Houston area and recently moved with her husband to a home in Canyon Lake, Texas. While at one time she called herself a quilter, her skill with fabric and thread has elevated her to fiber artist, pattern designer, and author. She won Houston’s Best in Show in 1993, 2000, and 2016.

England developed a quilting technique called “picture piecing,” which uses paper and straight seams for more detailed imagery. She says it’s a forgiving method that allows you to make mistakes and keep on going. She has developed patterns based on it and has traveled the world teaching it to others.

She studied graphic design at the Art Institute of Houston, training that helps her navigate pattern layout and design, and she also enjoys doing stained glass, which shows in her quilt work. Some 11 of her quilts are now in an exhibit at the National Quilt Museum in Paducah, Kentucky, and her first award-winning quilt was named one of the best quilts of the twentieth century.

“The first time I went to the Houston show, I didn’t know they had anything like that. I thought quilting was using leftover scraps, that you don’t even buy anything. That show opened my eyes to the fact that it’s an art form, not just a utilitarian thing with people making bedding to stay warm,” England says. “Karey [Bresenhan] is a very savvy businesswoman. Her group has made quilting more valuable as an art form and the business side of it gave it an economic base. It’s real smart the way they did it.”

Janet Stone of Overland Park, Kansas, won Best in Show in 2015, 2017, and 2019, as well as many other awards, including one of this year’s top prizes, the eQuilter.com Master Award for Machine Artistry, plus $5,000 for her alphabet quilt, “Butterflies, Bees & AlphabeTrees.”

Stone has quilted off and on since the 1980s, starting and abandoning the hobby a couple of times before buying a nice sewing machine in 2006 and sticking with it. She doesn’t teach classes, lecture, or design patterns—she’s strictly a show quilter and she quilts to win.

She primarily uses fusible raw-edge appliqué with a blanket stitch, one of the most common methods of quilting, but she does it with exquisite beauty. Stone said that she’d always done needlework and enjoyed cross-stitching alphabet samplers, and that shows in her quilts, which resemble very large-scale samplers. She planned to make 26 alphabet quilts and finished her last one this year.

“[The Houston show] has always been prestigious. If you got into the show, it was a big deal, and if you got a prize it was the icing on the cake,” Stone says, noting that prize money paid for new air-conditioning and new windows in her home. “The first show I got in, I got a prize and I was hooked on Houston.”