Film Overview

Drawing over 50,000 visitors to Houston’s George R. Brown Convention Center each fall, the International Quilt Festival fills an area equal to 11 football fields to offer the largest quilting event in the United States. In Stitched, director Jenalia Moreno follows
three renowned quilters—Hollis Chatelain, Caryl Bryer Fallert, and Randall Cook—as they prepare their work for the 2010 competition, known as one of the most prestigious in the field.
Quilting stands as one of the most popular crafts in the nation—with more than 21 million quilters in the U.S. alone—ranging from hobbyists to textiles artists whose work hangs on gallery walls. Throughout the centuries, American quilt makers maintained the purity of their craft by way of
relatively simple rules: careful assembly by hand, an even balance of color, and a delicate layering of soft material.
However, with an explosion of interest in traditional American crafts starting in the 1960s, quilt making witnessed a dynamic evolution of forms. While colonial flags and family trees once dominated the quilting world, recent winning works from the International Quilt Festival incorporate
paint, photography, and themes as varied as world hunger and the effects of global warming.
Stitched explores the contemporary quilting scene through the experiences of innovators who push the art form into new terrain.
“There’s this idea that it’s kind of like cheating to paint a quilt,” explains Hollis Chatelain, an award-winner whose painted quilts won best of show at the Houston festival in both 2004 and 2007. One of the film’s three central figures, Chatelain is known as one of the quilting scene’s “superstar” instructors, passing down a new tradition of quilt making that opens the field to techniques drawn from the fine arts.
Caryl Bryer Fallert, another star of Stitched, is widely recognized as the first quilter to win a major award with a machine-made quilt. A mentor to Hollis Chatelain, Fallert worked as a painter until inspired to start quilting after purchasing a farm from a quilt maker. She currently maintains a renowned studio and workshop in Paducah, Kentucky that encourages quilters to develop his or her
own personal style rather than simply follow quilting tradition.
“I think the piece that I’m currently working on is my best piece so far,” Randall Cook mentions in an interview about his current festival entry. A former mentee of Hollis Chatelain, Cook sparked controversy at the International Quilt Festival with his quilted depictions of male nudes. In spite of
the respect he garnered in recent years, Cook has yet to secure a best in show prize.
Can one of these artists win the 2010 Best of Show, a $10,000 prize and instant fame in the quilting world.