workshops, webinars, and Quiltcon—an annual modern quilting conference and convention. The founding Modern Quilt Guild formed in October 2009 in Los Angeles. QuiltCon features a quilt show with 400+ quilts, quilt vendors, lectures, and quilting workshops and classes. The first QuiltCon was February 21–24, 2013 in Austin, TX. QuiltCon 2020 will be held in Austin, Texas, February 20–23, 2020 and will feature 400 juried modern quilts from quilters around the world. Quilting in fashion and design Unusual quilting designs have increasingly become popular as decorative textiles. As industrial sewing technology has become more precise and flexible, quilting using exotic fabrics and embroidery began to appear in home furnishings in the early 21st century. Quilt blocks The quilt block is traditionally a sub-unit composed of several pieces of fabric sewn together. The quilt blocks are repeated, or sometimes alternated with plain blocks, to form the overall design of a quilt. Barbara Brackman has documented over 4000 different quilt block patterns from the early 1830s to the 1970s in the Encyclopedia Of Pieced Quilt Patterns. Some of the simpler designs for quilt blocks include the Nine-Patch, Shoo Fly, Churn Dash, and the Prairie Queen. Most geometric quilt block designs fit into a "grid", which is the number of squares a pattern block is divided into. The five categories into which most square patterns fall are Four Patch, Nine Patch, Five-Patch, Seven-Patch, and Eight-Pointed Star. Each block can be subdivided into multiples: a Four-Patch can be constructed of 16 or 64 squares, for example. A simple Nine Patch is made by sewing five patterned or dark pieces (patches) to four light square pieces in alternating order. These nine sewn squares make one block. The Shoo Fly varies from this Nine Patch by dividing each of the four corner pieces into a light and dark triangle. Another variation develops when one square piece is divided into two equal rectangles in the basic Nine Patch design. The Churn Dash block combines the triangles and rectangle to expand the Nine Patch. The Prairie Queen block combines two large scale triangles in the corner section with the middle section using four squares. The center piece is one full size square. Each of the nine sections does have the same overall measurement and fits together. The number of patterns possible by subdividing Four-, Five-, Seven-, Nine-Patches and Eight-Pointed Stars and using triangles instead of squares in the small