When you think of quilts, you might think of patterns, geometric shapes, and being cozy and warm. You probably don’t think of shiny lamé fabric, text, and 3-D materials that hang on a wall and tell a story.

But you’ll find such items on the quilts in the Breaking Traditions traveling quilt show this month in Saline. The show features art quilts created by 84 artists from all over the world, including one by Saline art quilter Kat Campau. The show is on display at the Saline District Library for the month of October.

Each show has a theme, and travels for a year around the state. The 2009 show, which was on display at Two Twelve Arts Center in September, was themed “What Home Means to Me.”

Campau's quilt portrays a dog running up to a red brick home. The dog is her family pet, and he’s running up to her mother’s home. She said her family accidentally ended up owning a dog who was rescued from a shelter.

“I was picturing him finding a home of his own. My mother had just moved out of her home and gone into an assisted living place and her home was on my mind. So just thinking about her house and my little dog kind of worked its way together on my quilt,” she said.

Campau used several different fabrics to create a textured, 3-D story on her quilt.

“I used fabrics that were about the same color as my mother’s house. I did a lot of free motion quilting on them to resemble the brick siding on her house. I put corduroy for the shutters, just to get the texture,” Campau said. “On some of the quilts (in the show) I noticed people have used velvet and sheer fabrics and shiny lamé and all kinds of gorgeous, gorgeous things.”

This is perhaps her favorite part about art quilting. “People use all different kinds of materials and techniques in their quilts. Some of them are so exquisite. You really have to stand there and look for a long time and see all of the details the artists have put into them,” Campau said.

At Two Twelve Arts Center, Special Events Coordinator Gaines Collins said the same thing.

“This one, most people don’t like it that much,” Collins said, looking at a teal square with green stitched loops. “But if you look really closely, there’s all these yoga positions.” Four different yoga poses are stitched into the fabric. The artist included the words “I feel at home in my own skin” along the edges.

Another quilt that caught Collins’ eye was one that portrayed a seascape. Made from ripped pieces of layered fabric, it looks like an impressionist painting.

Collins said the art quilt exhibit, in its second year at the arts center, is her favorite one the center hosts. “Usually we have one or two people in the exhibit, and it’s just all their work. This is so many different people,” she said. “And each piece is so different. And you can always find something new when you’re looking at it.”

The exhibit, organized by Lynn Krawczyk of Plymouth, debuted five years ago at the American Sewing Expo. For the past two years, Krawczyk has used the show to benefit a different charity each year. The majority of the $15 entrance fee from each artist benefits the charity, and the rest of the fee pays for a prize for the favorite quilt. The 2009 show benefited an animal shelter in Tennessee.

Artists have sent their quilts from as far away as the United Kingdom, New Zealand and Israel. This year’s favorite quilt was created by an artist in Hawaii. Krawzyck attracts submissions by a large e-mail list of art quilters that she’s compiled over the years. Krawzyck, estimated half of the quilters are from Michigan.

Krawczyk said the purpose of making an art quilt is different from that of making a traditional quilt.

“Traditional quilts were made for functionality. They were made to keep you warm, and from whatever fabrics you had. It was very utilitarian and it was very functional,” she said. “Art quilts have crossed over into the art realm and removed the need for them to be functional.”

The 2009 Breaking Traditions quilt show finishes its tour in October. The 2010 exhibit, themed “In My Words,” benefits Autism Speaks, an organization that promotes research on autism. The exhibit debuted at the American Sewing Expo in Novi on Sept. 24-26 and then will be exhibited around the state.

Tara Cavanaugh is a freelancer reporter for AnnArbor.com. To read more news from Saline, visit our Saline page. To reach the news desk, call 734-623-2530.