Quilting Adventures ~ The Friendly Store for Everyone Who Creates With Fabric!

We’re really tired. So tired, in fact, that we’re missing our classes this morning so that we could sleep in.

We walked through a lot of the quilts yesterday, took a break from shopping. You cannot begin to imagine the number of truly breathtaking quilts here, one row after the next! As much as I’d love to share pictures of them here, it would be a copyright violation to do so – a subject that I feel very strongly about. However, I can share pictures of quilts that I do have permission from the artist. So here are pictures of Phoebe standing in for ME:

Phoebe’s holding a copy of the Market Shopping Guide, where my Mariner’s Lone Compass Star appears on page 83 (I had know idea until I saw it in there myself!). She’s been showing EVERYONE we know here (a bit to my embarassment) the photo.

Here’s another photo – one of our customers, Cindy Lyles, has a quilt in the Hoffman Challege exhibit here, so Phoebe’s standing in for Cindy. As we were walking around, Phoebe saw this quilt from a distance, and said, “Ooooh! Look at this one! Wait – it’s Cindy’s!!!!”

It’s fun walking around Market seeing all sorts of famous people walking around just like the rest of us. Jinny Beyer, Alex Anderson, Kaffe Fassett – they’re all here. There’s a few famous people we actually know, too, and we were happy to run into them yesterday – Luana Rubin from eQuilter (also a designer for Kaufman fabrics), and Mark Lipinski, editor of Quilters Home magazine.

Time to get our day started. We have more shopping to do today, and then our first “Festival” class is tonight.

Well, we made it! It has been an exhausting day so far. We landed in Houston after flying through some major thunderstorms on Thursday. They had 30 airplanes sitting on the runway, waiting to take off because the weather was so bad.

On to the more important stuff…..

We bought fabric! We visited our Michael Miller, Kaufman, Free Spirit, and Batik Textiles reps today! From Michael Miller we got 18 out of the 32 new colors of Fairy Frost and a new collection called Carnival Bloom. It has the trendy color combinations for pink, turquoise, chocolate brown. From Kaufman we ordered 11 pieces from their Silhouette group, which includes pink, green, black, and white prints. We bought 6 pieces from the Dogs Spotted Everywhere group, which coordinates with our current line Cats on the Loose. We discovered one of their new products called Nu-Suede which is similar to ultra-suede, but it costs less and is made from microfiber polyester. From Free Spirit we ordered two new lines. Fresh Cut by Heather Bailey and Follow Your Imagination by Prints Charming. From Batik Textiles we ordered 25 new batiks, including 15 sunprints! Many of these fabrics are so new, they aren’t even on the fabric companies’ web site yet.

Many of you have never been to Quilt Market, or even Quilt Festival. It is hard to describe the large amount of quilts, fabric, notions, etc, that are in this building. I took 5 pictures and pieced them together to make a panoramic view of the convention center. To give you an idea of scale, it’s about 5 football fields long, and one football field wide. There are 23 rows of vendors, and 18 rows of quilts. And this is just the trade show!!!!

Here’s a close up of the hallway down the right side.

One of our teachers Laura Blanchard is here, working with Red Rooster Fabrics. We stopped by their booth to see all of the wonderful samples she had made from their fabric. We’ve run into her numerous times, and had dinner with her last night. Here are some of the quilts she did.

I’m sure that if you’ve been in the shop within the last year, you know our employees Betty and Nina. Betty made all of the chair covers for Red Roosters booth(each one averages 5 hours to make) and Nina made some samples for Red Rooster as well(inluding the PJs two pictues up). Here are the pictures of their wonderful work!

I’m sorry the pictures aren’t the greatest!

Read more about this quilt challenge here!

I’m very bad about remembering to take pictures – not a good thing. Luckily, one of my customers who brought her son in to sew a block in honor of his grandmother remembered her camera and sent me some photos! Kevin was our youngest participant on Quilt Pink Day, and here’s a picture of him (with his dad) working on his block, and then a photo of the finished block: