I’m tired and stiff today from wandering around all day yesterday and about 5 hours on the road. Because I have talked so much about this show in the last few posts, I felt it only fair to report on it. It was a good show with lots of people and vendors. All kinds of fun things to look at. My first purchase was one fat quarter. Just in case your monitor is telling you something else, it is orange. I’m planning to use it for the legs on the applique chickens I was talking about a few days ago. I wandered through many more booths without buying anything. At 12:30 my mom and I sat through a free stage presentation by Luveta of The Junk Jeans People. She comes up with very interesting ideas. The jacket she wore was from one of her patterns (Expo Jacket) and I seriously considered buy it. However, all day the question kept running through my head — “Will I really use/make this?” The pattern stayed there.
I had time to walk fairly quickly down one aisle of vendors before my next class which was with Jenny and Simon Haskins. I knew this class would be worth the $4 just to listen to those wonderful Aussie accents. It was worth it for other reasons as well. Their samples were drop dead gorgeous. One of Jenny’s lines was also worth the money. She said American’s don’t like making decisions/choices. American was founded by the Puritan Fathers who had many rules and we want to follow rules. She said the Aussies don’t have that problem, their country was founded on convicts and they had already broken all the rules! She breaks the rules beautifully with her work.
Now I had about an hour and 15 minutes to walk more vendors. Just after I started in my sister called on my cell phone and asked where I was. She and my mom had gone to the car and eaten lunch while I was in class. I was teasing her when we left yesterday morning about taking more than enough food to feed the 5,000. After all Jesus only started with five loves and two small fish. She always takes good care of us. She found me and brought me a great pita bread sandwich, carrots, juice and a granola bar which hit the spot. (Good vegetarian food can be difficult to find at events, so this was great.)
We picked up again with the vendors and I found a Moda Jelly Roll I hadn’t seen in other booths. That booth also had all fabric discounted by 25% including the Jelly Rolls. Again I didn’t really need it. I finally told myself I’d come over 1,000 miles to this show, I’d better buy something. So I bought two! I intend to use them for a quilt from one of Debbie Caffrey’s books
I went to my last class which was with Cheryl Barnes of Golden Threads. It was on playing with your quilt patterns. She did fine, but the set up wasn’t good for what she was teaching. It was a large room, but no camera person. That meant the people near the rear of the room couldn’t see a lot of what she was showing on her quilts. She was talking about using portions of a quilt pattern which really is a great concept. It wasn’t anything new to me, because I took a very similar class from Keryn Emmerson at MQS several years ago. I hope most of the students got some new ideas from the class. After all the lecture classes were ONLY $4 for 45 minutes so if you took away even one new idea it was worth it. And if you didn’t get any new ideas, you got to sit down and rest for a little while.
I drug my mom and sister by the Dakota Collectibles booth. They had some new collections stitched out that caught my eye and theirs. They were also running a buy two disks get one free show special. The monkeys and frogs were a hoot and I know I’ve eyed the penguins in the past (I just hope I haven’t already bought the penguins). So that was my second fair sized purchase.
If you would like to see close ups of these designs check them out on Dakota Collectibles Web site. Here is the link for the frogs, the penguins and unfortunately the Funny Monkey appears to be new enough I can’t find it on their web page.
The show closed at 6pm and by now it was getting very close to 5:30. I thought I was finished shopping when we wandered back to the first building of vendors. There were two booths that I kept thinking about so I ran back over to the largest vendor building while my mom and sister went on in the first. I really admired the samples in Barb’s Elegant Designs booth and was considering buying one of the patterns. I went back and tried to make up my mind. I finally decided that while I really liked the patterns, it was the quilting on top of it that was ultimately drawing me. I passed on the patterns, but they were still really cool quilts.
The other booth to which I returned was Bird Brain Designs. This booth had hand embroidered wallhangings (almost all the samples were done both in redwork and multicolor) and wool work. The quilt that kept drawing me was Friendship Garden. The pattern was considerably more than I wanted to spend for a hand embroidery pattern, but I finally decided I was almost finished embroidering the nursery rhyme blocks and I would like to have another hand embroidered project going. The pattern came home with me. I intend to do the multi color version so I have cropped the picture of the pattern. While it looks very colorful, there are actually only 10 colors of Perle cotton used in the whole project.
It looks like I won’t have any problem fitting my purchases in the suitcase for the trip home.
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