Houston International Quilt Festival

Leslie and I started out our "Festival Time" on Wednesday night at the preview.  We were there for 3 hours (not counting the hour we stood in line to get in--we had our tickets and were not sure what the traffic situation would be so we got there a "little early")

We drove down on Tuesday and visited 2 quilt shops in McKinney, TX on the way.  Even the pouring rain didn't "dampen" our spirits as we drove through maddening traffic in Dallas.

We spent Wednesday "resting"--in other words we went to some more quilt shops, this time in The Woodlands where I lived from 1988-1996.  Someone had the nerve to open a quilt shop within a mile of my old house--AFTER I LEFT!



This is Sharon Shamber with her winning quilt.  She's known for her beautiful quilting and for the cording she puts around her quilts.  This time she added cording in the middle.  All of those black and red straight lines are open "lace work" done with covered cording!  It was stunning.  And she won $10,000 for the top prize!



Here you can see some of the quilting and cording.

This was another top prize winner.  I think the catagory was "World of Beauty".

This one was the winner in the "Hand Workmanship" catagory.  I heard the lady say it took her 6 years to make.  All hand appliqued and hand quilted.

On Thursday morning we decided to wait upstairs for the crowd at the door to thin out.  Leslie had a cup of coffee and we relaxed for a few minutes.  This is looking down onto the vendor floor.

Did I mention that there were 1,000 vendors there?  We saw them all.  We didn't stop at all of them.  We did our math before going in and realized that we had only 1.27 minutes at each booth if we wanted to see them all.  Of course, there were many that we weren't interested in at all and others that we visited more than once.  Lots and lots of fabric, gadgets, tools, jewelry, clothing items, embellishments, beads, etc.

I love the bright colors!  I wish I could show ALL the quilts I took pictures of. 

I feel like I'm part of the orchestra.

This full sized quilt was amazing!  It's made entirely of yo-yo's.  Look closely in the next picture.  It's a close up of the little girl's eyes.

We liked this quilt just because of what it said.

Another close up detail  of the winning quilt.

More to follow in the next few days:  Famous People at the Show and more quilts.