Belated quilt show report

I wrote this more than a month ago and I can't believe I didn't at least link back to it from here:

So, I went to the quilt show. I went zipping through the whole thing - exhibitions, vendors and all - in a little over four hours. (People who haven't been there and don't know how incredibly big this thing is will not appreciate this achievement.) I did not take a single picture - I didn't even take the camera, actually, for the first time in ten years or so. It certainly made things move much faster! I walked up and down every single aisle and at least glanced at every quilt and every vendor. I'm not sure what my aunt was talking about, about the quilts being better than usual - I will have to ask her. I mean, they were good, but I always think they are good. Here is the winners list, with pictures. Sharon Schamber won Best of Show for the second time - that seems to have become a pattern lately, actually. (Two-time winners, I mean.) Her thing is that she does really fabulous machine quilting - which, of course, you can't see at all in that picture. (Here's a detail from her other BoS, though.)

I only bought a couple of things, amazingly, and only one of them was a quilting thing. I bought a pattern (a pattern! I never buy patterns!) for a quilted crown, of all things. It looks like stained glass and it came with the stiff foundation material, along with the pattern, and it was just so cute I couldn't resist. I used to be known as the "Princess of Chat" on a forum I hang out on, and so crowns have a sort of odd significance for me. Besides, crowns are just cool. (Oh look, here are the crowns - mine is the second one from the bottom.) Then I bought a finished pair of polymer clay earrings, and a bunch of pewter beads - just spacers, mostly. That was it.

I didn't notice a lot of new trends at the quilt show, generally, but if I did, I would say that embellishments was one. Every other vendor had beads and fibers and paints and things like that. Oh, and you know what? I saw a surprising number of teenagers there. I hope that's a good sign for the future of quilting, because quilters in the 20-35 range are still awfully rare. It seems like there was a generation skip there, or something. (I'm aware I'm not the first person to notice this!)

Oh, and there was a whole exhibit of political quilts - some very funny ones, too. Somebody did a whole series of quilts about recent elections - so there was one with the Clintons and the Doles, for example. (Bob and Bill were having a chicken fight on their wives' shoulders, no less.)

Oh look, she's alive.

I'm back, sort of! It's still to be seen if I will keep posting, but I've been meaning to post for ages and let you guys know where I went off to. I've been updating my Livejournal pretty regularly all this time and so if you really want to know the whole story, it's over here. Short version of recent events: hurricane, evacuation, flooded apartment, new apartment, new town. You know, all that sort of fun stuff.

As far as what happened to the pictures, that pre-dates the hurricane and in fact, it was the same thing that happened to several other bloggers that I know of around the same time: some people who exhibited quilts at the International Quilt Festival, but who apparently had never paid any attention to the International Quilt Festival's policy on posting pictures, decided to report us all to Flickr for copyright violations. I don't believe that I was violating copyright but after a couple of rounds of this I made most of my quilt pictures friends-only to stop it from happening again. I have gradually been making more of them public again but it's a slow process and of course it completely messed up this site. I hated to do it but at the time it seemed like the best option. And I meant to post and explain at the time but it was hard to know what to say. And I was angry and anything I said showed it all too clearly.

So anyway, here's a belated catch-up post and if I decide I have something to say about quilts I will post again. I haven't been quilting so far since the move, but most of the fabric and stuff survived the storm so I may yet! I did update the quilt show calendar while I was at it, and I have re-posted some of the pictures, but I think I have to do that manually so I don't know how far I will get.

(Ooh, there's a couple of pretty quilts on this page.)

Happy holidays, y'all!