Houston Quilt Festival

I know, everyone else has already posted fabulous pictures of the quilts on display. The winners were all breathtaking; so were most of the quilts that didn't even get a mention! The vendor booths were interesting - many of them had new tools and gadgets on display. There were lots of technique tutorials. The folk at Thimble Art were showing off their dimensional paper piecing technique, Fabric Fanatics had the best deals on beautiful batiks (some of which are pictured below!) big companies and individual entrepeneurs were side by side in booths. I bought some metallic thread for which I have high hopes, and found just the right blend of oranges and yellows in a thread for a top that's waiting in the queue; my buddy Beth and I spent a lot of time directing each other to various sights.

This is all completely normal.

What we did that's blogworthy this year is, we made a quilt.

That's right. We made a quilt while we were at the Houston show. You know how seeing all the beautiful quilts is well, at first it's just humbling, but then it makes you really want to get back home and get busy, right? We are both already aquainted with that feeling so we brought along fabrics for a donation quilt. We cut, pressed, sewed, (frog stitched :( ) and sewed some more. When we left Houston we left with an extra quilt top! I used the leftovers for a back and quilted it, and today Beth will be taking it home to sew on the binding. It was a most satisfying experience. We had plenty of spare time while we were there because we didn't have to pick up anyone else's dirty socks, cook dinner, help with vocabulary words or let the dogs in and out. We went with a simple rail fence block in a zigzag layout. almost (but not quite!) impossible to mess this up. I sewed on an entire pair of rows upside down and we didn't notice it until we were setting it out to admire the finished top. One bad seam in the whole top isn't too awful though.

I quilted it with a pointy, angular meander. It took almost no time. I've seen Beth sew binding. That's not going to take long either.