I’m back from Quilt Market in Houston, and what a wild ride it was! Kimberly and I had a great time traveling and rooming together, with much laughter and fun, even during the rotten flight over. The flight on Lufthansa was just plain painful, and not nearly as nice or comfortable as the one to Des Moines on Northwest. The only thing that made the flight to Houston even sort of okay was this:

Lufthansa serves either Cognac or Bailey’s Irish Cream after the main meal during the flight, and it truly was the only good part aside from good company!

The best part: watching Kimberly perk up like a curious meerkat when the cart with the Bailey’s came into view! She’s just so funny! The main meal on the flight was some weird pasta thing that was barely even passable as “food” in my book, and my thought was “This is really not very good, is it?”, but Kimberly, being the “glass is half full” person that she is, says “Boy, we’re really going to enjoy dinner tonight!” We kept each other laughing.

I can’t begin to tell you about all of the new things I saw (and in some cases, bought!), but I’ll try to touch on some of the “new and notable” highlights, things I thought were just plain cool and other fun happenings.

Everything in the quilting world is “foody” right now. Jelly Rolls, Layer Cakes, and new Sweet Rolls (like Jelly Rolls but with 1 1/2″ strips) and Turnovers (5″ x 5″ stacks of fabric like charm packs, cut diagonally into a turnover shape) from Moda. It’s not just Moda with the food thing either; the other manufacturers are on that bandwagon too, I just can’t remember the names of all the other foody things I saw. I visited the Moda Bake Shop, and ordered charm packs for the DreamWeaver’s Quilts Studio (eeek! I actually ordered stuff for my online shop, which was a little scary!). The Moda rep gave me the most adorable little box with two teeny tiny “Sweet Roll” fabric rolls, each about 2″ across. I think they’re just too cute to use!

I played cards with Ricky Tims, and won the deck, including his autograph:

Hmmm. Maybe pictures of my quilts will be on a pack of playing cards one day, but I’m not sure I want my face on the Joker cards. As for other celebs, I did see the winner of Season One of Project Runway, Jay McCarroll (though because I don’t watch TV at all, I’m clueless and I didn’t even know who he was until I read Kimberly’s blog just now. I do remember seeing his hair at the show though! ), but I missed seeing Marie Osmond at the show by two minutes. C’est la Vie!

And one other notable celeb sighting: Kimberly invited me to accompany her to the Robert Kaufman reception on Saturday evening (which was very nice) where I met Mark Lipinski, who is just as real in person as he is in the pages of Quilter’s Home magazine. Of course I couldn’t come up with a witty response (or any response at all for that matter) when he said “I know your name! Why do I know your name??” I can’t imagine why Mark Lipinski thinks he knows who I am. Not a clue. Who knows? Maybe I’m an “It Girl” and I don’t even know it.

I bought lots of embellishments; beads, fibers, hand dyed floss, threads, micro beads. You name it, it was there at Quilt Market, and I sampled heavily for both the book and the DWQ Studio. I viewed new fabrics from Hoffman, RJR and Robert Kaufman Fabrics, with an eye toward including some of the newest fabrics in my book, and let me tell you, the newest fabric lines are awesome! The batiks in particular from Hoffman and Robert Kaufman are really wonderful! I also met the folks who should probably be held responsible for my bead addiction, Edward and Ruthmarie Hofmann, creators of Hofmann Originals Bead Mixes. I brought home some of the newest additions to their Bead Soup Starter lineup, and a few totally new, limited edition mixes called Soup du Jour. See, more of that foody stuff, yummy!

Here are some of the other goodies I brought back with me:

Notable faves: Hot Ribbon Art fusible ribbon (bottom center), Valdani 3-strand hand-dyed floss (top left), Kaleidoscope Kreator 2.0 software (bottom left), Diva Cord Maker (top center), Yazzi organizer tote (top right).

I picked up so much stuff, including a small mountain of literature from many different companies, that it almost didn’t all fit in the suitcases to get it home. I’ll get to play with some of it while I work on my book, but a lot of what I was after at Quilt Market was for the DWQ Studio, and I have to put that on the back burner for a month or two. In fact, I have to put everything on the back burner for a month or two, and work on nothing but the book, so I can get the manuscript done asap. I hope to have it done and to the publisher by mid-January at the latest, so if things are a bit quiet here until then, that’s why. I’m just going to have to ask forgiveness ahead of time for being too busy to write much here! Exciting times ahead!

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One more stack of loot to share from the AQS Quilt Show in Des Moines:

Here we have a very mixed bag. From the top center:

• Beads! Couldn’t pass up the Miyuki beads since I’ve been wanting to see what all the fuss is about. Interestingly enough, though Miyuki beads are purported to be the “be all and end all” of high quality seed beads, I’ve kind of decided that I like plain old average seed beads just as well for my purposes. The Miyuki beads are TINY, as well as being more cylindrical and uniform, and while the uniformity doesn’t bother me, sometimes they’re too small (though maybe that’s just the combination of the colors that I have with the fabrics that I’m using them on at the moment), and the more rounded edges of a regular seed bead work better for what I’m trying to do than the cylindrical shape of the Miyuki beads. So now I know.
• Next are some hand printed fabric panels from Block Party Studios. These are really fun printed panels with sayings on them like
• The fabric is four fat quarters of Halloween type prints with holographic or iridescent overprinting which was just too unusual and fun to resist!
• The bundle in the middle is a few bits of hand punched, hand dyed wool fabric, and the curly stuff below it is also wool, hand dyed but more “au naturale” just as it came off the sheep. There was a booth that had all kinds of wools and other things for needle punch, and they had these overflowing bins of curly, colorful wool that you just grabbed what you wanted out of, and they sold it by weight. Think embellishments…
• The packets in the lower left corner are Painters Potpourri from Tentakulum, a German manufacturer. Each packet contains a paper-like background card, silk cocoons, a bit of silk fiber fabric stuff, and a hank of different fibers, all hand dyed in a coordinated colorway. These were too unique to pass up when I came across them in the YLI booth. I’m sure that any of you who are into the altered art or mixed media thing would know just what to do with these, but so far, I’m just admiring them. Their day will come though.
• Last we have the Bo-Nash bonanza bag. Bo-Nash was at the show with their newest products, a line of super fine glitters, Tonertex foils, glue pens and fabric adhesive in a fabulous squeeze bottle. I bought some of everything, and can’t wait to try it all out. I’m not sure it’ll be as “no-mess” as they claimed though.

Even that’s not quite all the loot from Des Moines, since we did spend one day at the local mall where I found the leather coat I’ve been searching for for years, and a pair of Anne Klein brown patent leather boots to die for. The boots were quietly waiting for me to discover them in the giant shoe department at Von Maur, but the coat positively screamed my name from across the store, and what could I do but answer the call? Everything else I bought is cool, but the coat was the best buy of the entire trip!

Believe it or not, I’m getting on the plane again on Thursday morning (yes, just 10 days after returning from Des Moines) for a super quick, four-day trip to Houston. Kimberly and I are going to Quilt Market to see whats new and news in the retail quilting world. I’m planning to make connections with distributors in preparation for stocking my new online shop which should be opening by the second quarter of 2009. My head is already spinning with products and plans, but I’m sure it’ll be doing a negative 4-g rolling dive by the time I get back!

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Despite the “what not to do” list in the previous post, I really did have a great time at the show. AQS usually puts on a wonderful show, and this one was no exception. I saw (and bought) so many new things in the vendor mall, and made great connections with a number of vendors. I test-drove a couple of longarm machines, even though I’m not really in the market for one at the moment. I think I found the one I want, if I ever do buy one though!

I also made some great connections with the AQS folks while I was there; Kimberly introduced me to Bonnie Browning and Meredith Schroeder, and a whole host of others in the company that I’ve emailed back and forth with over the years when I’ve sent quilts to the show or the Quilt Museum in Paducah. It’s great to be able to put faces with the names I already know. I had a couple of really good meetings, and I hope to be able to share some super exciting news with you very shortly!

But the better part of the show was growing a friendship with Kimberly. We were great friends already, but spending so much time together made it even better I think. People couldn’t believe we’ve only really known each other for a couple of months, I guess because we are so comfortable and get along so well.

Kimberly and I are really good traveling partners. Our internal thermostats are very close most of the time, and we find ourselves reaching for the temperature control in the car to adjust it at about the same moment again and again to keep things within our 3 degree comfort zone. We both love to shop though not necessarily for the same things, but are perfectly happy to separate and shop alone for a bit, and then meet up for a drink or snack later. We tend to like the same kinds of foods and restaurants as well.

And don’t get me started on how much time we spend dissolved in laughter when we’re together. Kimberly is “incessantly cheerful” (as one of the other instructors at the show put it), and, well, I’m anything but cheerful, incessantly or otherwise. Being the eternal pessimist that I am, I have a pretty dry and sarcastic sense of humor which cracks her up, and then I’m cracking up too. We seem to balance each other nicely.

Here’s another “what not to do”: never underestimate what an instructor goes through just to show up and teach at one of those shows. I got the inside look at it all hanging out with Kimberly. It’s damn hard work, from hauling all the quilts, books, rulers, class handouts, etc., to being on your feet and “in teaching mode” 8-10 hours per day for classes, and that’s after all the prep work at home. You’re lucky to get lunch, and it’s not like there’s anyone there to help you schlep all the stuff, so you really need the food!

I really enjoyed the time I spent in a couple of Kimberly’s classes watching her teach. She’s so professional and so good at it! She’s much better at it all than I am, and all her students loved her. Despite all the hard work and preparation, she makes it look effortless. I should have been taking notes…

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