Short Attention Span Girl

This years quilting adventure was to QuiltCon in Austin, TX.  While I’m really not a modern quilter per se, I do enjoy seeing what those creative quilters are up to and it looked like the show was going to be really fun.  So, I packed my bags and met up with my quilting friend.

My flight arrived rather late in the evening but we had decided to go out to dinner when I got there.  We found a good restaurant near the hotel and enjoyed a delicious dinner.  On the dessert menu was pecan pie – a favorite of both of us – so we decided to split a slice.  The waitress said that it wasn’t a slice but a little pie and with her hands she put her fingers together into a little circle.  Then it arrived:

Hello!  This pie is 6-7 inches across and would feed four to six people easy.  We took one look at it and started laughing.  Honestly, we couldn’t even eat a bite because we were laughing so hard.  The waitress came back to check on us and asked if we needed anything.  I told her we needed her to grab a fork and take a seat and help us eat that giant dessert, but she wouldn’t.  What we ate was delicious, but we left a lot of pie behind.

One of the things we’d looked forward to about the conference being in Austin was the food.  We were really not disappointed.  I think we need to go back since we didn’t make it half way through our list of possibilities.  And while I liked the sign, we didn’t eat at this place:

I have no idea what a “flapjacket” is and I for sure don’t want to know what their jackalope dog is made out of.

Friday I had a lecture pass and enjoyed the lectures quite a bit.  The day started with a yoga class and the teacher was very good.  I was sore though because I am really not a bendy person at all.  Craftsy has put some of the lectures from the conference up on their site for free, so jump over there and check them out.

For lunch I went around the corner to a little BBQ spot.  It had quite a line which is always a good sign.  When in Texas, have the brisket.  It was really yummy.

Saturday we walked the show floor.  We collected free fabric and other goodies and enjoyed wandering the vendor booths.

There were lots of demo’s going on so we watched a few of those as well.

The quilt exhibit was much smaller than expected.  I counted only 240 quilts in the program which is about what my little local guild shows.  I had thought it would be twice as big particularly since they had so many entries.  They do, however, win for the cutest show ribbons ever.

I have no idea how they got all those ribbons made, but they were really adorable.  Each category was a different color.

Also the people whose quilts were in the exhibit were also given smaller versions of the ribbon and printed on the button was “my quilt is in the show”.  People wore their ribbons or had them pinned to their bags.  A very nice idea.

We did think though that I should have made up a bunch of buttons that said “my quilt was rejected by QuiltCon” to hand out as well.  I wish I had thought of that before the show because I think it would have been pretty darn funny.

Sunday we went out for a nice breakfast and I just had to order the pecan waffle.  Now, I know people in Texas are very proud of their state but I have to say I was quite surprised to have my breakfast look like this:

Really, now I have to go in search of state shaped waffle irons.

I spent the day in a workshop with Denyse Schmidt learning about Improvisational Patchwork.  I am a planning girl who has a great love of graph paper.  Learning to just sew and go with the flow was a challenge!  The teacher was so encouraging and really made it easy for us to play which made a stressful class much more fun.  Here are my four wonky blocks arranged in my design wall:

The white fabric with the little houses was the fabric I brought.  All the rest was from the class scrap bags.  I don’t know that I’ll ever become an improvisational piecer, but it was a fun exercise.

As fun as it was, I’m glad to be home and back in my sewing room ready to work on my next project!

- – marcella