We Take Ourselves With Us

I had one more class. The teacher was solid--upbeat, knowledgable, approachable--and has designed a ruler and technique for making flying geese that I both bought and really will use. Yet, with all that going for it, this was not a good class. Why? Bad machines: All the sewing machines at Quiltweek are provided. This is awesome, except when they're awful and the machine instructor is even worse. One class out of three had this convergence of events. Guess which one. Yep. We were doing a quilt that required a precise quarter inch seam allowance and involved lots of sewing of pointy edges. And--even according to the sewing machine helper--this particular model does neither well. Wait, what? So, everyone's fabrics were getting chewed up and their blocks weren't aligning. Ugh. Bad students: One can sense a problematic class climate ahead when 1) students start over sharing personal family issues with strangers; 2) students proudly state that they don't se...

I lived in the South for 30 years, the majority in a part of Florida often referred to as "South Georgia" (for all sorts of reasons which do not belong on this blog). So, for the life of me, I cannot understand why the food in Paducah is so lame. Represent the South, y'all! Shame on you :( I'd have thought it was just me if I hadn't heard the same complaint echoed around me. There's a low-level country fair collection of food tents at the convention center, a few middling BBQ spots, a couple decent locally owned places, and low-mid end chain restaurants galore. The service at most of the chains was terrible; we even walked out of the Outback after our waitress disappeared on her own personal walkabout for 30 minutes. The Outback! The place that invented the intrusive server who tries to join your party. Here's a short list of the non-terrible stuff we ate: --The cheapest food tent deal was also one of the best: roast pork and mashed potatoes wit...

Paducah has 4 separate vendor areas onsite at the convention center, and then there's dozens more vendors scattered throughout the city--including the supercool AQS "hurt books" sale, where books are $5 ( including a good number one can buy for 5-6x more on the sales floor). Here are some random observations about the shopping: --Prices do vary booth to booth by 2-5 dollars on items, which was surprising to me. --Some booths are rocking awesome style & super friendly staff. Others are chilly and sterile. And it doesn't correlate to price. --Almost all the sewing machine salespeople are hardcore deal closers. It's worse than a used car lot. I was trying out the smaller quilting machines thinking I could get a buy-in point that would be less than the cost of a car. Whew--was I wrong (with one exception). But it was hard to extricate once I sat at a machine. Ick! After playing around with it & researching online, I did buy a stripped down "2...

When I reviewed the program months ago and saw Gwen Marston was teaching at Paducah this year, my heart raced a bit. Gwen has been so influential in quilting--pushing quilters to find their own style and be guided by color, arrangement, and energy of design. Well before the newer crop of modern or contemporary quilters and even before the (unfortunate) advent pre-cuts, do-it-all sewing machines, and self-regulating, programmable long arm quilting machines that can quilt for you in your sleep, she was going back to the simple and eternally complex roots of quilting, filled with make-do beauty and patterns born both of necessity and desire. In so (sew) many ways, she is the precursor to the modern quilting faction (Schmidt, Ringle, et al.). And, it turns out, she's totally awesome! Funny, thoughtful, generous, gracious, kind and quirky while also being a solid teacher full of constructive criticism that lands softly and effectively. She could name drop with the best of them if...

Looking at the quilts (and the vendors!) at Paducah, I felt like the little girl in the AT&T commercial who wants more. So, here are more! (Some are close ups to show detail--and a steer!)

There were so many to love but these are some of my favs from the AQS Paducah! As my sister noted, after a while, you're overwhelmed by the artistry and beauty. Not a bad problem to have! (Doesn't include the miniatures, which were among the most amazing but were also under glass, making photographing them w/o glare impossible.)

Was it a great day? Well, we set out before 8 am and got home around 9 pm. So, oh yes! We showed up in time to get primo parking and participate in a lively, though very chilly, flash mob! That meant we marched behind an honest-to-goodness Paducah high school marching band right into (and around) the prime AQS floor to great cheers from the personnel and vendors inside--and daggers from the thousands of folks still stuck in lines outside. Yay, us! This meant we got a sneak peak of the prize winning quilts in a near empty hall. On Day 1, we managed not to freeze and to see all the quilts, about 3/4 of the vendors, the National Quilt Museum, a great & funny lecture/trunkshow by prizewinning quilter George Siciliano, and find the "hurt books" sale. We snuck into the vendor tent before it opened, made ip sad backstories for the Paducah Sun newspaper mascot Sunny, ate pulled pork sandwiches for breakfast, had about a half-dozen "quilt celeb" sightings, and sa...

And, the blog is back. Having finished four days of worklife conferencing full of meetings, presentations, networking & deal making, I'm running off for AQS Quiltfest with my (honestly better than me) quilting sister. Given the juxtaposition between the two halves of this trip, I just realized how crazily fitting it is that I'm listening to the Head & the Heart. And, as H&H sing there were indeed "stars up above" as well as a massive, low-hanging white moon when I left my hotel in San Francisco this morning at 4 am. (Seriously, it's hard for me to think of the last time I left for and/or returned from a trip when it wasn't pitch dark. My iPhone alarms include times like 3:00, 3:15, 3:25--the last of which suggests how much of an efficiency science I've built around morning flights.) In addition to a really good, fresh cooked breakfast sandwich and a terminal filled with repro-mid century modern egg chairs, SFO also provided someone-who-is...