Cincinnati International Quilt Festival
I feel like I’m late posting my update from the Cincinnati show, but the past few weeks have been just insane with how busy they have been. The comic book event I attended downtown in Chicago butted right up against the trip to the quilt show, but it was worth the harried and frazzled nerves for the fun that I had!
The view I left to get to Cincinnati before the Welcome party started! A 5 hour drive later, we were in Cincinnati!
First order of business, visit with my quilt, Road To Home, which is on the second to last stop on it’s tour.
Well before the Welcome party was underway, with a great band called After Midnight. We danced like crazy!! And someone said to me “Are you Muppin?” which always makes my day. (Thanks, Bob! It was great to meet you too!)
Catherine and I getting ready to get our party on. Judy Coates Perez was also hanging out with us! See pictures of us on her blog too!
After-party beers and chocolate caramel desserts in the hotel bar, where we got to see folks there for the National Tattoo Association Convention! They were fun, we got invited to a party, but I was way too tired… (ha ha)
Just some of the loot I got by spending just a couple hours on the show floor. What do you not see here? A table that I bought for my studio! Yes, a super fancy table is coming in 6 weeks!
I was so happy to see my friend Pokey in her new role with the International Quilt Festival as Chief Creative Officer! Congrats, Pokey!!
You have to see the modern quilts done by the Modern Quilt Guild of Cincinnati… So awesome! We could not stay for their party, but their display was so inspiring. Click on their member blogs on their sidebar and check out the exhibit pics.
After this photo, Catherine and I hoofed it back with our loot to the hotel and drove the 5 hours back to Chicagoland. It rained and it’s a long drive, but worth it! I met an awesome quilter on line for Starbucks who has a blog called 52 Quilts in 52 weeks! Sounds like me and my little weekly quilts, right? Check her blog out!
What i did at CREATE… or how Cheryl got her groove back.
As you may know, this summer has been extremely busy and while I am happy to have made my sister’s wedding flowers, after the initial design they were a bit monotonous to make. I felt pretty uninspired, and because my work schedule freed up, I spent Friday 8/27 at CREATE in Rosemont.
Now, I don’t have pictures of the event because I was silly and didn’t bring my camera, but you can see some other great recaps and pictures here, here, here and here.
Of course, I saw all of my friends there, and that alone was incredible. The hardest working staff I’ve ever run across, Pokey Bolton and Lindsay Murray were there, and Pokey says I’m going to love Houston, which is getting me super jazzed up to go. And that’s just 10 minutes into the event!
My class was thread painted art quilts with Elin Waterston. Elin is an incredible artist and it was so wonderful to learn from a teacher like her. Patient, kind, and extremely talented. She really demystified the process and I had a great time working on my project (which will be in another blog post for the return of Technique of the Week!) Elin is co-author of the Art Quilts at Play and the Art Quilt Workbook, some of whose techniques I have tried this year.
I got to have dinner with some new and old friends, including Belinda Spiwak.
CREATE also had a “store” onsite that not only showcased Bernina sewing machines, but also a wide variety of Interweave titles and other books and supplies so you can take your creative juices home and continue working.
To wrap up our evening, it was time for the Artist’s Faire, and it was AMAZING. Several artists had table “booths” and you could walk and browse lots of art supplies and original art. The art was amazing! Beautiful stuff from Kelli Perkins, Jamie Fingal, Jane Lafazio, and many many more. Also lots of vintage collage materials from various vendors and some amazing collage artists from the pages of Cloth Paper Scissors. Of course, it was the place to be, and I ran into my friends Melanie Testa, Judy Coates Perez (click her link for super cool recaps of the event) and my new friends from the Chicago Modern Quilt Guild! (HI Karen! HI Sue!)
Want to see the few things I got at Create? Commence the showing and telling!
The book and TAP (Transfer Artist Paper) are both going to be used later this year for a Technique of the Week! And of course, they had all the newest magazines, so I picked up the latest QA GIFTS. It is such a great issue.
I loved the ephemera booths. There were lots of them, and if I were a collage artist, I’d be in heaven, but as it were, I saw a couple of things I HAD to have for my creepy victorian parlor. (You know about my year round haunted parlor, right?) So this tiny (and I mean tiny, these do not even come close to fitting around my neck) set of faux pearls and the cool eyeglasses and case only cost me $6 total!
This is a gorgeous teapot from Altered Ever After, and is featured in an issue of a magazine this month!
These lovely brass findings were super cute on the gorgeous sample artworks by Rene, and I picked up these tiny sets for a future project.
So, that’s about it, and I have to say that I came home SUPER jazzed up to start creating again, and I wish I had allotted more than one day, but the wedding was important and that’s OK. There’s going to be another one, and that’s great too. I think the folks at CPS and QA have a lot to be proud of, and I am looking forward to going again next year!
This n That #7
I’m getting ready to go to Philadelphia to the Pennsylvania National Quilt Extravaganza,and I can’t wait!
So much to do before then!
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I’m planning to redesign my main website soon, so that should be completed by the end of the month.
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I have a Halloween costume to plan, and I’m expecting this to take up a good chunk of September and October’s sewing time.
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My sister and I attended the Renegade Craft Fair in Chicago this past weekend, and we both got come crafty mojo. Not many booths selling what we are looking for however…. Sublime Stitching, her favorite, was not there. There were barely any quilts. I did see some bloggers that I follow, like The Small Object, Foundling, and 16 Sparrows. I thought the show was way too heavy on silkscreened t-shirts. In all, it was a good craft show. I bought a fair amount of cool stuff.
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I’ve been recently diagnosed with hypothyroidism, and my new medication has not leveled out yet, so I have the typical fatigue associated with the disease. I can’t wait to get my energy back. Judy Coates Perez has the same thing and recently discussed this on her blog. I may think about switching from synthetic thyroid hormone to natural if I can’t get these levels to normalize soon.
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Football season has started, and so has the fall tv seasons. So much to watch and so little time to do it!
Weekly Quilt Series- A rabbit jumps over the moon
Where we westerners see a “man in the moon”, the Japanese see a rabbit in the moon. The rabbit and moon together is a popular theme. My usagi (rabbit) is jumping into the moon for the night.
I absolutely love this background fabric by Lakehouse Designs. I wish I had more than the little fat quarter I have of it (or what is left of it). When I put the moon on the background, there was a design problem. You could see the flowers “through” the moon, and they were very distracting. I quilted over them quite a bit, and it still didn’t “knock them back” (as Pokey Bolton says). So, even though the piece was quilted and bound, newly confident via Judy Coates Perez and my recent class with her, I dragged out the Setacolor black paint, and painted over the flowers. The “cool” thing was that Lakehouse outlined the flower with a thin shimmery rim and metallic gold, which the paint didn’t really cover. In the end it was so much better for having “shadow flowers” inside the moon. I really like the new piece. This month’s theme has been fun so far.
Getting back to normal
I know I have been away for a bit. I know I said I would run a giveaway last week, but life intervened. I’ve been dealing with a family crisis for a couple of weeks now, both in a “hands-on, getting things taken care of” way, and a “why can’t I think about anything else” kind of way.
I did take some time to go to Judy Coates Perez’s wonderful Fiesta Ornaments class this past weekend, and it was great fun. You can read about it on both Judy’s blog, and my friend Catherine’s blog too. I really like taking classes with my friends, and Judy is a great teacher.
I plan to run the giveaway next week, just in time for the holiday spirit, of which I could use some. The tree is up, but not decorated other than lights, and I don’t have much energy to get it done.
Tonight I spent hours winding a box full of tangled embroidery threads onto floss card bobbins… Just could not do much else that required thinking. I also spent an hour cleaning my studio, which has not really recovered from the weekend class supply “grab” and coming back from Baltimore. I did finally remove the suitcase out of the room… Shows how behind I am on everything.
For something quilty, the above is a custom Spencerian script that was made of my name and turned into a rubber stamp. It was made by Victorian Trading Co., whom I love and have been using to slowly decorate my front “parlor”. I plan to use the stamp on the labels of my quilts using permanent stamp pad ink.
My next few posts will show all the STUFF I have made lately, I think you’ll like it.