Rosemont & Paducah

I’m back from my two favorite spring shows, Rosemont and Paducah. This will be the last year at Rosemont but they’re hoping that the Cincinnati venue will do just as well if not better. It will be great to have the two shows to go to without having one right after the other. There will be time to go home and regroup before heading to Paducah for the vendors as well as the show-goers. It has been really tough on the vendors. They haven’t had time to go home in between and the shipping of items they run out of has to have been really expensive. Let’s hope the Cincinnati venue is a success. Only time will tell.

I appraised a quilt in the “Celebrate Spring” exhibit this year. The quilts were great as usual. Click here to go to the Quilts Inc website and look at the exhibits and fun we all had.

Kaffe Fassett was in the house in Rosemont and Paducah. My husband’s Christmas present to me was a class with Kaffe in Paducah. With everything that was going on with preparations at home, I didn’t get to take the time I wanted in selecting fabrics for the class, so I decided to just shop in Chicago for the fabrics. We were supposed to have fabrics that were small prints. It was difficult to find the colors I was looking for in small prints so I went for batiks. The pattern we worked with is in Kaffe’s new book. The pattern is called “St. Mark’s Diamonds”. In Chicago I met Kaffe at his book signing and had him take a look at the fabric. He doesn’t care for batik fabrics. Oh boy. And I had just put out a mitt full of cash on this fabric. No worries, Nancy will make it work. Sure enough, the day of the class came and he loved what I had done with the fabrics and said that the layout of fabrics is what he had envisioned he would have done with them. He called the layout “utterly fabulous” and “absolutely glorious”. (Not bad for him not liking batiks!) Here is a picture I took of him admiring my layout. The class was great. Strictly a design class with 60’s music in the background with most everyone singing along with the songs. It was a very relaxed and positive atmosphere, perfect for creating design and playing with fabrics.

On Monday in Paducah Sandy Schweitzer and I went to visit a friend of hers, Ella Bontreger. Ella is Amish and is well known for her appliqué chicken quilts on feed sacks. She was GREAT! She was sweet, welcoming, beautiful, and worth the trip to visit. I purchased one of her quilts and will treasure it always. Every time I saw a chicken in a quilt later that week I thought of her. She said, “I love chickens and I love quilts. And I love making chicken quilts.” You just wanted to squeeze her and take her home with you. She was so loving and kind. Marion, KY will be a mandatory stop every year now in Paducah. It is definitely worth the one-way hour plus trip.

The quilts in Paducah just keep getting more and more elaborate! I don’t know that I’ll ever get a quilt accepted but I will still dream. I appraised three quilts on the floor and had four walk-in quilts at the PAAQT booth on Thursday morning. And it was time to go home before you knew it. Now the trick is to accomplish everything on the list I made while I was in Paducah. (My working vacation.) J Enough for now. Talk again soon.