What A Day!

Dark picture - It's made of print blocks and says QUILTS.

Last Friday morning I headed on down to West Palm Beach to the World Quilt Show Florida at the Palm Beach Convention Center. It's a new event location for Mancuso Show Management - the BIG quilt show people. Hopefully, it was well attended so they will consider it again for next year. Classes were also offered by local and nationally-known teachers. I stopped on the way south to pick up THE TRIO (AD, DM and SM), who I was honored to be joining for the day! Once we got into the convention center, we bee-lined it for the Olde Green Cupboard's booth to visit with Gloria and Jill. Gloria was busy cutting out pieces for an English Paper Piecing project, Jill had her hoop and was needle punching away, and Sue was demonstrating Locker Hooking. We all just started to drool at the quilts/quilt kits/folk art - most of which is not offered at their store. The booth was my favorite - as I expected - since lots of other shops focused on the tropical look, I guess, since it is SOUTH Florida, duh! Not really MY thing. We shopped, perused the quilts from all over the world, grabbed sandwiches for lunch, and then re-visited our favorite booths. I ran into several people that I haven't seen in 10+ years. Here's two shots of the OGC's booth.

My favorite quilt: Pennsylvania Palette (made by a quilter from Maine) - it was made with repro fabric of a typical 1890's PA quilt, with the tiny yellow, bubble-gum pink, and blue prints, as well as a great red paisley fabric for the borders (a repro from earlier in the 1800's). It won an award for Best Use of Color. I was drawn to it because I own a few PA quilts using those original fabrics - one of the first antique PA quilts that I bought was a bar quilt with bubble-gum pink and yellow bars. Think I have a Lone Star quilt from PA using the pink, yellow, and blue, too!

It was a fun day (helping out the economy a bit) and as always, lots of laughs with these three women. After leaving the convention center, there was a question as to whether someone left their cell phone at a booth or somewhere else in the center. As I was trying to concentrate on getting onto I-95 going north, AD (in the front passenger seat) was calling SM's cell phone. SM was in the back seat of the car. We all heard her phone ringing, so that was good, but SM could not find it in her purse!!! It took DM to fish it out of the purse. As if I hadn't understood before, it was clear to me then why these three are ALWAYS together!!! Ha-Ha! Even though I was somewhat doubled over the car's steering wheel laughing, we made it up I-95 and back to AD's house safely.

I was thrilled to be able to get to tour Ann's house, which I've heard so much about. She loves primitives and her house is chock full of early items - yellow-ware bowls, tin and pewter pieces, redware plates, wonderful old pine and oak furniture, and quilts, in addition to her samplers and other stitched pieces.

In Ann's sewing room I spied her first block of the Settler's Pride quilt done in hand-dyed wool. It's beyond YUMMY!!! The whole quilt can be seen on Homestead Hearth's website or Country Thread's website.