I had the great good fortune to be invited to teach at Lowell Quilt Show earlier this month.  I’ll blog about one of my classes in a couple of days, but today I wanted to give you an overview, starting with this overview of the show, which is held in the Tsongas Arena in Lowell, which is northwest of Boston (about 45 minutes by car, I think….it’s about 3 1/2 to 4 hours from Camden, Maine). Note:  photos in this post are clickable to be viewed larger.

The vendors are on an upper level that surrounds the arena, so you get a bird’s eye view.  This photo was taken early on Sunday (hence the lack of crowd).   I got over to the show earlier in the week, after class was over, and was thrilled to spot my Koi quilt for the first time….when folks were looking at it!  I guess a white glove lady was near it a lot of the time to show the back (LOVE IT!):

I had not realized until shortly before the show that the 2007 journal quilts would be there (I am not sure if this viewing included all of them or not, but I think it did).

As always, the journals are a popular exhibit (sure hope one of my entries gets in this year… I need an acceptance!!! instead of a “sorry” letter!).  On Sunday, I was thrilled to see someone really looking at mine… my journal is quite subtle, not a grab-you-from-a-distance piece, so it was really rewarding to see someone drawn in and taking a long time to take it in…thank you to whoever you are in this picture!  I hope it is OK for me to have posted this photo of you:

Wow…just realized I never uploaded this quilt to my website… I’ll do that when we get back from vacation in a week or so!   There is a lot to it… it is about Hiroshima, peace and all that….

One of the best things about quilt shows is the teachers.  If you ARE one of the teachers, one of the best things about a quilt show is getting to hang out with the other teachers!  I was thrilled to run into Nancy Prince, whom I had briefly met in Paducah, Joanie Zeier Poole, Judy Cisneros, Nancy Brenan Daniel and others….. dinners were a GAS.  This first night we each and every one of us had lobster of some sort at the hotel restaurant:

Nancy lives in Arizona, so she decided to splurge, and ham it up a bit… I totally love this photo and need to send it to her before heading out on Wednesday (and yes, she did take the meat out of the shell before eating it LOL)

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On Sunday I got to have breakfast at the locally famous Four Sisters Owl Diner, a real OLD diner, with good old fashioned cholesterol-heaven breakfast:

To my great astonishment and pleasure, I got an e-mail a couple days before leaving for Lowell informing me that I had won an honorable mention for Naiads!  After viewing the other quilts, I’m thrilled even more…. here’s  a picture of Naiads with the ribbon alongside and the “neighborhood”:

I taught Thursday, Friday and Saturday, so got to see the show on Sunday to my hearts’ content.  But even tired teachers wear out.  And get hungry.  So mid-afternoon I set out on the town to see the shows at the Brush Gallery, The Whistler (more on those two in future posts), and get some lunch.  I was fortunate to be able to wait to pick up Naiads and my teachers quilts (Koi and Garuda Dances Under the Ocean Moon) at 5:30, after show take-down (thereby saving a bundle on  shipping) before heading home.  So, while waiting, I had an iced coffee…perfect:

Not so long ago I shared the results of the Coastal Quilters’ Art Quilt Challenge, to take Dwight P’s photo of ropes and buoys and make a 10 by 10 inch art quilt. I decided to crop the photo tightly on the buoys and make a piece with the same values (light and dark areas) as the original photo, but in entirely different colors. I couldn’t decide whether to go with blues or with something wild, so I decided to make two! First, I enlarged the cropped photo to the desired size, then traced the outlines by taping tracing paper over my computer screen and, with a pencil, lightly marking the outlines:

The first is in blues (click to make larger):

The second is in pinks and purples:

After the group quilts have been displayed at the statewide annual show, Maine Quilts (in Augusta the last weekend in July), I’ll mount my two pieces on stretched cloth the way I did with the crane (below) and offer them for sale. (The crane is for sale, too….. write me if you’re interested or go surf the for sale gallery on my website). The instructions on how to mount works this way is included in the Creative Quilting With Beads book for my second project. Hmm… don’t think I’ve shared that one yet, have I? Guess that’s a new blogpost! Anyway, hope you like the style (click for larger view):

Phew! I did it! I taught at the AQS Show in Paducah last week, which also happens to have been my first major teaching gig at the national level…what a way to begin! It was exhausting, fun, a learning experience, and I’d do it again…just not every year please! Unlike Festival in Houston, the show is spread out in Paducah’s Expo hall, convention center, and the (icky) attached Executive Inn. The rest of the town joins in, from the MAQS Museum 3-4 blocks away, to Hancock’s of Paducah (a major store and catalog/online quilt store) several miles away via car/shuttle bus, to the many shops in town including Caryl Bryer Fallert’s studio and the new Eleanor Burns emporium. Regular stores all have quilts in the windows… it’s just fun! (Even if the weather can be hot and humid and sticky. Showers please!)

I did get to see the show, and thought I’d seen all of it, but since my return it appears I missed a section of the exhibits…bummers! From my arrival on Tuesday, to my departure for the Nashville airport on Saturday evening (I actually reached home at 9 pm Sunday), I had maybe 4 hours total during open hours to see everything and do just a little shopping! The first thing I saw, above, to my sheer delight was Gloria Hansen‘s quilt with a big ribbon (that’s me doing a stand-in for the much prettier Gloria, who is also my website designer extraordinaire)! (Note! All photos in this post are clickable for larger views.) Across the aisle was my Koi quilt. I totally love its simplicity, but it suffered in comparison to the heavily worked quilts in the show, I think. Still I’m glad that some of the folks in my classes saw it and remembered it!

One of the best parts of going to a big quilt show is meeting folks from online. I’ve also discovered that hanging out with other teachers is a phenomenal experience. Like quilters, they are so sharing, helping newbies like me learn the ropes. Jan Krentz was awesome (I may have to take a piecing class with her just to learn from watching a master teacher at work), and I got to room with Suzanne Marshall, whose quilts have earned spots in the top 100 quilts of the 20th century and the next best 100 quilts of the 20th century… amazing! (Click on their names to open a new window to their websites.)

And such a kind, down-to-earth lady. I’d room with her again any time! Our dinner out after our evening classes on Weds. was the best dinner of the week–we yakked for hours! This is her entry in this year’s show The Beast and The Boy…yes, all hand appliqued, hand quilted, hand stitched…sigh!

Here I am with Caty and Leslie from the Quilt Mavs list (they are sisters, yes their hair is that gorgeous, I want Caty’s!):

I was so busy teaching, that I didn’t get to really see much of the town. Thanks to meeting online friends, Caty and Leslie, for the first time, I DID get a lovely tour of the town (and was so glad to be able to do that sitting down in her comfy car! I was literally hobbling by the time I met them Thursday evening). We saw old homes, beautifully renovated old homes, dogwoods in bloom (the thing I may miss the most about Virginia), and also azaleas and redbuds. And we drove the Lower Town Arts Walk area…what a great idea to revitalize a town.

From the Janome 6500 list, I met Maggie S. and Madge Z. and we got this pic (thanks for taking my classes!):

and from the Pickles list, Michele E. from Alabama — if we look tired it’s because it was the end of my sixth and final class, and I was ELATED–I did it!

I also met and really enjoyed having Ruth Ann W. from the QuiltArt list and her friends in my classes…Ruth Ann, how did we miss taking a photo????? Maybe in Florida!

The hotel was, well,….. ugh. The folks who run AQS have apparently threatened to leave town and find another venue if the owner doesn’t fix it up, but according to the “word on the street” (aka gossip) the owner doesn’t much care and wants to turn it into a casino. If you go to Paducah, try to stay somewhere else then drive or shuttle to the expo center! Over the next few days I’ll be adding more posts….pictures of the show, of students and classes, the Ricky Tims concert… can you tell I had fun (and that I’m now catching up on sleep enough to enjoy it LOL!).

Well, it has been busy! This post will “publish” on Tuesday while I am winging my way south to teach in Paducah! As usual, life has been insanely hectic. I began getting ready for Paducah. Here is the first round of “stuff” in the crate:

Then, there is another round of “stuff” to pack and take. These things are mostly my teaching binders, a few handouts (most were shipped ahead of time), and my teachers’ samples:

On top of prepping all this stuff, I had to MAKE some new samples (which I’ll show you in a couple of days) to go with the shorter 3-hour format classes Paducah prefers. Then, an opportunity fell into my lap: write a proposal for an art quilt project at the Camden-Rockport Middle School. So in addition to continuing to get mom settled, the regular daily stuff, dog-walking and litter-box-cleaning (not to mention laundry, food and sleep), I wrote up this:

The project would be seven panels. Six panels are 3 feet wide by about 4.5 feet long, with a seventh panel 40 inches wide by 18 inches deep to go over the door in the middle of the 24+ foot wall! The principal LOVES the idea of depicting inspirational people / things from around the world and across time (folks like MLKing, Mandela, Mother Theresa, Gandhi, engineers (a bridge maybe), shipbuilders and explorers, teachers, doctors), and is going to submit the proposal to a local grant-giving group. If a small miracle happens and I get it, it would be a MAJOR commission that would keep me busy the rest of the year!

Thanks to a nice tax refund, I was able to finally get my eyes checked, and will be buying new frames for the first time in 3 years. This is the most likely pair (so far):

Please ignore the dippy expression, fat on my neck, lack of makeup etc….They are a matte black, and I’m leery of black. I had wanted a deep ruby red, turquoise, or plum…. so far no luck, but some new frames coming in soon….. what do you think of these? Are they too stark on my face or OK? I do like the shape…..

I’ll be back online in a few days (well, a new post will come up) with one of the new class samples I made for Paducah AND a book review….

I’m thrilled to report that my art quilt Koi has been juried into Paducah and, provided the USPS has gotten it there, is already in that city waiting to be hung for the show! Long-time readers will remember this quilt, which is actually two-sided. I used quite a lot of my own hand-dyed fabric for this quilt, as well as commercial batiks. This is the front (looking down on the pond):

Here is the back (from the bottom of the pond, looking up at the fish bellies and overhanging branches):

And here is a close-up of the front:

and the back:

I am especially thrilled, since Koi didn’t get juried into Houston (will try again this year, since that is permitted), and since I’ll be teaching in Paducah this year… always good when the teacher has a quilt in the show, eh?