Friday Fun Day…..

Friday morning started with the “Friday Sampler”, a two hour session where 29 quilters presented their specialties and we were allowed to move between them and glean what we could.

One of my favorites was Karen Miller who specialized in Free-motion quilting. On this day, she was talking about using rulers in your designs. After telling us about threads and needles, she then displayed a number of examples of simple quilting done with rulers…..

The “bead-board” border on this quilt is fantastic….and simple too.

I also spent some time with Gail Garber, watching her draft the amazing designs that she specializes in…..

I was reminded to go home and pull out my “flexible” ruler and GET TO WORK!!! This was one of her fascinating pieces…..

This landscape quilt caught both of our eyes, but Linda was the one to really see the vines on the fence post. Some of them were tiny bias binding and some were couched threads. It was super effective…..

This sweet quilt was one of the first that we saw when we arrived on the show floor. It was a magnificent mixture of thread painting for the bird and applique for everything else. I cant remember, but the windshield wipers may have been a photograph…..

These “dampened” colors made for a very effective quilt…..

……as did the colors in this quilt…..

Just the opposite colorwise, this quilt was full of happy, bright colors and WAY TOO MANY perfectly matched stripes. This person must have been seriously OCD. But, the result was a fun quilt!!

I spent a lot of time in the “Landscape” division and was drawn to this quilt……

….and was not surprised when I saw that the artist was one of my favorites from last year!!

I did love that she used a tulle over the fused applique pieces and then quilted over the tulle…….

This seems to be a current trend and certainly makes quilt with lots of little pieces easier to create!

I loved these gentlemen sharing their bench with a dog…..

As we wandered into the SAQA retrospective exhibit again it was fun to see an older quilt by Elizabeth Barton….one of our Athens, GA quilters!!!

This was the 45th anniversary of the International Quilt Festival. Since the Sapphire is the stone for the 45th year, they had presented a “Sapphire Challenge” and the results were amazing. There were old quilts, new quilts, big quilts, miniature quilts and everything in between. The medium size quilts were all displayed from the ceiling of the ballroom and the display was striking…..

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After several hours of looking at quilts and several more in the vendor mall, we were both tired and headed back to the hotel.

The Holiday Inn Express is a special place to stay during Quilt Show week!! They do so many things to make us feel at home, including providing dinner for us on one of the nights.

It was fun to sit and listen to the voices of so many women united in conversations about color, fat quarters, rotary cutters, piecing and applique…..seemed a bit like heaven to me!!!