The IQF Houston Experience

You read about the quilts…now let’s talk about the entire experience. Overwhelming. Yup. Totally. It doesn’t help that Texas is two hours later than here, which means I keep having to wake up at ungodly hours to do stuff, so I’m only half coherent. It really didn’t help that it was Halloween, because crafty women (whether quilters or stitchers or whatever) are often a truly frightening tribal experience when in a large group, wearing similar clothing, or weird hairpieces, or sparkly light-up hats. I can’t deal with that stuff…although, if mom had a hat like that, I probably could have kept track of her better.

So there’s the hotel experience. There’s the flying. There’s the classes (I don’t take those any more). There’s the famous people (in the quilt world). There’s a million quilts. And then there’s the vendors.

Now I don’t really use a lot of supplies in my quilting. I have a light table to beat all light tables (after 23 years of quilting, I do not consider this a bad thing…plus it was free). I have my mom’s hand-me-down sewing machine, which is a pretty damn good machine. I do buy fabric (although not a crazy amount, despite what it may look like to the uninitiated), batting, and thread. I don’t actually have a massive thread stash…it all fits in one plastic doohickey container (if you saw my mom’s stash, you’d realize this is NOTHING). I have some pens and a ton of embroidery thread (remainders from my crazy-quilting days). I have those applique ironing sheets…I have about 5 or 6 of those. That’s probably more than most people, especially when you consider the big ones aren’t cheap, but I use them a lot and I need that many on your average quilt. I have pens and sketchbooks and paper. I have Wonder Under. I have my stitching gloves, pins, and safety pins for pinbasting. I have scissors. I don’t have a ton of scissors, but it’s probably more than your average noncrafty household. I have colored pencils that I occasionally use on fabric, usually because some handdyed fabric ran and I need to cover what it did. I have needles…lots of those.

People often give me doodads and stuff for quilting, like special holders for quilting or different fusibles to try, but I’m kinda stuck in my creating ways at the moment, for whatever reason, so I don’t really use a lot else. I do like handdyed fabrics, though, and I’m often looking for more of that.

So when I go to a massive vendor mall like IQF Houston, I’m mostly overwhelmed…and underwhelmed. I don’t really buy patterns. I did buy two this time, and I’m not really sure why…

I sat there and listened to a woman ask the seller about 5 times, “but what are they FOR???” and the seller kept saying, “They’re not really FOR anything.” Well, yeah. Do I need a candle mat? Not really. Whatever. They’re cats. And owls. And apparently I needed cute cats and owls. Don’t judge.

I wandered into a lot of booths, mostly embellishment stuff and threads (hand embroidery, which I really don’t need more of), and then I got to the handdyed fabrics of Laura Wasilowski and Frieda Anderson. Now you’re talking…and this is the ONLY place that really got my business…

I know how to dye fabrics. I just don’t have the time or patience to do this stuff.

Ten yards. Did I need 10 more yards? Don’t ask that. I walked past a million other fabric, doodad, pattern, and machine booths and this is what I got. The Artfabrik store is here if you like this kind of stuff. I got 8 of Frieda’s and 2 of Laura’s. I don’t know what that means. Mom was an enabler. I would have probably only gotten two or so if it were just me, but they were offering one free yard with the purchase of four, and then mom mentioned my constant need for more browns (as she said, something about my obsession with DIRT at the moment, like it’s a BAD thing). So I got more brown. And green. And there you are. I should admit that I didn’t pay for them…mom gifted me.

I look at the long-arm machines, but don’t really need one. If I can push and pull a 72″ by 84″ quilt through my machine, it’s unlikely that I need anything fancier than that. If I did, I have friends with such devices…but they probably would take issue with my need to quilt at 1 in the morning. So I walk past all those long-arm booths.

Mostly I would kamikaze through an aisle of vendors, avoiding the crazy people, going into maybe one or two booths each row, and then waiting at the end for mom to make her way through (she’s not a slow woman, trust me, but she likes to look at more stuff than I do). I lost her multiple times. She must have run past me somehow. I was watching the man who had to guard the mens’ room (I love that…they needed a guard because the line to the womens’ was so long). She must have snuck by me.

Food in Houston: we ended up at one of the same restaurants as last time, with a longish wait because there are a million women in town and they will only walk so far to get food. Every restaurant you went into had long tables full of quilters. I have not heard the tribal call, so I usually just eat with mom. She’s going deaf and her hearing aids don’t work well in noisy restaurants, so I get to translate the Southern waiter accents for her. Really, I’m not yelling at her…she can’t hear unless you yell.

I did go to the gym one morning…amusingly, there were only 4 other people in there, and two were men (I recognized one as the husband of a well-known quilter…that was a little creepy…the wonders of the blog world).

I tried to find plain milk in a variety of places, but Houston apparently thinks milk should be chocolate or it should go home. I finally had to buy milk in a cup from Starbucks, paying more for the milk than for a cup of tea…crazy, that. Houston also doesn’t believe in sourdough bread.

The view of some office building seemed to fascinate me…

Or maybe it was just the sky reflected in the building…

We stayed in the Hilton this time, a much shorter walk, which was nice…plus everyone staying there seemed to be a quilter…and you could see the Convention Center from our window…

Of course, when I hung out with friends, I could still see my hotel, so I’m not sure we needed to be THAT close…

I’m not a social-enough beast to really use this experience the way I probably should. I did better this year about talking to people, but I think I still prefer the intimacy of the Quilt National experience, where there are fewer people, but all the artists are there in one space.

And today, in the mail, the announcement for Portland’s new version of the show, Quilt! Knit! Stitch!…so Long Beach (so close! so convenient!) is gone and Portland requires money for a flight and hotel and food. Not happening the summer before I send the boychild to college. It’s OK. I will survive. I have all of you here, on the net. I probably talk to more of you here than I do in real life.