Snow day sledding

It's a St. Louis tradition to go sledding down the giant hill in front of the art museum (known as Art Hill) after a big snow, but somehow we'd never actually done it in our six years here. Today turned out to be the day we fixed that. It was too perfect not to, so we bundled up, joined the masses, and hopped on our sled. What a fun day!

 

It definitely won't be another six years before we do it again!

QuiltCon recap, Part 2: The goods

So now that we've covered how I spent most of my days at QuiltCon, let's get to the goodies. First up, check out the amazing goodie bag (plus a few small freebies I picked up from the vendors).

Can you believe that? I would have been happy with just the bag itself, which is too cute, but it was filled with all kinds of fun. Nice work, MQG. I also got this super cute box pouch from my roomie, which she filled it with chocolate because she's awesome like that.

I ended up not buying a lot from the vendors, in part because it was a little overwhelming and I only had so much room in my suitcase, but mainly because I spent all my money on this ... 

A new sewing machine!!! I went in planning to purchase a new machine if I found one I liked and could get a good deal, and I totally scored on both counts. I ended up going with a Janome Skyline, and I can't wait for it to get here. FedEx briefly claimed it was going to arrive on Saturday (just in time for snowmageddon), but they changed the date at the last minute -- curses! I was so excited about my new machine that I couldn't even bring myself to sew this week because I kept thinking how much better it would be once the new machine arrived. Ridiculous, I know. So instead, I've been squaring up HSTs. The only other thing I bought was a batch of FQs from Cloud 9 because they had a great sale going on, and I couldn't resist these prints, some of which I've been drooling over for a long time. And, foxes, obviously.

Finally, Riley Blake had a promotion going where they chose five people each day that they spotted wearing their pin (see my lanyard below) to win a prize, and I got picked one day, so I scored this rainbow dot FQ bundle. Yay for pins and free fabric!

I probably should have included these in the last post, but it was getting pretty long, so here are a few bonus "goodies" (aka, fun shots from my time in Austin). I ate well there, folks.

And in case you're wondering where all the beautiful quilts are, I'll have one more recap post coming up, so stayed tuned.

QuiltCon recap, Part 1: My days

I'm back! I think I've finally recovered from my QuiltCon high, so it's time for a few recap posts, don't you think? If you follow me on Instagram, you saw a few snippets of all the fun, but I was more interested in enjoying the experience than posting pics, so there's lots more to show.  Today, I'll give a little rundown of how I spent my time. I'll show off some of my favorite quilts from the quilt show in a future post, and I'll probably do a third post on the goodies I found/received.

I started my trip off with a bang, taking Elizabeth Hartman's Patchwork City workshop on the first day. As any casual follower of this blog knows, I'm a huge fan of Elizabeth's work, so it was so exciting to finally get to meet and learn from her. I tried to play it cool as much as possible. :)

As I expected, she's a great teacher, and I learned a lot of new techniques for freezer-paper templates and fussy cutting. It was also so helpful to get her input on fabric color selection and placement. I am loving where this quilt is going. We made three blocks from the book (I didn't quite finish my third one), and I can't wait to get back to work on this project. I'm planning to make the biggest quilt in the book, which uses all 75 blocks, so I better get started.

I finished the day off at the Moda Party, which was a great chance to chat with some new people. I also got to meet Faith from Fresh Lemons Quilts (who was also on my flight to Austin from Chicago) and Lee from Freshly Pieced, two of my favorite quilter/bloggers! On my second day, I started off with a special exhibit tour with Bill Volckening. He was fascinating to listen to and gave some great insights into the Gee's Bend quilts and 1970s quilts from his collection on display. I also went to two lectures by Heather Jones, on large-scale piecing and color theory, but I spent most of my day perusing the quilt show and vendors. I may have bought just a few things...

My third day was another workshop, this time with Lee Heinrich. The workshop was on advanced piecing techniques (paper piecing, partial seams) and focused on four blocks from her book Vintage Quilt Revival (another favorite around here).

Lee was super nice, and the workshop was really helpful, pushing me to try some totally new (to me) techniques and helping me to improve on some I've only done a bit.

I finished three of the four blocks, so I need to wrap up the last one and then decide what to do with them. I'm not sure if I'll finish the sampler from the book or maybe just turn these four into a table runner.

After the workshop, I went to the keynote lecture with the Gee's Bend quilters, which was fun and really interesting (though I wished we'd gotten to see more of their quilts!), followed by a super fun dinner meet-up with some of the other ladies from the STLMQG. What a great way to end the trip! I was up at 3:15 the next morning to fly home (Boo. But bonus -- Anna Maria Horner was on my flight to Nashville!), but I'm so glad I got to experience all the fun of QuiltCon this year.

P.S. You can check out some of the recap posts from the Modern Quilt Guild here and here.