So I was recently asked to teach a series of classes for the Nebraska State Quilt Guild (NSQG). It was in Lincoln (I’d never been there before, let alone Nebraska). Penny had been there before. She told me to go to the museum if I had time. I was still slightly frazzled from checking my flight online to make sure everything was in order, and it asked me “are you ready for your trip to Chicago?” “Uh… no… I’m going to Lincoln, through Chicago…. where is the other half of my trip?” Luckily the flight had been rescheduled and not cancelled, so I fixed everything with a few days to spare. I focused on getting my classes ready and remembering that if I forgot to pack my laptop & handouts it wouldn’t be a very fun class for my students. I figured if I had time to do stuff on the side, there would be others itching to get away too whom I could go with.

I got to Lincoln around 2pm and two lovely guild members picked me up and dropped me off at the Cornhusker Marriott hotel. My first impression of Nebraska on the car ride over was “oh my gosh it’s just as flat as Bowling Green!”

I scoped out my classrooms and saw a projector was already provided that I would need to figure out how to plug into. I was excited about the dry erase board, not that I knew what I’d write on there, but I always wanted to use one.

Thursday night’s line up had a “Welcome Reception” scheduled at the International Quilt Study Center & Museum. I thought to myself, “oh that must be the place Penny wanted me to go to.”

I caught the shuttle and wow… that building makes quite the impression as you drive up. It looks like a bargello quilt, but with windows. The building is quite large (over 35,000 sq. ft.) and has many exhibitions every year. I wondered what the exhibition would be tonight.

If you ever go there, you’ll know you’re in the right place when you see the white sculpture out front. It is the coolest thing ever. It looked like it would make a fun quilting/thread pattern.

To my surprise, it was a new show scheduled to open the next day and run through October 25th and it was all about Crazy quilts! The exhibition is called “A Fairyland of Fabrics: The Victorian Crazy Quilt.” I thought about the Crazy quilt book Penny wrote and thought about the coincidence of it all.

The cover quilt on Penny’s book is in the exhibit. It is called “My Crazy Dream” by Mary M. Hernandred Ricard made 1877-1912. It is in the Ardis and Robert James Collection.

The quilts were beautiful, intricate, and exquisite. If I can ever get over my fear of cutting up fabric that expensive looking, I think I will have to try silk. The hand stitching and embroidery was amazing. Some of the quilts looked really familiar… I must have seen them in Penny’s book before.

The quilts were great and so was the food. It was nice having some fresh fruit after being stuck on airplanes all day.

In the lower level, they had some non-crazy quilts, but equally cool. Nancy Crow had just finished teaching classes and it was a gallery of her students work. There were about 12 quilts all in her strippy-style and in a variety of amazing & completely different color schemes.

So chalk Thursday up as a good day. I enjoyed visiting the museum and meeting some of the guild members and seeing the quilts. I hoped Friday would be a success as well.