The 35th annual Quilt Market & Festival in Houston finished on Sunday at 5pm. It was a long two weeks, but your excitement and awe kept us going (as did Barb Vlacks’ secret stash of homemade Marshmallows).

We saw a lot of familiar faces and a lot of new ones. As always, it was fun talking with friends, fellow vendors, teachers, authors, fabric designers, publishers, TV hosts, EQ fans, and new customers. We were so excited to see how many of you brought printouts and flyers by our booth to show off what you made in EQ. We can’t wait to blog about your design adventures and successes.

We bonded with a few, fellow Ohioans and joked with them whenever we walked by their booths. Marcia Derse is an artist out of the Toledo area (just north of us) and has a new fabric line from Troy Fabrics. Penny couldn’t leave her booth without getting a stack of hand-painted/hand-dyed fat quarters in all sorts of goldy-green shades. One of the HoopSisters is from Lima (just south of us) and does amazing quilt-as-you-go embroidery designs. She plans the quilts in EQ6 and then designs embroidery patterns to go with them.

The quilts in the exhibit hall were spectacular. Margaret and Andrea went to the convention center early every morning so they wouldn’t miss a single quilt. The different exhibits… Russian, Canadian, Flowers, The German Tree Forest, Hoffman Challenge, Architecture, Embroidery, Painted, all of them were so …. wow. The variety was just as stunning as the quilts. So many techniques, so little time…

The gadgets and gizmos for sale in the hall were just as fun. Everyone in our booth came home with something… or more than one something.

We found a lot of fun restaurants this year and enjoyed walking through the greenspace in front of the convention center. The trees and landscaping are really starting to thrive next to all those fields, and the pond with all the waterlilies. The puppies in the dog park were also cute to look at on our walk home to the hotel. Kudos to the city of Houston for all their work, it’s a pleasure to come to the city and the progress they have made has not gone unnoticed.

Thanks for a memorable 2 weeks.