Quiltcon!

I went to Quiltcon two weeks ago!  I had an awesome time!  The quilt show was really beautiful and inspiring.  Many of these are the kinds of quilts that I like and aspire to make (and feel like I could realistically maybe someday make quilts like them).  There are a lot of really amazing quilts at quilt festival, too, but so many of them are art quilts, using techniques I can't ever see myself learning, or are very traditional or otherwise not really my style.  I took lots and lots of pictures of my favorite quilts in the show.  I also enjoyed the vendor hall - I found some really great fabric for a baby quilt I'm going to start soon.  And there was a really generous swag bag!  There were several fabric samples, and patterns and magazines, and little gadgets.  The tote bag itself is really high quality, too.

But my favorite part of Quiltcon was the classes I took.  The blocks up there are from Lee Heinrich's Advanced Piecing Crash Course on Friday night.  I learned paper piecing and partial seams!  Paper piecing is something I've wanted to do for a long time, but I was afraid of it.  Now I'm confident!  Lee walked us through the two blocks and gave us a bunch of tips to make the pieces fit together and place each new piece.  The only downside was the sewing machines ... I'll probably never buy a BabyLock.  The machines in the class were BabyLock Rachels, and they were advertising a special show price that I don't remember, but I think it was in the neighborhood of $500 plus or minus 100.  The machine was about the same size as my little Brother machine (which has a tiny harp space and cost about $100) but didn't sew anywhere near as well.  Several of us, including me, had seemingly unsolvable tension problems.  It was computerized (which my machine is not) and had a needle down feature, which was nice but not worth the other problems it had.

The other class I took was Elizabeth Dackson's Find Your Go-To Fill.  It was great!  We used wonderful HandiQuilter Sweet16 mid-arm machines and did a lot of sketching and practice of five or so different filler patterns.  In contrast to the BabyLock experience in the other class, if I had a spare $5000 and a permanent space to set it up, I would definitely consider buying one of these machines.  They quilted so smoothly and were really easy to use!  I came home inspired to do more free motion quilting!