IQF Houston - Saturday Sampler

If you don’t follow us on Facebook or Instagram, you may not know that we have been in Houston since Thursday for International Quilt Festival. This is our first time attending the festival and it has been inspirational and overwhelming at the same time. The impetus for coming was that Sue had a quilt in one of the special echibits (sorry; no photos allowed yet due to pending book publication). But we have TONS of other pictures to share!

We’ll start with an event we attended which was the Saturday Sampler. There were 28 teachers in a large ballroom, each doing 15-20 minute demos/presentations. You could choose the ones you wanted to visit over the 2 hour time frame. It was a great way to find out more about a teacher and what they do, and pick up a few tips and tricks.

We first visited with Cindy Lohbeck who demoed her process for Ice Dyed Shibori. We have both done this process but it’s always good to pick up a few tips from experts.

She gets wonderful results and was featured in an article in Quilting Arts magazine (Dec. 2017/Jan. 2018).

Ana Buzzalino demonstrated the use of Inktense Pencils on Fabric.

Melody Crust talked about the elegance of straight line quilting.

Maria Shell explained her method of Improv Quilting, which starts ny making striped fabric out of solids, and using the stripes in various ways to create other patterns.

Jenny Lyon talked about choosing threads for machine quilting on a domestic machine. She is a fabulous quilter.

Judy Gauthier’s topic was Using Scraps to Make Beautiful Quilts. She also talked a bit about color theory.

Karen Miller is an Aurifil thread educator who focused specially on Aurifil thread.

The 2 hours went by quickly and we felt it was a good way to learn a lot in a relatively short period of time.