The International Quilt Festival in Houston

Is next weekend.  I'll be leaving early Friday morning on a bus trip sponsored by The Quilt Cottage, a shop in Corpus Christi, TX, and will get home Sunday evening.  I'll take my laptop along, so may be able to do a blog post or two from there.  At any rate, this post is about the first time I won a ribbon at the Houston show.  My brother and his wife had bought a home in Rockport, TX in 1992, when the Coast Guard had transferred him to Corpus Christi.  They had dreamed for years about being able to live on Key Allegro here in Rockport, but never thought they could.  But, when they moved here, the TX real estate market was in the dumper, and they were able to buy a fixer-upper on the island.  That fall, and every fall after until we moved down here, I came to visit.  Oddly enough, my visits always seemed to coincide with the Houston show--funny how that worked out.  <insert snicker here>  In 1994, I entered the quilt you see here, which had gotten a 3rd place in the House of Fabrics/SoFro competition, in the Houston show.  I drove up to Houston on Wednesday, and went to the preview showing.  If you go to that, you can hustle around and get good pics of the quilts in the show, without getting so many backs of heads in the pics--it's much less crowded.  So, I was happily wandering around snapping pics of the awesome quilts, when I heard an announcement--they were going to be giving out the ribbons up at the front of the auditorium.  "Yeah, right," I thought, "even fewer folks taking pics, great."  And I continued on.  BUT.  All at once, I heard them call my name!  I raced to the front of the auditorium, and found that this quilt had won first place in the Traditional Pieced, Small category!  I tell you, people, my feet didn't touch the floor for two weeks after that.  I walked around dazed, with a huge grin on my face, through the rest of that show.  What an experience that was.  After they did the ceremony, they put the ribbons on the winners, and the show went on.  I never did finish photographing the quilts--I stood next to mine as requested by the show, and fielded questions for the rest of that evening.  For the rest of the show, I enjoyed folks coming up to ask about the quilt, too.  I'll tell more about it in my next post here.