Rhonda Bracey: At Random

I attended Winners Circle at the Houston International Quilt Festival last night. This is where the winners of each category are announced,  along with the major prize winners and Best of Show. After the presentations,  we could wander among the quilts.  They were all truly amazing works of art.

The winner was a 19th century snow scene, which was spectacular, but my favourite of all those beautiful pieces was the horses.

However, photos cannot do these quilts justice. They are just STUNNING. I think I’ll hang up my needle and thread right now…

The George R Brown Convention  Center is enormous. The views from the circle windows upstairs show just a tiny section of the wholesale market stalls. When the exhibition opens to the public tomorrow (class attendees get a preview tonight) it takes up half the ground floor of the convention centre with the vendor mall taking the other half. The wholesale vendors loaded out after 3 days yesterday and the retail vendors load in today.

Just to give you some idea of the size:
* 65,000 attendees
* 5,000 class attendees
* 415 classes
* approx. 50 quilt exhibitions in the exhibition hall with I don’t know how many quilts on display
* more than 550 vendor booths
* this is the only event that takes up the three full floors of the massive convention centre – ground floor is the quilt exhibitions and vendor mall (retailers selling fabrics,  notions,  machines etc); second floor is admin (registration,  enrolment,  class info,  Starbucks,  FedEx office etc),  and third floor is classes (seems to be hundreds of rooms!)
* one person I know who attended last year walked 32,000 steps at Festival in one day alone!

This is why it’s the ‘holy grail’ for quilters.