2019 Vermont Quilt Festival

This year's show was perhaps the best I have attended. In terms of how it was organized and how it felt to take a class and shop, it was outstanding. The expo has two main buildings, and this year one was housing all the quilts - the quilts in the show as well as the exhibits of teacher quilts and the New York curated show of antique quilts. All is all a tremendous job is done by the organizers of the show.   The vendors were all in the other building, and this made for room to shop and room to sit. There were more benches and chairs this year, and that was much appreciated.  The food vendors were all top notch and I enjoyed two taco salads - one on the day we had a class and one the next day.  My good friend and I had a ball shopping, and even though we bought no big ticket items we each came home with something we couldn't get here locally. 

I featured this quilt up top, and this is the detail and the attribution. This was a lovely quilt - you just cannot imagine all the stitching that went into this lovely work of art. The pictures do not do it justice of course, as is usually the case with fabric art. 

The curated show of the New York Historical quilts was wonderful. Some really lovely work went into these quilts and some were amazingly colorful! The picture below is of my very favorite in this collection.

This is an absolutely beautiful quilt. Very old, and those colors still pop out at you like crazy!! I was stupefied for moments looking at it and just had to photograph it and its card.

1890, and still vibrant colors....just lovely.  Usually I am not a fan of orange, but in this quilt I love it!

Ladies enjoying these lovely detailed quilts - more from the New York Treasures collection!

We took RaNae Merrill's class called Free Motion Mastery in a Month.  It was a lot of fun. We did the half day, and I think it was a good class for beginners or for more experienced folks like my friend and I - we aren't experts but we have been around the quilting block awhile now and we have done several classes. RaNae is a born teacher, and her approach was so kind and so supportive. No negative remarks at all - just a "keep trying" approach if things weren't going well, and a "great work" approach if they were!! Very nice lady!  We had to shlep our own machines to this one, and it was one of the classes held at Vermont Technical College in Williston, just down the road from the Expo itself, which is in the Champlain Valley Exposition in Essex Junction.   Note the detailed variegated quilting in the quilt by RaNae above!  This was hanging in the Teacher's Quilts exhibit.

I took my trusty little Janome 8050, which while not actually a small machine compared to the Janome Jem, is smaller than some machines people managed to haul in there. HAHAHA.

Here is the Janome in her EverythingMary tote that was purchased just for this event! I will store the Janome in there though - it is handy.

And yes, there was one doll there at a booth with her "gramma." Belonging to the vendors daughter - she is traveling with the vendor to shows this year!  I bought the Indygo Junction pattern in the background...and couldn't resist this picture! 

And as a finale, my haul. Amazing how cute little coordinated fat quarters can be - planning on several doll outfits with these. And who could resist a 6"x8" Olfa mat and smaller cutter? Not me for sure. As to those Alpaca socks, I bought them at the EmptyPockets Alpaca Farm booth!  They feel like silk. I bought them because I wore my sandals and had begun to get a blister. I wanted socks, and outside of bulky wool, the wool and yarn vendors only had these, and oh how wonderful they are! I put fashion aside and popped them on and the blister had no chance.   Another year gone by - looking forward to the 2020 show already and hope many of you will be there too!