Houston International Quilt Festival- What's For Dinner? 2014

I announced a while back that I had a quilt make it into the "What's for Dinner?" exhibit at the Houston International Quilt Festival and I was excited to see it in person last weekend!

Here is the description of this exhibit from the call for entries:

"What’s For Dinner?
One thing we, at International Quilt Market and Festival, have noticed is that our quilters not only have a passion for fabric, notions, and sewing machines, but also a passion for FOOD! Whether it’s going out to eat or cooking something in their own kitchen, this is a creative interest and/or hobby in which many quilters take part.

International Quilt Festival wants to know what you are having for dinner tonight, and would like to invite you to participate in our new exhibit, What’s for Dinner?, which will premiere at International Quilt Market and Festival 2014 in Houston.

We’ll “set the table” for this Special Exhibit on the show floor with enlarged “place settings”, complete with a placemat/tablecloth, napkin, fork, knife, spoon, and a plate full of “what you are eating for dinner.” This could be your favorite dinner at home, in a restaurant, or what you have for Sunday dinner. We are excited about this theme and hope that it will show a variety of interpretations, fabric choices, and views into different cultures, rituals, and lifestyles. Think colorful, fun, outside the box, and visually appealing!

The jurors for What's for Dinner are Jamie Fingal and Leslie Tucker Jenison."

Without further ado, I am excited to show you my quilt!

 The quilts in the exhibit were arranged on a long table, which looked like it was set up for a big dinner.

I'm going to apologize now, because I totally forgot to take separate pictures of the table decorations in the center of the table.  However, I do have pictures of all of the "placemats" and I will share them here to give quilters inspiration for this exhibit for future years.

Please feel free to use my pictures on your blog, but please credit me and link back to this blog post!

The roast beef on this quilt totally looked real!

This one was probably my favorite (besides mine, of course!)- called "What Would Picasso Serve?"

 

I hope you enjoyed the exhibit!  Hopefully my quilt will travel to Chicago and get to be seen by even more people :) 

Houston International Quilt Festival- Astronomical Quilts

This past weekend I attended the Houston International Quilt Festival.  This was my 10th year in a row attending and it is an event that I look forward to every year!  The next few posts here will be all about the quilts at the festival.

Last year when I attended the Quilt Festival I saw that they were inviting everyone to participate in a block challenge with NASA Astronaut Karen Nyberg.  Karen sewed a star themed quilt block while in space onboard the International Space Station and they wanted everyone to sew a star block and mail it in to be included in a quilt with her block.  The blocks were supposed to be 9.5" unfinished.

I sewed a block and mailed it in last summer, so of course I couldn't wait to see the astronomical quilts.  It turns out that they received over 2,000 star blocks and made 28 quilt panels!  There were also several scrapbooks of stars at the festival that didn't make it into the quilts... they were received late or were the wrong size, etc.  The scrapbooks also included letters from people that they received with the quilt blocks.

I tried to take a picture of all of the panels at the Quilt Festival because I know that everyone was dying to look for their specific stars.  It took me over half an hour to find my star- my sister eventually found it on our second time walking by all the quilts!  I apologize for the angles of some of the pictures, I had to photograph around other people who were enjoying the exhibit.

You may download these pictures for your own personal use (and bragging rights).  If you want to use the pictures online or in your personal blog, please give me credit and link back to this website.

Now, the pictures!  This was the main star panel. The star in the center of the panel (the blue one with the red and white stripes radiating from it) is the one that Karen Nyberg sewed on the ISS.  

This was the other featured panel- it had blocks all from kids!

 

In no particular order, here are the other 26 panels- see if you can find your star!

 

This panel is obviously one of the coolest ones because it has my star!  It is in the second row from the bottom, 7th star from the left- it is yellow and blue.

Blogger's Quilt Festival- Large Quilt!

Hello!  I would like to enter the following quilt in the Blogger's Quilt Festival on the blog Amy's Creative Side. 

I call this quilt "The Blue Star Quilt" for lack of a better name.  My husband and I moved into a new house about a year ago and decided that we needed a new quilt for our queen-size bed.  Both of us claim that blue is our favorite color, so the quilt would definitely have to be blue!  I spent a long time gathering different shades of blue for a scrappy blue quilt.

I started off in the center with a scrappy lone star.  I followed a tutorial on a blog that unfortunately no longer exists so I can't link to it.  Then I decided that I wanted a border of flying geese.  I hate throwing away the triangle scraps from flying geese so I used those to make the pinwheels.  Finally, the last border is the scrappy version of my favorite star block (sawtooth star, variable star, it has lots of names!)

I quilted the quilt myself, it is mainly stitch in the ditch around the different borders.  It was such a pain to send this size quilt through my sewing machine that I didn't do any exciting quilting.  The quilt is 96" x 96"!

 

Here it is on the bed, you can see that we painted the wall behind the bed to match and I finally got around to making curtains as well!



And finally, just so you can realize how huge this quilt is, I added a 20-lb beagle for scale.

Quilt Statistics:
Size: 96" x 96"
Fabrics: Scrappy
Batting: Warm & White
Quilting: Stitch in the ditch with white thread

I hope that you like my quilt!  If you are interested in seeing more, please follow my blog!  This weekend I will be going to the Houston Quilt Festival and posting lots of pictures next week, if you are into that kind of thing :)