Quilt show-and-tell

Before I do my show-and-tell about the quilt show we attended recently, I think you may want to know about Charlie's latest feat. You should be impressed by it.

Sunday night, after the hockey game ended and my wife went upstairs to bed. I was sitting on the couch, reading over a legal contract for a meeting Monday morning. Routine stuff; I was just scanning it over. Charlie was lying on the couch next to me, napping. Or so I thought. It was late, after all.

I flipped a page--and the next thing I knew, Charlie had dived over and spread herself out over the contract. Maybe she wanted to read it over for herself ...
[IMG]http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b289/drdog/CQuilt-Charlie-4-08.jpg[/IMG]

Don't know what she would find interesting in it. It was just a renewal of the cable company's contract to carry the Lifetime network. But Charlie reached for a page and pulled it down, then started nibbling on a corner of a page, evidently to bookmark it.

Clever little cat.

****
I fear I am going to have to break the report on the quilt show into two pieces. One about our day there, and the other showing some of the quilts. There were very many beautiful quilts there, so it won't even scratch the surface. I marked numbers of some of the images I wanted to use--and I went past 50. Cutting them down to a reasonable number won't be easy or quick.

As I said, the quilt show took place on the far west side of Chicago, near O'Hare Field. I watched some of the O'Hare traffic from the motel room's window. Big jets were taking off and landing all the time--coming down out of a low overcast or else rising up to be enveloped by it ...
[IMG]http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b289/drdog/Cquilt-Jetfog-4-08.jpg[/IMG]

On Saturday morning, we went to the show, which was held at the Donald E. Stephens Convention Center in Rosemont. The late Donald E. Stephens must have been a good guy to know. He helped found Rosemont and died during his 13th consecutive four-year term as its mayor.

According to the Wikipedia article about him, Stephens was suspected of being associated with organized crime; he had been indicted on charges of tax fraud and bribery but was acquitted on both charges. The Wikipedia article about Rosemont lists many places named after Stephens and notes accusations of "rampant nepotism." He also was quite fond of Hummel figurines and started a museum of them. Just so you know.

Here is what the convention center looks like from outside, as we walked from a nearby parking garage to the show...
[IMG]http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b289/drdog/CQuilt-Site-4-08.jpg[/IMG]

Parking, by the way, was $11 per vehicle. Tickets to the show were $10 per person.

During the long, long walk from garage to show, we passed what appears to be the entrance to one of the ballrooms in the complex ...
[IMG]http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b289/drdog/CQuilt-Hallway-4-8.jpg[/IMG]

Check out that humble, understated light fixture ...
[IMG]http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b289/drdog/CQuilt-HallLight-4-08.jpg[/IMG]

After more walking, we got to the entrance to the quilt show ...
[IMG]http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b289/drdog/CQuilt-Entrance-4-08.jpg[/IMG]

This is what it's like inside, as show-goers look at a display of some smaller pieces ...
[IMG]http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b289/drdog/CQuilt-Displays-4-08.jpg[/IMG]

As I said, the main display of quilts will come later. But this one was judged "Best of Show." It was made by a guy from Colorado, who here is explaining how he made it ...
[IMG]http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b289/drdog/CQuilt-BestShow-4-08.jpg[/IMG]

One of the things my wife had heard about was a quilted version of the "Last Supper" painting by Da Vinci. It was hanging over one of the walkways ...
[IMG]http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b289/drdog/CQuiltLSupA-4-08.jpg[/IMG]

From up close, it looked like a low-res digital photo: Here is a close-up of the last picture, showing Jesus at the head of the table ...
[IMG]http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b289/drdog/CQuilt-LSupB-4-08.jpg[/IMG]

In fact, the Last Supper quilt was made up of thousands of little tiny squares of different colors--and yes, a digitized photo was involved ...
[IMG]http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b289/drdog/CQuilt-LSupC-4-08.jpg[/IMG]

We walked around, examining the quilts for several hours. Finally, it was time to get some lunch. We wound up in a cafeteria and made our way down a long, long line. And when we finally got to the front, it was like "Saturday Night Live."

The cook who took the order may have been of Indian descent. He definitely spoke with a thick accent, as he asked "Shee-boorger, shee-boorger, shee-boorger" over and over. Just the way John Belushi did on SNL many years ago. We didn't hear "No Cokes--Pepsi" but we weren't there for long.

The french fries were barely lukewarm and soggy, and the shee-boorger was of a normal size. What wasn't a normal size was the bill. Just remember what I wrote earlier about prices in the Chicago area. Here is the bill from our modest little meal of two shee-boorgers, soggy french fries and two cokes ...
[IMG]http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b289/drdog/CQuilt-LunchRecpt-4-08.jpg[/IMG]
Yeowch! You know, for a big bill like that, you'd think that the date on top would be at least somewhat accurate.

Back on the floor. The exhibition hall was huge and crowded. We finally came to the end of the quilt displays and started meeting vendors. That area was crowded, too ...
[IMG]http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b289/drdog/CQuilt-Displayarea-4-08.jpg[/IMG]

Many of the booths had a large assortment of "fat quarters" for sale. My wife looked at some of them, but after a while, she said she wouldn't look at any more of them--they were all running together in her mind. I said, "If you've seen 10,000 fat quarters, you've seen them all." Here are a few dozen of them ...
[IMG]http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b289/drdog/CQuilt-FatQtrs-4-08.jpg[/IMG]

They had all the latest, most exotic sewing machines there. As well as some oldies but goodies ...
[IMG]http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b289/drdog/CQuilt-SewMachns-4-08.jpg[/IMG]

What my wife had wanted to see most of all (her main reason for going to the show) were long-arm quilting machines--machines that can assemble the components of a quilt, the top, the back and the batting inside, putting a stitch design on it at the same time. She is thinking about getting one for herself in a year or two, and this was her chance to do a little in-person research.

She thought they would have two vendors there. In fact, they had about a dozen, from as far away as Australia, including some models that attach to a regular sewing machine. Here, she is giving a "Tin Lizzie" machine a test run ...
[IMG]http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b289/drdog/CQuilt-Longarm-4-08.jpg[/IMG]

So she collected a lot of brochures, other handouts and business cards with web addresses, and will be going over them carefully at some time in the future. By the way, she deliberately left her purse behind in the motel; she wore two fanny packs (one for her camera, one for her wallet) and carried a backpack for collecting things. That plan worked well.

It took several more hours to give the exhibitor section a "once over lightly." When she got to the very last row--and discovered that a vendor was giving massages with a hand-held machine--she was quite happy to sit down for a while ...
[IMG]http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b289/drdog/CQuilt-Massager-4-08.jpg[/IMG]

In all, we were at the quilt show for about seven hours, so we were pretty tired by the time we made the long walk back to the car. For the record, we never got separated from each other--I stayed pretty close to her, even when breaking away to get a photo of a particularly interesting quilt.

It was the biggest event either of us had ever attended. No wonder we were tired that night.