My iPhone let me down :-(

Drove in to Garden City for the Long Island Quilt Show yesterday.  It's a long drive, but fortunately I had my friend Peggy along -- we never stop talking and the time and miles fly by.  We had a fabulous lunch at a Mediterranean restaurant, then headed over to the Garden City Field House.  The place was filled with so many beautiful quilts, but not one picture that I took with my iPhone came out!  I'm so disappointed; I really wanted to share them with everyone.  Sigh.

The quilts ranged from king-size to small wall hangings; from very elaborate to someone's very first quilt (it won a first prize, nice!); from intricately pieced to all kinds of applique; from densely machine quilted to hand ditch-stitched; from muted batiks to brilliantly colored; from traditional to ethnically-inspired art quilts.  Oh, how I wish you could see them!

This was my first quilt show since I started quilting.  There were about 20 different categories in the competition, some more interesting to me than others.  I don't know if I'll ever approach the exquisite work in the very best quilts, but I was pleasantly surprised to see that many of the quilts really looked like something that I could tackle with some success.   Fortunately, my DH and I were going to some friends' for dinner, so I didn't have to cook when I got home.  Fueled with enthusiasm, I sat right down at my sewing machine for an hour.

There weren't as many vendors as we'd expected, but given the number of quilts and people, I'm not sure where they could have set up shop anyway.  There was one big place that had sooo many different notions and tools, I'm surprised the floor wasn't damp with drool!  A couple of vendors with highly discounted fat quarters and half-yards.  I scooped those up to use in my Farmer's Wife quilt.  My stash isn't all that big, and since most of my early quilting projects were for babies, the fabrics don't work very well in this quilt -- I needed more muted colors.  Can't wait to dig into them!