Internet at last!!

I've been in Houston since Saturday and only now have Internet access at the hotel. Don't ask! So now you're in for either a very long post or several long ones while I catch up on everything. Saturday afternoon, Russ Little and I met at the hotel and took the tram to the convention center. We didn't have a lot of time to spend but I had to see a bunch of people, so we headed to the vendor aisles. Here we are at the start of the afternoon. The first person we ran into was Cathy Arnett, who was working at the Embellishment Village booth. Cathy and I have never met face-to-face so it was good to do so, especially since I will be teaching at Fabrications Retreat next September. This picture of us isn't great but the other one was worse, so you get this one! Cathy is wearing a scarf she bought from me several months ago. Over at the C&T booth, Jane Davila had just left to go over to Make It U and Lynn Koolish (my editor) was left to man the booth herself. Can you tell what a terrible time she was having? She was demonstrating the new line of Liquitex soft acrylics that will now be available in quilt shops so that people who do surface design will have easy access to paints. Behind Lynn, the booth was loaded with all the wonderful little quilts created with those paints,including two that I made. The diversity of art was a pleasure to see!Here's Leslie Jenison, who was over at Make It University, demonstrating gelatin printing. She had just finished and we were waiting for Jamie Fingal to finish up so we could have coffee with them and chat for a bit. Pokey came over to say hi while we were waiting, and Susan Brubaker Knapp, who had just finished teaching, came over for a hug. Susan and I first met at Quilt Market in Portland last year when she took a schoolhouse class I was teaching. Now she's got a book out. Goodness, what a group! Russ and I did have a little time to see the quilts but I was not comfortable taking pictures of them. However, I had to take one photo of the wonderful German Forest installation. This doesn't begin to give you the idea of how amazing this exhibit was, but it's all I have.After the show closed, Russ and I met Jane Aldoretta and went out for a delightful evening and good dinner. It was soooo great to catch up with Jane and I can't wait to go out to Grand Junction again one of these days. She's got plans to open a wonderful, big, new studio and classroom space in January 2010 that will probably be a mecca for that whole area. There were people I didn't have a chance to see because there was so little time. We had hoped to go back the next day but Sunday turned out to be quite a different sort of day, which I will post about tomorrow.