Quilt Market 2016 Recap

This is what the floor of the George Brown Convention Center in Houston looked like when we arrived. This is serious business and companies spend a lot of money for their presentations, especially the fabric companies. The show is open to the trade only. Lookie Loos are not allowed.

I had a single booth and it was in a very nice location.

I had 3 great helpers for set up. You're not allowed to pin anything to the drapes, so we had to hang everythiNg from the top pipes or pin it to another quilt.

This is what my booth looked like all set up. I was very pleased. I love my new demo table. It breaks down into two bags. I made a felt background, and hung felt fish and turtles that I made from the Fishalicious pattern.

When I made the choice to go to Quilt Market, I decided to take advantage of every opportunity to share Curvalicious. There was "Sneak Peak", which was a glass display case right before you entered the convention floor. Curvalicious was in section C1.

Don had suggested using a silk Skinny quilt and it truly glowed in the light. It brought lots of people to the booth.

Friday morning, I had a 1/2 hour presentation, called Schoolhouse.

I was so afraid there would only be 3 people in the audience, but 36 people showed up, including a couple of my friends as supporters.

The Curvalicious girls were ready for the presentation. I had 2 Vannas!

This is the quick Curvalicious, Baby!

Next up was Sample Spree. This is an evening event, but we saw people lining up at lunchtime. It's an opportunity for attendees to purchase lesser quantities of items at wholesale prices. The fabric companies have lots of fat quarter bundles with fabric that will not be in the quilt shops for a few more months. We had a table and were selling a Curvalicious combo that included the ruler, Beachalicious, Fishalicious and the Tote Bag pattern.

The presentation was very eye catching and it certainly did the trick. We sold out!!

We fell into bed exhausted after all we did on Friday. The actual show started the next day, Saturday. This is what the show floor looked like Saturday morning.

It was quite a transformation.

Here's a photo of me with my first customers! The shop is located in Lowell, NC and it's called Sew Much Fun!

And here are some booth and quilt photos.

Carrie Bloomstons fabric for Windham. I love the bee.

Here's the Relax and Recharge Lounge for charging phones and confabbing.

The Relax and Recharge Loungs

Here's a quilt in the lounge apropos for Halloween.

Quilter's Dream batting

Stephanie and me with Tula Pink.

She is sewing the butterflies on by hand.

 

Sew Kind of Wonderful

 

Cotton and Steel now has cotton thread made by Sulky.

This display shows off the very cool ends of the spools.

The Moda fabric booth. Shops make appointments to order the newest fabric.

We sampled the local restaurants. The first night we had Tex Mex at Chuy's

And the second, we couldn't resist the House of Pies. Yum.

The show exceeded my wildest expectations. We met so many shop owners and industry people. There was truly a buzz going about Curvalicious and I'm coming home with no rulers. Someone even bought my demo! Color me HAPPY!!!

If you need one, you can always go to my Etsy shop.

My next post will include some photos of the quilt exhibit.

 

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Ready, Set, .....

Today is the last day of the quilt show. The time has flown by. I thought you might like to see what the convention floor looked like before the show started. AQS provided 2 days for set up, so it wasn't that crazy busy when we arrived for set up on the second day.

We arrived in Daytona on Monday. It took us about 8 hours to drive from Key West including assorted stops. This state of Florida is long! Tuesday we headed to the convention center to set up the Curvalicious booth (#1507). This is my 3rd show, so booth set up is pretty smooth with a few tweaks for either new patterns, kits or quilts.

It's exciting to see the convention floor with unpacked boxes and pallets full of quilting goodies.

They were still hanging competition quilts.

 

There was a teachers' meeting before the show started. I was sooooo excited to be a member of this group. I felt a little star struck to be in a room with Gina Perkes, David Taylor, Karen Stone and Leni Levinson Weiner. We were even given a box of Winderfil thread. You can see I already removed 2 spools to share with my class.

 

The show has been awesome. The Daytona quilters were numerous. Many watched my demo and they loved Curvalicious. I sold out on Friday. My classes went well. I couldn't ask for anything more.

Now I'm ready to head North to sleep in my own bed. It's been 2 1/2 months.

You can check out my FB page for photos of some of the contest quilts

 

 

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