Our Trip to Paducah

Its been darn near a week since we got home from the AQS show in Paducah and I'm still having a hard time submitting to my routine here at home. Large quilts are overwhelming me with their vastness and miles of quilting to do and my brain is still on overload from all the beautiful color of the show and all the ideas. I'm just a little depressed in the normal world.

We did have a great time! It was four years since my last visit to the Paducah show and took me that long to work up the courage to enter a quilt in that show. I was thrilled to get juried in and even more thrilled to have won a ribbon!

This was a truly unexpected honor and I have the picture to prove it, the unattractive one with my mouth hanging open, but wow, it was a cherry on top of the ice cream sundae! My entry, Sweet Candy Dots, was in the 1st Time Entry into the show division and there were many lovely quilts in that division. You can see the first and second online at AQS website.

Our trip involved a 12 hour bus ride before we got there but a dozen of us from our area went together so it was a lot of fun and especially having my sister and friends with me. We always have a great time together no matter what. We'd shop and look at the show, take classes and lectures every day and then meet back at the hotel for show and tell and glasses of wine or apple martinis! Nice way to end the day too. We had a couple of "rookies" to the show with us and on the first day Maggie said, We got to come back to this again!

My dear friend, Deanna, has tried for years to get a picture of herself with Eleanor Burns and succeeded this time. Deanna is her greatest fan I think and this year Eleanor even made it to one of our parties...she didn't know about it of course but it was pretty crazy. Thats my sisters jeans and shirt with a paddle face of Eleanor drinking some of our wine of course. She was propped in a wheeled desk chair and rode the elevator to our room which startled a man in the elevator I guess. He said, I won't even ask...I'm pretty sure we were the noisiest guests and had the best time but we shut her down at 10:00.

It was much more difficult to pack up our purchases though and lift them onto the bus. Lou Ann who owns the bus company and drove us to Paducah is a patient woman and I think she likes us quilters.

Funds were running low so it was time to head back to Wisconsin but I'm sure a return trip is being planned. As usual, all the people of Paducah went out of their way to make us welcome and did everything possible to make our trip memorable. Some told us they were grateful for the extra hours of work that week and in this economy, thats a great thing too. We did hear some critical remarks about the show or buses or their own fabric choices for crumps sake, but there are always sour grapes in the bunch, aren't there? Not in our bunch though!

All I can say is, even without a ribbon on my quilt, we'd have all been smiling while we were at the show! This is my sister Laurie and myself and we hope to get my other sister down there and my Mom too. Thank you friends for the great companionship, to Paducah for hospitality and AQS for a great show.