Dena Crain: Artist & Teacher in Kenya

Well, I survived it! And it certainly was BIG!!! The venue met up completely with all my expectations – HUGE! You know, I once lived in Houston. Apart from the fact that it’s a whole lot bigger now than it was then, not much has changed. Check out this photo:

Houston Skyline

Forget about the billboards; they’re not what I’m showing you. Just take a look at the skyline – talk about urban sprawl! This kind of view persisted 360 degrees around me, this photo having been taken from the central downtown area.

In the Hilton-Americas Hotel right next door to the George R. Brown Convention Center, I shared a room with mixed media teacher Katie Kendrick. We found we had much in common, including the fact that we were both first-timers teaching at the IQF. We got along beautifully through the entire 10 days we roomed together, possibly because we were both so busy we hardly saw one another. Anyway, it was nice to make a new friend in Katie! The photo below was taken from our hotel room, which faced the George R. Brown Convention Center:

George R. Brown Convention Center

Here you see the venue for the International Quilt Festival, the George R. Brown Convention Center, as seen from my hotel room in the beautiful downtown Hilton-Americas Hotel. The Convention Center, it seemed to me, is a stunningly well-conceived structure, ideal for hosting any large gathering. With plenty of show space, lots of classrooms, banquet halls, and administrative offices to cope with virtually anything, the George R. Brown Convention Center is certainly the perfect choice for IQF. You can also appreciate that the weather was lovely. The only trouble was that I didn’t get out into it for the entire time I was there!!

Inside the George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston, Texas

For me, the first day’s teaching was a bit rough. Not only was it a bit overwhelming to enter this huge hall and locate my classroom and to teach for nine hours on the first day (!), but my self-confidence seemed to get lost along the way. It took a while for me to get a feeling for my student population. After all, quilters at the International Quilt Festival in Houston are among the most sophisticated in the world. Their expectations were quite high. By the second day, teaching Darned Quilts, I located my lost self-confidence and moved smoothly through the rest of the week’s teaching, with the highlights being my classes Goodbye to the Grid and Wholly New Wholecloth – both very positive surprises!

My thanks go to Judy Warner, previous Quilt University Darned Quilts and other classes student who was there to support me by working as my Teacher’s Pet in a couple of my classes – thanks, Judy! Also, my thanks go to all the Quilts, Inc. team for their amazing professionalism and especially to the Pfaff team for always being there when I or my students needed them; nice job, folks – thanks!

The exhibitions, events and shopping were simply too remarkable for words. I shot this photo of the sales floor from an upstairs overlooking window. You can see a glimpse of my head and shoulders reflected in the glass:

The vendors

It was here that I met Carly Mul, owner of WebFabrics, an excellent online and offline quilt fabric shop.  Carly has supported the Darned Quilters by supplying them with wonderful gradation fabric bundles, and I hope soon to be collaborating with her on a small marketing project – stay tuned!

One of the most impressive sights I saw was this booth shown below, where the Quilt Guild of Greater Houston were busy teaching the youngest quilters the traditions and techniques of patchwork quilting:

The youngest quilters!

Most impressive for me was the one class I had time to take, a longarm quilt demonstration class taught by Jamie Wallen called Thread Fusion. Jamie is an accomplished master on the longarm machine, with his own special style of stitching the most wonderful patterns – entirely free-motion and without marking! Below is just one little sample of his work:

Jamie Wallen's free motion longarm quilting motif

For more photos from Houston, be sure to check out this WebShots site: http://www.webshots.com/search?query=2008+Quilt+Market+Festival+Houston.

Another highlight of my trip (mine is a simple soul) was passing through the concourse tunnel at the Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport, Detroit, Michigan. This ugly but useful architectural necessity has been magically enhanced by interior art that borders on the sublime. I’m a great fan of electronic music, and that’s what you notice first as you come off the down escalator into the tunnel. Then you realize the walls of the tunnel are alive, dancing with colors that respond to the music! In fact, the installation is of frosted and sand carved glass panels, behind which are millions of tiny colored lights. As the music changes, so also does the pattern of colors. It’s a bit like stepping into my favorite screensaver, Flurry, on my Mac and with music added – only it’s life-sized!!! What a trip!!! I didn’t want to come out!!! Foxfire Glassworks are responsible – check them out!

Foxfire Glasswork's installation art in the Detroit Airport

International Quilt Festival teachers who have at least one class that would have filled twice are invited back to teach again the following year. One of my classes, Fuss Free Binding (my very favorite method of binding a quilt entirely by machine), would have done that had it been offered a second time, so I received an invitation to teach in Houston in 2009. Unfortunately, doing so would wreck my teaching schedule for Quilt University for the entire second half of the year! I was forced to decline that invitation, but I requested that I be permitted to teach instead in Chicago in 2010. That request was approved, so you can look for me there!

This entry was posted on Friday, December 5th, 2008 at 10:16 am and is filed under International Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.