Chicago Quilt Festival

My parents came into town this weekend from Cincinnati for the Chicago Quilt Festival. It was my first quilt show and it was pretty much exactly how I pictured it - except bigger. They said the Houston Festival is at least twice the size - I can't even imagine as it took us 6 hours to get through this one.

The beginning of the Festival was full of antique quilts dating back a couple hundred years. It is amazing to see what people used to make, all by hand. I could picture a lot of the elements in these quilts reworked in a modern fashion.

Other quilts displayed were made by current artists.

There were what seemed like a million booths. There wasn't a lot of modern fabrics - some Amy Butler Love, Sandi Henderson, Heather Bailey, Kaffe Fasset - but I did buy some very cool, original fabric which will be it's own post. I saw a few booths with feed sacks. I dug through them and found some pretty neat prints, but didn't make any purchases.

In one of the booths selling antique quilts, I came across an unfinished string quilt top. I flipped it over and it still had the paper on the back - a newspaper from Baton Rouge in 1967! I thought that was a pretty neat find.

This guy really intrigued me - he built his own long armed quilting frame! Now I just need to talk my engineering husband into building one for me...

Overall, it was a fun show. My mom LOVED it. It is moving to Cincinnati next year which is cool because that's where they live so I will just go to visit them next time.