QuiltCon 2024 – I’m Back Home!

What a week. Holy smokes. I’m back home from QuiltCon 2024 in Raleigh, and getting back into the flow of working in the studio is a little rough. How about a little photo download a sharing of the experience instead?

My trip started with a flight from Florida to New Jersey. I had a few days of working with my team at Gotham Quilts to pull everything together for our booth. That involved packing up the patterns that Mom had kindly stuffed, then putting Mom to work at the shop folding fabric bundles. We folded a gazillion bundles of fat quarters and half yards of fabric. It takes me 10 minutes to fold 2 fat quarter bundles, when there are 12 fabrics. That feels pretty good. Then, it was time to pack up the cargo van and my car.

Andrea and I drove from New Jersey to Raleigh on Tuesday. Somehow, despite ignoring all of the routing wisdom given to us by our various menfolk (avoid I-95, detour around DC, yada yada) I turned on the GPS and followed the blue line. We hit 2 minutes of traffic, and made the trip in record time. Ivete and her partner followed another route and took a few hours longer. I felt skilled, but I know its just dumb luck. (I’ll take dumb luck every day, thank you very much.) Reyna rolled in just as Andrea and I were falling asleep.

Reyna is an OG Gotham Quilts employee. She was part of the team already when I first met Andrea and Ivete. I was so thrilled to get to spend so much time with her this trip. I always liked her at the shop, but we never had time to get to know each other before she moved across the country. That has been rectified, and now I have another weird buddy. The weird ones are worth waiting for.

Wednesday was when THE WORK began. We drove over to the convention center, waited patiently in line, and unloaded our vehicles. Ivete, Andrea and Reyna got started laying out the booth, while I went over to the Fish Museum booth to help with set up. Deb Fisher has a very specific vision of what her booth needs to look like, and it is tremendous fun watching it all come together.

After lunch, Deb was mostly done, so I headed over to Gotham to help finish setup there. It was long, hard and everything was heavy. When Andrea packs a box, she is not messing around. There was zero air in any of those boxes. It makes for a nice efficiently packed truck, but holy shirtballs, those boxes were heavy. Also, I’m an old lady now, and when I bend over and try to lift up a box, nothing happens. Actually, not nothing. I make a noise, but the box doesn’t move. We worked on the booth until they kicked us out at 7, then went to have dinner.

Thursday was Day 1. I worked on crowd control at the Fish Museum booth, which is always fun – I hand out deli numbers to people, then chase them away, because we can’t have 300 people waiting to get into the booth. Last year people had a hard time finding me, as I’m so short. This year I solved that by tying a balloon to my hair clip. Worked like a charm.

By noon, the crowd had died down and I was able to go over to the Gotham Quilts booth, where they were totally swamped. There were so many customers crowded into the booth, I couldn’t believe it. From a shopper perspective, I hate crowds like that. As a shop employee, I loved it. We sold a lot of fabric and kits, and it was awesome.

Friday was crazy busy all day, and I loved it. I had never realized how much fun it was to watch people buy bundles I had folded before. Oh, and watching copies of my patterns walk out of the booth was fu*ing fantastic.

Saturday and Sunday weren’t quite as busy, which was a little surprising. I’d love to understand how it slowed down on the weekend, which was the opposite of what I expected. Sure, Sunday made sense, but Saturday I was expecting to be busy. Sunday ended with packing up the booth, loading the unsold merch into the van, and going out to dinner.

We drove back home Monday. Once again, we encountered very little traffic. Now I’m back home, trying to settle back in after months of working on this one project. I’ve got a to-do list that is a mile long, and includes pattern design for Threadsome, working on getting my published patterns into print versions, prepping for upcoming teaching, and so many other things. I really love my job. Thank you for being here and giving me a reason to keep sharing.

Also, thanks if you came by to say hi while I was in the booth. I loved having so many people tell me they enjoy my stuff. What a rush. If you didn’t get proper attention from me because I was ringing the register, or with another customer, I’m sorry. I get customer service tunnel vision and can’t pull myself away from working. I did love all of the hugs and selfies, though. I almost never suggest selfies – I have some social anxiety and I’m super neurotic. Just the thought of asking and having someone say “no” makes me unwilling to ask. If you want a pic with me, I’m happy to smile, so just tell me.

One thing I decided while at QuiltCon 2024 was based on my love of networking. I love amplifying the voices of other makers. If you have something you are working on that you would like to share, drop me a line. I’ll share it, and maybe you can share what I’m up to with your followers, This industry is so kind and generous, and I want to be part of that. There are some folks who like to climb on top of each other, and that is a real turn-off for me. I think we can all pull each other up. I’m happy to start. I’ll be back on Friday with a post about what some of my friends are up to.