This past week is where deer and quilts collide in my life.
For almost all of the past ten years, I have been attending the International
Quilt Festival in Houston. For all but one of those years, Quilt Festival is
during the week preceding and the weekend of Opening Weekend of Deer Season. I
capitalize that because it is a holiday at my house that is on par with
Thanksgiving. So imagine being gone for a week leading up to Thanksgiving and
returning late Wednesday night to find all of your visitors already present at
your house. Men, you will not understand, but the mothers will.
Fortunately, the meal preparation for Opening Weekend is not
as elaborate as it is for Thanksgiving. For many years we had a fish fry, but
the past couple of years we have had a hamburger cookout. Every family or group
brings some of the ingredients along with other goodies like dips and chips and
desserts. Another advantage over Thanksgiving is that we have this dinner
outside around the campfire. One of our hunters is a veteran firefighter with
lots of experience working in the firehouse kitchen. Unfortunately, he is off
elk hunting in Colorado this year, so I did not have his able assistance. But
my friend Earleen Brister was here to help, thank goodness!!
Interspersed with all of this is the excitement of hunters
going out and coming back in to report what they saw and/or what they shot.
This year, no one on our ranch has shot anything so far, but the neighbors a
couple of ranches over came by today with a really nice mature eleven-pointer
and an ancient eight-pointer. My daughter and I went out Saturday afternoon and
saw lots of deer, but nothing that we needed to shoot just now. I always enjoy
just watching the animals and listening to the birds. My daughter and I also
enjoyed the requisite nap just after settling in the blind—you know the one
where you lean your head back and hang your mouth open?
Now for the Quilt Festival report—Earleen and I both took a
week of classes and are back full of ideas for how to put our new information
to use. After nearly forty years of wanting to learn shisha embroidery, I
finally know how. I will post a picture of my first attempt on my blog, where
you will be able to see how I got the hang of it as I went around the circle.
Shisha embroidery is from India
and involves attaching tiny mirrors or
reflective metals to cloth. For this class, we used large paillettes, which are
similar to sequins. I also took classes in machine applique, a couple of
machine quilting classes, one on painting shoes, and one creativity workshop.
 |
| My first attempt at shisha embroidery. |
As for the quilts on display, there is an obvious trend
toward quilts that recreate photographs. The top winner was derived from a
photograph of a display at the Dallas Arboretum of a boatful of Chihuly glass
balls. The artist managed to capture the
illusion of translucent glass in fabric yielding a beautiful work of art. My
favorite among the top winners was by Jane Sassaman, who is known for her
stylized natural motifs. This year’s quilt represented plants, lizards, and
insects in her back yard and was very colorful. The Houston Chronicle website
has a slideshow of the highlights that I will link to on my blog, if you want
to see these works of art for yourself.
So off I go, back to clean my rifle then get back to the
sewing machine—my favorite time of year!!
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