Final Impressions
Quilt Festival Houston 2022 was considerably smaller than 2019.
There were fewer students taking workshops.
The vendor market was much smaller.
The number of exhibits was half.
In many ways I thought this was a better show. With fewer quilts/exhibits I could concentrate on each grouping. There weren’t so many people that I couldn’t get a good view of each piece. And this year, the brochure contained photos of the winners in each of the categories.
I attended two lectures…one by Juditth Baker Montano on her journey as an artist with stitching: and Jill Kertulla on the value and manner of visiting an art museum.
Both were well attended and offered the following take-aways.
Judith started small (only two students in her first class—her best friend and her best friend’s mother), She works hard to develop her work improving—and interestingly getting more detailed with finer and finer thread. Her Silk Embrodiery book sold more copies than Stephen King for three months in a row.
Jill Kertulla started as a graphic designer in the days of cut and paste–physically and began using technology in the form of photographs printed on cloth but with additions of multiple layers, cutting down to some but always building. Focusing on a particular aspect whether it be design or color or image makes a museum visit valuable in advancing personal artwork.
I was fortunate to stay in the Hyatt Regency–a very nice hotel with bus service to the George R Brown Convention Center, I did a lot of walking on all three days and had the luxury of Starbucks coffee on two of them.
My husband dropped me off on Wednesday and picket me up on Saturday. I’m already dreaming of next year—but I have a lot of ideas and things to work on—and perhaps next year I’ll have several pieces in the show.
Sylvia Weir Art 
Your observation that smaller might actually be better for the show reminded me of my impression of the first year the Houston show added a Chicago location. I’d not been to the Houston show – too far away – but I was relatively close to Chicago at the time so a friend and I drove over and stayed 3 days I think so we could see the exhibits, vendors and take a few classes. It was sensory overload to the max, and I might add, not the first big quilt show I’d attended – I’d been to Paducah several times. It just seemed that they thought if they could just add more of everything, it would make it a better event. It did not. Especially when it came to vendors – 500! No way to get to them all even if I had wanted to. Anyway, when the card came wanting to know what I thought of the event, I was frank in telling them that sometimes more was just more and not necessarily better, just too much.