Kristin (and Jesus) at the Quilt Show

Yesterday I drove home from teaching, changed clothes, and went to the Asheville Quilt Show with one of my best retreat friends.  I wasn't sure what to expect.  I've gone to many quilt shows, and each one is different in subtle ways.

Yesterday's show was very navigable, with wide spaces in front of each quilt, so I didn't feel too crowded.  People who wanted to linger wouldn't be in the way.  People who were tired had a variety of spaces at the edge of aisles of quilts where chairs were gathered in a circle.  A ring of vendors was at the outer edge--easy to get in and out of, which is not always the case.

As with every quilt show I've attended in the past 25 years, I saw very few hand quilted pieces.  My Florida quilter friend and I used to feel discouraged/outraged about this fact, but now I understand.  If I had money and time, I might send my quilts to a long arm quilter too.

As with every quilt show I've attended in the past 25 years, I was impressed with the variety of quilts:  traditional, experimental, modern, artistic, in both large and small sizes.  There was a quilt that was sort of a log cabin-ish pattern, but with a variety of ribbons, laces, buttons, and other embellishments; the contributor note said that they came from 4 generations of family members.  I wish I had taken a picture.

There was a moment when I wondered about entering my own hand-pieced, hand-quilted pieces.  Might I win a prize, since the competition is so sparse?  But my hand quilting is not likely to please the judges.  These days, my piecing is wonderful/intriguing/non-traditional/sloppy.  I do enough quilting to keep it all together, and it doesn't take as much as traditionalists tell us.

At the end of the afternoon, my friend and I went to the Moose Cafe.  I ordered NC mountain trout, not realizing that the frying would be more like a deep-fry than a pan fry.  I probably would have been happy with all sides.  Honestly, having the complementary biscuits with apple butter that were plunked down on the table when we first sat down would have been enough.

This morning, I woke up wanting to go back to the show.  I didn't take many pictures.  

The ones that are here are pictures that I took to text to others.  I also woke with the small, red, travel Janome machine in my thoughts.  And then, a line popped into my head, Jesus buying that machine, and during the last hours, I've been working on a poem about Jesus at the quilt show.

Here's my favorite part so far:

Jesus remembers the women
in his life who did the constant
work of repair:
his mother who kept
every scrap and transformed
them into safety and warmth.
Martha did the mending
after all the other work of the day.
Mary Magdalen taught
them all the value of adornment.

The poem is not finished yet, but I'm happy with the directions it might be going.  More to the point, I'm happy to have a poem coming into existence, a poem whose inspiration that I didn't even perceive yesterday.