QuiltCon 2015 in Austin, Texas was a blast! It was a very busy 4 days for the show and one extra day of shopping in Austin. My plan for reporting on this trip is to go in mostly chronological order and grouping photos in a way that makes sense to me. All of the photos for these posts will be clickable if you want to see more detail. Also, my photos don't represent the whole show (how could they?), but they are a taste of what appealed to me at the time.
Above is my official PDX selfie. I'm glad I got there before the carpet disappears. I left Bend on Wednesday morning and flew through Portland and Seattle to Austin. Along the way I met up with my travel buddy, Marion. There were also 5 others from the Central Oregon Modern Quilt Guild who traveled to Austin. 
Thursday morning dawned beautifully. Unfortunately, this was the last we saw of the sun. The rest of the days in Austin were very grey. Our hotel room (Hyatt Place) looked out over the convention center and faced east to the rising sun.
We got to our hotel at 7 pm on Wednesday night, too late to register. So on Thursday morning we waited in a rather long line while some computer issues were worked out. We got our name tags and a huge goody bag!
The first event on our schedule was the MQG Awards Ceremony. The ballroom was surrounded by many of the QuiltCon charity quilts, made from MQG's around the world. There were more in the other ballroom too.
Unfortunately, the convention center did not have the lecture set up finished and the ceremony started about 45 minutes late. When it did start, Jacquie Gering had no sound system and the power point didn't start working until nearly the end. That was very disappointing, but I mostly felt bad for the winners who really didn't get their due. Below, Jacquie shows everyone how to do the "matchstick quilting" dance.
This is our Central Oregon Modern Quilt Guild charity quilt. We did liberated houses in this alternate grid format. All the COMQG peeps who made it to the show are in the photo above: Susan, Kayla, Christy, Lindsey, me and Erin!
The charity quilts were really wonderful. Unfortunately, they weren't labeled with the guild name, so I don't know which guilds made which. Next time I'll be showing quilts from the Quilt Show floor! Enjoy!
