Take a gander at the Houston Market...

And I thought I had blunted the jet lag... well, that theory goes by the wayside.  Just couldn't stay up any longer last night, so laid down at around 9:30, thinking that would probably get me through the night, and I could wake up at a respectable hour... well, sort of respectable, like 5 or, with luck, 6.  Forget that!  I woke up at 2:30 am.  There is nobody else up, probably in the whole city... so thought I'd blog for a few minutes before I try to catch a few more winks.

Checking out samples, discussing...

Writing orders...

I thought I'd give you a view of the Houston Quilt Market before this new format (or my funky computer) completely drives me nuts.  I have pictures and text bouncing around at what appears to be random.  And, this blogging thing used to be easy!!

There were 22+ rows of vendor upon vendor.  You can see in the first picture how big the smaller vendors' spaces were, the second picture shows a bigger vendor with people writing orders.  The vendors who would share with me seemed to overwhelmingly say that they had wished this show had followed the election, thinking that the results of the election would have influenced the orders written.  Everyone agreed that people were kind of waiting anxiously before taking another financial risk.

Trying to give perspective... the lights go on forever!

Some vendors had lots of free space...

It didn't seem like the economy was much of a bother for many of the shop-owners, though.  New ideas and products, demonstrations, samples, quilting ideas abounded.   I took photos of lots of quilts - who would have guessed? - and found many ideas that might be translated into projects over here.   We have ideas for marketing, potential vendors if we want to open a store here, and it was generally a very productive time.

My lovely hostess after hours of driving, tromping the show!

Adi and I talked for hours about how a store might work, where it could be, what we would do there, strategies about introducing quilting or sustaining it over here.  Basically, she said we should focus on Tirane for now.  So, will not try to go north, but will still try to visit Morave and Berat.  It always seems like such a really long visit while I'm preparing, and the time goes by so fast, I wonder how I'm going to get it all done while I'm still here.

Well, I'm going to post this - so you can read it before it mysteriously disappears into the clouds somewhere.  I'll catch you up on my activities here in the next blog.