2009 APPLIQUÉ SOCIETY SHOW HOST

2009 APPLIQUÉ SOCIETY SHOW

My name is Cathy Cardwell and I am the 2009 TAS Show Administrator. I recently had the good fortune to be able to bring Laura Brooker, one of the co-hosts of the 2007 Tampa show, on board to help with the next show. Laura and I are working hard to find the perfect location for the 2009 show. You may have considered volunteering to host a show and wondered what all is involved. Below is a very informative note from Laura which helps explain a lot of the responsibilities for the host chapter(s) and for TAS:

I'm Laura Brooker and I'm assisting Cathy with the 2009 show. I was also co-chair of the 2007 show, Applique in Tampa Bay. I can definitely tell you that it was a once-in-a-lifetime experience hosting the show. We have a chapter made up of members from area quilt guilds and many of us had experience putting on quilt shows with our local guilds. This was a whole new--and very enjoyable-- experience for us.

We have show manuals that explain what each committee needs to do. We outlined these duties in our newsletter and then brought the notebooks to a meeting so our members could look through them and decide which committee to chair. My co-chair and I visited two other TAS chapters, each about an hour away, and told them all about the show. Both chapters got very excite and appreciated our willingness to have them involved. We appreciated them too as one chapter took on the judging committee and the other registration. We had fun getting to know the other groups and some of them even joined our Feather Princess group, driving an hour each way to meetings

TAS took care of the contracts with the show site, the teachers and the vendors. We had input into all of this. We found the show site (we needed a hotel with a 10,000 square foot ballroom and 12 to 15 breakout rooms for classes) and TAS negotiated this contract. They provided us with a dream list of applique teachers and asked who we would like to have teach at the show. They had better connections with national vendors but we provided the local and state vendors' names--again TAS negotiated their contracts. Basically our early preparation for the show was letting Florida know a national show was coming to the state and working on our opportunity quilt as well as our own quilts for the show.

In January before the May show, things got busier as the quilt entries and registrations began coming in from TAS members. But again, TAS received all this information and passed it on to us in the form of a database. Our entry committee made the cards that hung on the quilts and got the information ready for the show program that we produced locally. I can tell you our membership grew as word of the show spread. Almost everyone was really excited to be involved in a show of this proportion. When we were awarded the show, our chapter had just formed and we had 15 members. We'll celebrate our second anniversary in August with 107 members! Hosting the show didn't do all that but it certainly called attention to our group.

There is so much more I would love to tell you about hosting a TAS show. I know you will find Cathy and I will be fun to work with--we sure had fun getting to know each other and then working together on the 2007 show!

PLEASE CONSIDER BRINGING THE 2009 SHOW TO YOUR AREA!

For questions or more information, please email Cathy (clcard12@yahoo.com) or Laura (laurajbr@mac.com).

Questions about our site??

Contact Us

This page was last modified on Sunday, July 08, 2007

No part of this website may be reproduced in any way without the written permission of The Appliqué Society® .