A Day at a Craft Industry Trade Show: H+H Americas Edition

Tori McElwain

Have you been wondering what a day at a trade show entails? Let’s get into it!

It’s Wednesday, May 6, 2026 at the Donald E. Stephens Convention Center, Rosemont, IL

8:15 am — The Lobby

You smell the Starbucks before you see it. The line snakes back toward the registration booths, a slow-moving ribbon of lanyards and tote bags and people who clearly did not sleep enough last night. You jump in line (an easy breakfast).

The woman in front of you is holding a bag that says something about quilting. You ask about it. She laughs and says she’s been longarming for twelve years and just started designing her own patterns last fall. You tell her what you do. She pulls out her phone to scan your badge for the h+h app. You haven’t even ordered your coffee yet!

This is how h+h starts. Not at the keynote. Not at the booth. In line. In the lobby. In the five minutes before the day officially begins.

8:30 am — Keynote Session

Coffee (or water, or tea, or whatever floats your boat) in hand, you find a seat as the keynote begins. The room fills fast. The energy in here is different from a guild meeting or a quilt show - these are people who are building something, not just loving something. The knitters and hand quilters have their projects in their laps, needles flashing - hands busy and ears open. There’s a purposefulness to the way they listen, the way they lean forward and celebrate!

You celebrate with the winners of the Golden Scissor Awards. You take a few notes as the speaker welcomes the room to the h+h Americas Trade Show! Something the speaker says about community and trust lands differently when you’re sitting in a room full of a thousand people who are all, in their own way, trying to build exactly that.

10:00 am — The Exhibit Hall Opens

The crowd shifts, everyone buzzing with energy (nervous-excitedly!) moves toward the entrance hall. The sound hits you first. Hundreds of conversations happening at once, the low roar of a place fully alive. Booths stretch in every direction - yarn in every weight and colorway imaginable, fabric companies with their newest lines showcased in new quilt pattern designs pinned and spotlighted, pattern designers with their best sellers front and center, technology companies showing tools you didn’t know existed and now desperately want.

You have a plan. You’ve written down the booths you want to hit, the questions you want answered, the people you’ve emailed ahead of time to say “I’ll find you Wednesday.” But you also know the plan will bend, because h+h always has other ideas.

You look up first - top-down is the only way to navigate a floor like this. Signs, banners, the visual energy of a booth from thirty feet away. You stop at the ones that feel like they’re talking to you before you’ve even read a word. You take mental notes on the ones that don’t, for different reasons.

10:45 am — A Sticker Trade (and a New Friend)

You’re standing near the pattern designer pavilion when someone notices the stickers on your badge holder. “Oh, I love that one - where did you get it?” You explain that it’s yours. Her eyes light up. She reaches into her bag and produces her own: a small, perfectly designed block in her brand colors. You trade.

It sounds small, but it isn’t. There is something about the ritual of the sticker trade - the mutual offering, the “here, take a piece of my brand, I’ll take a piece of yours” - that cuts through the awkwardness of professional networking in a way nothing else does. You’ve just introduced yourself without a pitch. You’ve started a conversation that has nowhere to go but genuinely.

By the end of the day, you’ll have traded stickers with eleven people. You will remember every single one of them.

11:00 am — Business Class

You duck into one of the Business Classes - an hour-long session on digital marketing and content creation. The instructor is good, but what surprises you is the audience. The questions people ask are the questions you’ve been quietly turning over for months. Someone raises their hand and says exactly the thing you’ve been afraid to say out loud: “I don’t know how to make what I do online feel as real as it does in person.”

You write that down too. Not the answer - the question. Because you realize you’ve just found your people.

Tori at the Craft Industry Alliance Booth on the floor at h+h Americas trade show

12:30 pm — Lunch (Unplanned, Unrepeatable)

You grab a plate from one of the food stands in the side of the gigantic hall and scan the tables for a seat. The only open chairs are at a table already occupied by four people mid-conversation. You ask if you can sit. They wave you in.

One of them is a quilt shop owner from outside Nashville. One runs an online subscription box for hand-stitching enthusiasts. One teaches at a community college and also runs a pattern design business on the side. One is a manufacturer’s rep who’s been coming to h+h for nine years and has opinions about everything, generously shared.

You eat quickly and talk slowly. The quilt shop owner says she’s been looking for a pattern designer who does modern, beginner-friendly content. You happen to do exactly that. You exchange cards. The manufacturer’s rep leans across the table and says, “You two should talk to so-and-so in booth 412 - they’re looking for exactly what you’re describing.” Someone pulls out their phone and writes booth 412 in their notes.

You had no intention of sitting at that table. The show had other plans.

1:00 pm — Back on the Floor

You find booth 412. They were worth finding.

You stop by booth 1707 and say "hi" to me, Tori!

The afternoon has a different feel than the morning. People are warmer, more settled. The initial rush of “where do I go, what do I do” has given way to something more intentional. Conversations go longer. Someone you met briefly at the keynote finds you again and picks up exactly where you left off, as if the two hours in between didn’t happen.

You stop at a booth you weren’t planning to stop at and end up talking for twenty minutes. You hand over one of your trifolds. The person on the other side reads it carefully (actually reads it!) and asks a specific question about your bestselling pattern. You promise to send a sample when you’re back home. They promise to share it with their buying team. You both mean it.

I snapped this picture of Laureen from Tourmaline and Thyme with her quilt samples

1:00 pm — Second Business Class (Optional, But Worth It)

There’s a second Business Class slot running from 1:00 to 2:00 pm. You weren’t sure you’d go, but the topic pulls you in. An hour later, you have two pages of notes and a completely different idea for a program you’ve been trying to figure out for months. The speaker didn’t give you the answer directly - they gave you the question in a new frame, and your brain did the rest.

3:00 pm — The Main Stage Hum

The Main Stage has been running all day - free and open to everyone - and the crowd in front of it ebbs and flows depending on the topic. You drift past it several times throughout the afternoon, catching pieces of panels on everything from retail strategy to social media to the future of independent craft publishing.

At some point you stop drifting and stay. A panelist says something about the difference between being online and being known, and you feel it land somewhere useful. You open your notes app again.

4:00 pm — Happy Hour in the Exhibit Hall

The pace shifts. The exhibit hall technically stays open until 5:00, but Happy Hour changes the temperature entirely. People stop walking and start standing. The conversations get looser, longer, funnier.

This is the hour where plans get made. Real ones. The “we should collaborate on something” that earlier in the day would have been polite and vague becomes “okay but actually, here’s what I’m thinking” with a phone out and a calendar open. You make two promises in this hour that you fully intend to keep, and one that surprises you by how much you mean it.

Your feet are starting to register complaints. You ignore them.

5:30 pm — Fashion Show

The Fashion Show starts at 5:30 pm and it is, genuinely, a moment. Garments made by members of this community - this exact community, the one that has been humming around you all day - walk a runway under real lights with real music. People cheer for things they recognize. They cheer louder for things that surprise them.

You sit near the back and think about what it took to make each one of those pieces. The hours. The decisions. The courage of putting something handmade into that kind of light.

It’s a good reminder of why you’re here.

Posing at the end of an eventful day! Quilt is Fly Me Over The Rainbow quilt by Julius Rempe-Night and quilted by Corey Pearson

End of Day — The Tired-but-Electric Feeling

There is a very specific kind of exhaustion that settles in at the end of a trade show day. Your feet are done. Your voice is slightly hoarse. Your tote bag is heavier than it was this morning with other people’s stickers, brochures, business cards, and samples. Your brain, though - your brain is absolutely buzzing.

You scroll back through your notes on the walk to the car or the hotel shuttle or the hotel where you’re meeting people for dinner. There are names you need to follow up with. There are ideas you need to write down before the morning. There are two or three conversations that you’re still turning over, the kind that don’t resolve quickly because they’re actually good.

You leave with more than you came with. That’s what a good trade show does. New ideas, new connections, and new possibilities that feel real because you were in the same room, had real conversations, made real eye contact. You didn’t just scroll past these people in a feed or cold send a email hoping it doesn’t get lost in their mail box - you handed them a sticker, a acard, or a broshure and they handed one back.

Tomorrow Is Thursday — And It’s a Different Show

You get to do it again tomorrow - same building, same badge, entirely different energy.

Thursday is when the relationships from Wednesday deepen. The people you told you’d find again, you actually find. The booth you ran out of time for, you go back to. The conversation you wished you’d let run longer, you pick back up.

Thursday also has its own moments. There’s the Cosplay Fashion Show at 3:00 pm - a wildly creative celebration that reminds you the crafting world contains multitudes.

There’s a Meet up just for your community. And then, for those who got a Global Pass or bought a ticket separately, there’s h+h After Dark starting at 6:45 pm: food, music, drinks, dancing, and the particular magic that happens when craft industry professionals stop being “professional” for a few hours and just enjoy each other’s company.

You might go deeper into the exhibit hall. You might focus Thursday entirely on follow-up conversations. You might sit in on every Main Stage session and fill another notebook. The beautiful thing about having multiple days is that you can shift your focus—Wednesday for discovery, Thursday for depth, Friday for finishing strong and saying the goodbyes that are also, always, the beginning of the next thing.

But that’s tomorrow. Tonight, there are plans to make, notes to review, and probably a dinner with people you just met and already genuinely like.

This is the thing about h+h that nobody fully prepares you for: you don’t just leave with business cards and a heavier bag. You leave with a clearer picture of who you are in this industry, what you’re building, and exactly the kind of people who are going to help you build it.

See you on the floor. I’ll be at booth 1707!

Want to go in prepared?

Listen to the Quilting on the Side podcast with Tori McElwain and Andi Stanfield for behind-the-scenes booth prep, sticker strategy, and the real talk about what it takes to show up with purpose at a trade show.

For a full year-by-year strategy guide - from curious first-timer to confident exhibitor - read Tori’s roadmap post!

h+h americas 2026 runs May 6–8 at the Donald E. Stephens Convention Center in Rosemont, IL, with Tuesday, May 5 as a full day of pre-show programming including h+h University, Product Academy, and Sample It!

Register for h+h Americas with Tori's Link (Free Vender Hall Pass)

What year are you in? Where are you on your trade show journey? Let me know in the comments - I’d love to hear what questions you have or what's holding you back from attending.

Let's figure it out together. See you in Chicago.

About the Author: Tori McElwain is a digital marketing coach for quilting and creative businesses. With 24 years of quilting experience and a Master’s degree in Education, she helps quilters attract more students, sell more patterns, and grow their businesses online—without losing the joy of creating. She’s the author of “Workshops Unleashed” and cohost of the Quilting on the Side podcast.