The State Fair of Texas may be over, but some Armstrong Elementary alumni and their families now have a lasting memory as sweet as any funnel cake.
A quilt made by students and parents from Karla Seymour’s first-grade class at Armstrong Elementary in the 2000-2001 school year received an Honorable Mention in its category at this year’s State Fair of Texas.
The students and their mothers created the quilt 25 years ago as a PTA auction project. As part of the project, the students drew portraits of themselves that were transferred onto muslin quilt squares. The students’ mothers then hand-embroidered the faces, arms, and legs in the drawings. Seymour and the school’s principal at the time, Dr. Mary Richey, also feature on the quilt.
“I thought, for the auction, every class would do a big group project,” one of the mothers, Juli Dewar, said. “It was a big endeavor.”
Dewar appliquéd each child’s clothing to match their original drawing, chose coordinating fabrics for each block, pieced the quilt, and did the machine quilting. Her husband bid on the quilt at the PTA auction after some nudging from the other mothers, and it’s been in their possession ever since.
She’d long hoped to enter the quilt in the State Fair of Texas’ Creative Arts competition and did so in 2026 with encouragement from a friend. The Honorable Mention nod was a welcome surprise.
“It’s kind of fun to participate in something like this,” Dewar said. “The group has won because it was an endeavor, and I didn’t do it all, for sure.”
Some of the students featured on the quilt, and some of the mothers, took a “field trip” of sorts to the State Fair of Texas to see the quilt on Oct. 6.
One of the students, Johnny Dewar, said going to see the quilt 25 years later was a “cool” experience. His classmate, Riker Huddleston, was on hand too, with his own child.
“It’ll probably be around for another 25 years,” Johnny said of the quilt. “Our kids will be able to maybe do the same thing too, which is fun.”
While the quilt is the first entry for Dewar, another of the moms, Barenda Hino, said she taught her daughter, Dorothy, to needlepoint when she was 5, and she’s had success with needlepoint entries.
“As a teenager, she would enter these needlepoint stand-up Santas with all the fancy stitches,” Hino said of her daughter. “Four different times we would enter them, different ones each year, and she won blue ribbons every year.”
Juli said that she hopes to have an entry for the State Fair of Texas’ popular Glue-A-Shoe competition next year.
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