Quilt Show Weekend

Shane worked on the boathouse again the weekend.  He's been working on it every weekend we don't have the girls trying to get it done before he leaves for Vietnam - which is this Wednesday night. Friday I didn't spend solo because Debbie and Don took me to dinner at Rancho Bonita.  Then Saturday morning, I asked Debbie to go to the quilt show with me.

It was so much fun!  We saw tons of cute fabrics and amazing quilts!  Now that I know a little more about how they make more of the blocks, I was inspired to do more difficult quilts than I have previously tried.  Mostly though I was in awe at the amount of work some people put into their quilts.

Here were a couple cool ones I liked:

This quilt was made by a guild of quilters and each person made their own birdhouse block.  As a lover of birds and birdhouses - this one captured my heart!

This one gave Debbie and I goosebumps.  A military mom had given all of her son's uniforms to a local quilt store for them to design a quilt and her only request was "that they leave as many pockets on the quilt as possible for me to tuck memories of my son in for his son."

Here's a closeup of some of the pockets.

A little blurry yes - but I thought this one was cool anyway.

This was a fun one!

And this one I had to take to tell Shane it was going to be our new bedspread.  I couldn't keep a straightface long enough for him to believe me!

This one reminded me of Mom.  I'm sorry it's so blurry - I must've had my camera on a bad setting (so unlike me!).  But it's a Dick and Jane quilt which is right up Mom's lane.

Here's a closeup of some of the pieces of that quilt.

After the quilt show, Debbie and I checked a TJ Maxx like store of home decor items.  It was a cute store - some of the prices were good and some were no cheaper than you find at a regular department store.  We ate lunch at a hole-in-the-wall diner that had yummy asparagus soup.  It was apparently award winning - and a fun find to just happen across.  

As far as the quilting class goes, we learned the friendship star and flying geese pattern this week. I had to finish those blocks this weekend. Here they are:

And we had to sew our quilt tops together for class on Tuesday.  I am not still really not fond of the brown - I wish I would've known how the quilt was going to lay out a little better.  But I guess that was another thing the class was good for - learning the blocks and what kind of contrasts work the best in the different types of blocks.  Good thing it's just a small lap quilt.  But here it is:

This week we are going to learn to square the quilt, do the borders, binding and machine-quilt the backing together.  I'm excited to start on a new project.  I think it's going to be placemats with Kennedy.  I picked up a couple yards of cute spring fabric for us to have something to do on a rainy day.