PIQF 2008

The Pacific International Quilt Festival was held last weekend at the Santa Clara Convention Center. Oh how I look forward to this event, and this year was as wonderful as ever. I've prepared a slide show again this year. It looks like I took 81 pictures. The worst part of the show is the lighting. I found that if I turned off the flash, the quilts looked closer to real life. Unfortunately, I didn't realize that you have to hold the camera extremely still when there is no flash. Quite a few pictures turned out blurry, but not too bad. I'll have to remember that for next year.

edit: These slide shows tend to show very small in the blog. If you double click on the center of the picture, you will link to the web album and see much bigger and clearer pictures of the quilts.

Two more practice blocks

I have two more Dear Jane blocks done. These are the practice blocks that I started while I was waiting for my bolt of background fabric to arrive. I'm making four practice blocks that I'll put together for a small quilt for my hubby Lance. I gave him the book and had him pick out a list of about 10 blocks that he liked, and then I chose four for the mini-quilt. I have two that are foundation pieced and two that have applique. They are going well and I can't wait to start the actual quilt!!

Sewing Republic

I can't seem to grab a picture or icon, so there's not much "visual interest" to this post, but I wanted to let everyone know about a site I just found called Sewing Republic. I don't know much about it, but it appears to be sponsored by Bernina, and it has some really wonderful project ideas with full tutorials. I've got my eye on the coasters and also the wine tote. Hmmm. I'll be needing a project to work on tonight in class... Maybe we'll see some pictures soon after all!

Quilting in the Garden 2008

Quilting in the Garden is an annual quilt show in Livermore, California that is held at Alden Lane Nursery. Every year I get excited about going, and every year I miss it for reasons that are usually not very important. I kick myself for a long time about it and I always say, "well, next year...". Next year is finally here, and the show is this weekend (Sept 27 - 28). The plans are all set, and I am determined to go no matter what. I can't wait! It is such an interesting venue for a show; the quilts are all hung from trees in the nursery. There are featured artists, which this year inlcude Joen Wolfrom and Melinda Bula. And of course there is Alex Anderson, who was one of the founders of the show. I'll take lots of pictures and hopefully have a "celebrity" sighting. See you there!

Talk Like a Pirate Day!

Aha! I finally remembered that's it is Talk Like a Pirate Day before it was over!! I usually remember a day or two later. Aaarh you hearing a lot of "aarhs" and "mateys" today? Now you know why!

Class starts soon!

So my quilting hiatus lasted a little longer than I intended. With our vacation and my MIL's passing, I wasn't able to get back to sewing as early as I wanted. My mom came to the rescue and I did some sewing at her house last weekend that got me jump-started again. Just in time as the Monday night classes are starting up again. This coming Monday, September 8, 2008 at 6:00 pm will be the preview for the classes starting on September 15th, 2008 (6:00 to 9:00 for 9 weeks) at the Veterans Memorial Building in Redwood City.

I was putting the final border on one of the projects I'll be presenting, and a certain cat decided to attack my feet from under the ironing board. You can see the back view above and the very innocent looking front view below.

He must think he's helping by keeping me moving along! No time to stand around -- there's sewing to be done!

Marlene Murray

My mother-in-law, Marlene Murray, passed away last Thursday at her home. Although she had been ill, her death was sudden, and we believe she did not suffer. May she rest peacefully, free from the pains of her illnesses.

Vacation Day 6 & 7

So we are heading out today. Sad to leave our nice digs! I thought I'd post a picture of our favorite wireless internet spot, the Bean Scene. It's a nice little coffee shop here in St. George. They make the best iced mochas and some really good breakfast food, too. The people have been very friendly here (actually, everyone we've met on our trip has been very friendly). I've got pictures of the place we stayed as well as the quilt shops I visited, but I'll get those posted after I get home. Our flight out of Las Vegas leaves around 6:00 tonight, so we'll be beat by the time we get home. The question now is, will Bear be chew us out, or give us the cold shoulder... Thanks to Steve for watching over him for us!

Comments

It looks like I'm starting to get some weird spam comments. I've turned on the word verification feature that will hopefully stop that. If you would like to leave a comment (and please do!!), you will just need to type in the funny shaped word like you do when you order things on the internet. We'll see how it goes...

Vacation Day 5

Wednesday we explored Zion National Park. At this time of the year you can only drive through the park (which we did on Tuesday on our way to Bryce), but to hike around and explore, you need to take a free shuttle bus (after you pay to get into the park). It actually is a really nice system, where the shuttle comes around every 6 - 8 minutes. You can stay on it all of the way around the circuit, or you can get off at any of the stops and hike on the trails and pick up the next one when you are done. We got off a couple of times where there were shorter trails. It was over 100 degrees yet again, and hiking very far was rough. I don't think I've ever drank so much water in my life!! We did get off at this stop (below) where there was water seeping down the mountains. They made a walkway so that you could walk behind where the water was dripping down. It was refreshing to be behind there in the heat. It was strange to be in the desert-type climate and then see the water slowly falling down only in that one area.


If you drive through in your own car, you need to go through a mile-long tunnel that was built in 1930. They had to make holes in the side of the tunnel for light and air and also to push out the rubble as they were building. We saw the "window" first and couldn't figure out what it was until we got to a sign explaining it. When we got to the tunnel, we all had to stop our cars and wait for the wide motorhomes to come through from the opposite direction. Apparently if you are too wide for two-way traffic, you have to pay $15 dollars and you get an escort through the tunnel. Fortunately we were in the shade when we had to wait.

Today we relax! I'll be scouting out the quilt shops in town -- it looks like there are three right here in St. George! More on that tomorrow!!

View and Rental

Below is a view from one of our patios! The golf course runs outside of the casitas and we have a nice view of the mountains.



Lance took a picture of our rental car. I think we should have gotten an upgrade... :)

Vacation Day 4

Yesterday we drove through Zion National Park on our way up to Bryce Canyon National Park. We’ll spend a little more time at Zion today, but we wanted to get to Bryce because it is farther away from where we are staying. We ended up getting a later start than we intended, and didn’t get to see as much as we wanted. The pictures don’t show just how RED all of the mountains are. The formations are just amazing. We took tons of pictures, of course, but I’ll just post a few here. I’ll try for a slide show when we get back home.





Along the way we saw some buffalo outside of a restaurant serving buffalo burgers. We did not partake, but instead took some pictures for posterity.


Still posting from the coffee shop. I'm not happy about this situation, but the rest of the vacation is going great, so I can't complain too much...

Vacation Day 3

Just a quick post - sorry, no picture. We are having a tremendous amount of trouble getting internet access. Constant trouble where we are staying, and a bit of trouble at the coffee shop, too. There is outdoor musical theater during the summer at a high school for the preforming arts located about 5 minutes from where we are staying. Last night we saw Sound of Music and it was wonderful! They utilized the red rock mountain behind them in the staging and it all worked out very nicely. Well, we're off to a late start on our trip to Bryce Canyon today. This is the farthest. Tomorrow we are planning on Zion, which is closer. Hopefully we'll have better luck with the internet tomorrow!

Vacation Day 2

On Sunday we made our drive from Las Vegas to St. George, Utah. We ended up driving through the very corner of Arizona, and my plan was to take pix of the state signs. I got a great one of Arizona's, but we flew by the Utah sign and there was no way to turn around for miles. Oh well... It was a desert drive with a lot of this:

We ran around and did a lot of Geocaching -- we found six on one day (four in that tiny bit of Ariziona and two in Utah). However, searching around the desert in 100+ heat was totally exhausting! In and out of the car and slowly searching around was brutal. Lance and I grabbed a couple of pix.

The place where we are staying is absolutely gorgeous. I'll post pix of those next time...

Vacation Day 1

Well we've been without internet access for a couple of days. I even missed my own Blogoversary which was yesterday! We are having trouble logging in from our where we are staying now, as well. Right now I am posting from a coffee shop in St. George... We flew out of SFO on Virgin America. The flight was great. They have a tv in the back of the seat in front of you and you can watch tv or listen to music or even play video games. I'm not the best flyer, and this made the time just fly by. We got into the Las Vegas airport and got our car, which is a Ford Mirage -- a small SUV. Lance is a Hertz gold member, so they had given us a free upgrade! The heat hit us with a blast when we walked out of the airport. It looks like 100+ degress for us the whole time we are here. A short drive over to the Orleans Hotel and we were on our way. We were surprised to find that they do not offer free WiFi service, and since we were pretty busy so we didn't bother logging in. After a few beers and video black jack (Lance won the $10 that I lost), we headed over to the show. We saw the Steve Miller band with Joe Cocker opening. What a great show. Amazing how everyone is aging. I imagine both artist must be in their 60's by now... Most of the crowd was about the same, but I was surprised to see quite a few younger people. I guess good music spans generations.