Quilt Week in Central Oregon

If you're not interested in quilts, just skip this one. But if you like pretty pictures, stay tuned!

Sisters, Oregon has had an outdoor quilt show for 40 years now. The first year 12 quilts were displayed on and around buildings. This year there were about 1200 quilts! The show is always the second Saturday in July, so we arranged our trip to include this fabulous event.

In addition, quilt stores in the area have many classes and special events the week before the show. Wow! No wonder I haven't written in a while. I've been busy! I took two classes and attended one lecture. I spent more money than I care to admit on items for the classes. I had TONS of fun!

Marv was a truly good sport and went with me to Sisters for the show. After about an hour, he retired to have coffee and read his book while I kept wandering around town. Here are some of my favorites from the show.

Quilts have really changed in the last 20 years or so. They are now more art than craft. I make more traditional quilts but with bright colors and intricate fabrics, like this one:

But I truly admire the ones who created the last two pictures above. The eagle is so accurate that you could swear it must be 3-D. The last picture is a "modern" quilt, perhaps created on the fly, perhaps planned carefully in advance.

The top picture (with me in it) and the fourth one are both made with many, many small pieces and carefully planned color schemes. The pieces for the fourth one are about 1" on a side and there must be thousands of them! They probably include hundreds of different fabrics. (For me, life is too short to put this kind of time into a project! I'd rather do more quilts and spend less time on each one. But they are wonderful to see.)

Another change is in the quilting. I wish you could see how beautifully quilts are machine-quilted these days. They are detailed and gorgeous! You can see some of the intricate quilting in the tan band below the peacock. If you get the chance to go to a quilt show sometime, you will be blown away. Many quilts have also been "embellished" - extra stitching in different colors to "paint" the fabric, added beads and hot-fix crystals, etc. If you enlarge the top picture above you can see little dots in the black fabric. Those are beads sewn on by hand - again, hundreds of them!

 Now back to your regularly scheduled blog.

P.S. Thanks to my son Chuck and his friend Mark who helped me figure out how to add photos to this blog. You guys are geniuses!

Still Rolling

I'm sure you have all decided we've fallen off the face of the earth. In fact, it's just me who's disappeared - or rather, quit writing. But I'm back and planning more great adventures!

We had a delightful time in Colorado, checking in with friends and family in several cities. We went to our storage unit and decided that much of what we had planned to pick up was really unnecessary or had been replaced already. I did get my sewing machine and box of projects! Fun, fun.

We spent a couple of days in Loveland so Marv could go to Annual Conference and check in with some friends and colleagues. It was a good day for both of us - I sewed all day.

Then four days driving and a couple of days in the middle to relax, and we got to Bend, Oregon. We're here for a month. It's a lovely town with lots of trees. Free concerts in the park, farmer's markets, beautiful mountains (like Faith, Hope and Charity, the Three Sisters).

The first couple of weeks were unusually hot. Everyone in town was commenting on how strange the weather was. By noon it was time to stay out of the sun. But we managed to attend the Bite of Bend. Many food booths with samples for $1 or $2. Lots of yummy stuff! Of course it rained part of the time, but that just cools things off. And I have discovered that I don't even melt in the rain. Who knew?

We walked around the park downtown one day and discovered many ducks in the river nearby, some of them "mooning" us as they looked for food underwater. Cute!

Next - Quilt Week in Bend and Sisters!