Back From Quilt Festival

What a wonderful week last week was in the Ogden Utah area with my friends for the Utah Quilt Guild's Quilt Festival. Each year we gather as a state guild to take workshops, listen to lectures, eat, visit and of course shop! LOL And so we did.
Usually I stay in a hotel connected with the conference center with my friend JB but this year she is serving with her husband as a missionary in Canada and so I made different plans. Our timeshare Worldmark has condos that are less than a 1/2 hr away and so we spent our free time and nights there and it was a wonderful choice. It gave us plenty of room to spread out with 2 bedrooms (and two Murphy beds) a kitchen and dining area an nice living room plus all the extras like a gas grill and hot tub if we wanted to hike down to them as they were a bit of a walk LOL
My personal experience was good..but I have to admit my class wasn't what I expected.
It was a lovely project and the teacher had some new tricks to teach me doing foundation paper piecing but unfortunately the class "should" have been limited to experienced students with the paper piecing being such a hands on teaching thing and there were WAY too many who had no experience at all with it and some who had very little if any quiltmaking experience. So I just wanted to help out the teacher and spend a large majority of the time "assistant teaching" and didn't get much done on my own project. Just to explain how NOT EASY this was it took me about 3 hours to piece just ONE star and the project consisted of 20 stars with several thinking they would be making a QUEEN sized quilt out of these 6 inch star blocks...OK NOT a good plan LOL I talked to one of the other students the next day and sure enough she was not planning on doing any more of the stars...too bad because they are neat little stars.

Anyway, I got four sections pieced together and then two of them joined into a half star and two ready to join together for the other half. When I got back to the condo that night I finished the star and completed one more but I know it will take me quite a while to get this project done even though I have plans for it as soon as I can get it done! Sigh...

For the rest of the report we enjoyed trying a few of Ogden's restaurants new to us...Rooster's and Javier's (let me know if you want more info) were both great! And DH and I ate at a Dee's on our way home that was a great memory for him as it is a Utah based place and been there since probably the 40's or 50's LOL
Also the speakers at lunch were great but a bit shorter than in the past....the lunches were OK but the Key Lime Pie for Friday dessert was quite yummy! LOL The vendors were "ok" but didn't give out the usual little "freebies" of simple patterns or little kits, bags, etc as they did in the past. I got a cute kit from a girl who lives not too far from me and has a really nice style...more on her later...some fat quarters (that's pieces of fabric for you non quilters) and a book for the "future" LOL And a bit of this and that.

Funny enough my "lucky" streak has continued as I won three door prizes this year! One each day of the luncheon. Since I left before they did the drawings for the other stuff maybe I won something else LOL

One other thing the guild president Jill, asked at our last year's meeting to join her in a project to make Quilts 4 Cancer and at least turn in 250 quilts by next festival...so at our lunch meeting we were informed by the Chairmen of that committee that they had collected over 1200 quilts and more coming in after the lunch was over! Wow! I was so impressed that the guild and friends responded like this. The quilts would be distributed to children and young adults with cancer as a hug to them for best wishes and love. You can see the quilts all stacked up in a hallway...it was an impressive sight.

DH and I drove home on Sunday late morning and as we went took some pictures of the beautiful scenery and I just shared a couple!
Enjoy...this is long enough for now and I have plenty of stuff to get to after being gone for a lot of the week