Let's Visit A Quilt Show!

During our city celebration my quilt group has, for the 19th year, hung a community quilt show. It is judged, but we intend the judging to help the quilters improve their skills and celebrate what beauty they create! This year our show started out pretty darn small but with some phone calls to our members and friends we ended up with about 100 entries!
These are some of my favorites...many done by my friends.

My vote for favorite quilt was the one in the upper middle...Save the Scraps for the Dogs...made by a group member JA...who had the doggie head panels from many years ago and just by combing through her stash was able to use many many bits and pieces to finish a much larger quilt top. The close up shows a typical block. the bottom right is the quilt that received the People's Choice award...my DH's Administrative Asst. JS made the quilt! I am glad he persuaded her to bring some quilts down to the show.

Upper left is a Mandela quilt made with prints from a local HS art class and the tiny vests quilt was started in 1997 when vests were so popular among quilters and finally finished last year. LOL Another of my quilt friends made that one. And I just love the patriotic flags quilt.

A very clever quilter made the Rush Limbaugh quilt and is planning to send it to him. I sure hope he appreciates all the work she did. The purple sampler was made by another of my quilt friends ND and is made from our BOM 3 years ago. I have many of the same elements hanging on my design wall. It turned out beautiful didn't it? I love her color palate and embroidery work.
Upper right is a close up of the Best of Show...a beautifully done whole cloth satin quilt. Yes, it is machine done but it is exquisite and so well done that I agree with the judges choice.

This last bunch are some of our donation quilts. Our group is very much involved in creating baby quilts and other sizes too for various charity groups including Project Linus, our local Parent to Parent groups and others when we find the needs. Each year we try to donate about 75 quilts and afghans made by members.

So as you can see we had a successful quilt show and are ready to plan next year's! LOL

Debbie Mumm BOM top...

As you can see from the photo I have one of the two Debbie Mumm BOM's assembled to the borders stage!
HURRAH!
I am so loving the colors and the way it has gone together. However I have a dilemma...I chose to use mostly fatquarters and leftover backgrounds so I don't have any yardage to do the outside borders...sigh
I know I will put a narrow border of the sashing fabric on the outside before adding the main border...but not sure from there.

I am not one to spend tons of time on borders so whatever I do it will be pretty simple. I just hate to have to introduce a new fabric just for the border
Any suggestions???

From the Internal Memory

Somehow these photos were stuck in the built in memory of my camera, unknown to me. LOL

A top made by friend P of fabric given to her 5 years ago after her house fire. She said she started with the small stars but decided there were too many pieces to do a complete quilt so she made the larger ones and used the fun border type print to finish the top. She promises to have it finished by next July 4th.

Another quilt friend I shows her almost completed Make and Take project from June. Still needs to finish the quilting but she shared it with us.

DD B before the birth of grson A, who is now over a year old, and the quilt we designed together to celebrate BYU sports! LOL
I helped B but she did most of the work herself and as you can see she is very proud. I feel badly that these pics ended up hiding for so long LOL

MIdnight Magic

Yes, we are some of those crazy people who bought tickets for the very first showing of Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince...OK, I bought the tickets and son A and grson N came with LOL. I guess I was one of the oldest people there at the theater and I know I was the oldest with a Harry Potter shirt on! LOL

I love that this particular theater allows you to reserve seating so that we could arrive about 1/2 hour before the show began and not have to sit in the horrible seats. We had prime seats close to the middle on the first row in the upper section of theater 1. I understand that the show was a sell out in all 8 theaters and DS A overheard that one of the theaters had been "double booked" so that 200 people were turned away! How Awful for them.

It was fun to see how many were dressed up in costumes and were a bit hyper...even grson N said that he was surprised that there were bigger Harry fans than me! LOL We didn't do a preshow party this time at the house but when DD B comes and we go to the IMAX theater as a family I will go all out with a party for that.

Now for my review....WARNING WARNING WARNING WARNING WARNING
SPOILERS IN THE REST OF THIS POST!
IF YOU DON'T WANT TO KNOW SOME OF THE PLOT POINTS OR DETAILS DON'T READ ANY FURTHER....

Over all the movie was great and I will be excited to see it again soon.
The Good:
The "kid" actors are getting better and better and really seem to know their characters better each film
The new characters were great especially Prof Slughorn. He had just the right touch of hero worship and kind of a humility if you can call it that, to capture the character nicely. The werewolf Greyback was wonderfully menacing but didn't have much more to do other than be in the background so you don't really understand who the heck he is anyway...unfortunately and Lavender was so funny and although prettier than I had in my mind really did the "girlfriend" roll for Ron perfectly...wish they had shown the scene where Ron gets the necklace for Christmas...it is a funny one in the book OH and the kid who plays a young Tom Riddle is very very creepy and did an excellent job in capturing the evil Dark Lord to be.
I loved the little touches that weren't in the book but added some funny or poignant moments like when Ginny and Harry share a pie at Christmas and how she is there in the background supporting him without being in the scene too much.
It was beautiful looking and the Scottish scenery was great
The Felix Felicis where Harry first discovers the HBP was perfect and then when he uses the potion on Ron...sort of...and the aftermath were well done.
This is the first movie with Michael Gambon playing Dumbledore that I really felt that he "got" the character correct. None of the yelling or strangeness from Goblet of Fire in this film thank goodness

The Not So Good
OK...I really didn't understand the point of the attack on The Burrow... It didn't move the story along other than showing times were dangerous but you kind of figured that from the opening scene...and it was really out of place
The Burrow is supposed to be protected from the Deatheaters and somehow Bellatrix and Greyback manage to attack it??? I was just puzzled and annoyed at the scene

The MOST disappointing part was the lack of a battle at Hogwarts after the death of ....OK I won't spoil it if you don't know who dies. I thought there would be an exciting wizzard battle involving the kids and deatheaters who manage to get into Hogwarts with Draco's help but NOTHING! This was where Bill gets his scars...nadda...and where some of the kids really have to grow up even more fighting off the deatheaters...such a NON happening.
Sigh...

So I am looking forward to seeing it again soon so that I can concentrate on details that I didn't notice this time LOL

Rain, rain, rain

These pictures are a few weeks old but I thought I would share them anyway.
Those of you who have visited us here in Utah know that in the summer we are known to have hot weather but "dry" heat. This past June turned out to be one rainy, rainy month. We just don't have many rainy days but this year's weather pattern was very different and it was rainy more often than not.
I love the rain (unless I have an outdoor event planned) and didn't mind having an unusual month.
These pics are on one of those really rainy days and a big storm passed over us...OK so not so interesting to most of you but, hey, I don't claim to post exciting stuff all the time! LOL

There's a Crazy Man Up Our Tree

DH Mr Creative was really annoyed that his newly planted gardens were being shaded from several of the Siberian Elms (AKA Weed Trees) we have in our yard. He fussed and fumed about it for a couple of months, and finally one day he hauled our tall (obviously NOT tall enough) ladder out to the chief perpetrator and that crazy man began cutting down limbs!
I need to take a picture of our huge debris pile from that tree and several others, so you can see that those trees are like weeds in the garden.

There is more sunshine getting to the veggie gardens now and DH is happy but he isn't through with that tree he tells me!
So if you see a crazy man in my trees you will know it is HIM!