Crazy, Quilty June

 

Wow!  It has been a crazy month!  It started out with a trunk show in Cedar Rapids, NE where I presented about 50 of my quilts to a group of about that many ladies!  It was an easy drive through beautiful green countryside with my hubby at the wheel, and then a program where I showed my work and talked about my quilts...never a problem for me:)
  Next, it was off to Kearney to help mom settle in to her new quilt shop.  We had spent all of Memorial Day weekend moving her stuff just two doors down the street on the bricks in Kearney, and getting everything in order to reopen, all in the span of 4 days.  Not an easy task, but well worth it because the new shop has much better lighting and several aspects made it a wise change.
  On the 8th of June, several friends and I headed off to Creston, IA for a five day retreat with a group of about 40 women from both Iowa and Nebraska.  We get together once a year for this retreat, and the rest of the year we are looking forward to getting together again!  It was so much fun, not so much sleep, and a fair amount of productive sewing:)

  Literally five days after we returned from our crazy, quilty fun in Iowa, a bunch of us hopped on a bus with ladies from the Grand Island Prairie Pioneers quilt guild and headed out for a bus trip!  Needless to say, the bus trip was tons of fun, and I bought even more quilty stuff...also never a big problem for me!  After a couple of days of recovery, I was once again in Kearney to work for my mom and to hang up my latest class sample, which I quilted somewhere between the retreat and the bus trip.

  Last, but not least, this weekend I am the featured quilter at the Nimble Thimbles Quilt Show in Aurora, NE.  I took 22 of my quilts to Aurora on Wednesday, and the lovely ladies from that guild got them all hung and ready for public show which lasted Thursday through Sunday.  I spent Friday afternoon hanging out at the show and visiting with anyone who wanted to talk about my quilts.  It was a lot of fun, and I was very honored to have been asked.  I was even interviewed and photographed for the local paper...must have been a slow new week! LOL!  Following are some of my quilts hanging at the show.  It was a bit dark for my iPhone to capture some of them, but you get the idea

  The Vintage Linens quilt to the left was created from cutting up and using linens made by my Great Aunt Adelaide Walthers, who is now 97 years old, my grandma Dorothy Hansen, my mom Phyllis, and my Great grandmother Georgia Hansen.  There are hankies, doilies, dresser scarves, pillow case tops, and armchair covers all used in this unique quilt.  The pattern comes from a class I did with Rose Cottage Quilts. Check out their website if you are interested in making a quilt like this one.  Cutting up these types of family pieces can be a bit scary, but it is worth it!

My Pineapple Retreat quilt was made from the 10" squares exchange that we did at our Iowa/Nebraska retreat in 2015.

Madame Butterfly was awarded a blue ribbon at the 2015 Nebraska State Fair.

 The Pineapple Blossom quilt to the right is a free downloadable pattern from Bonnie Hunter's website Quiltville.com, and was a really simple quilt to make.  I love the end result so much that I have already collected the fabrics in oranges and grays to make another one.  Stay tuned for photos of that work in progress.

 So, here I am at the end of the month.  My goal for the next few days is to quilt as many customer quilts as I can before heading off to Kearney to help my mom!  I am also working on a new sample for a class that I am teaching toward the end of July on Eleanor Burn's LeMoyne Star pattern.  Its a super easy was to create a quilt that looks very difficult...thanks, Eleanor!
  Hope July is a little more relaxing!  All this crazy, quilty fun has left me wiped out!  I need a vacation...so that I can collect my Row by Row!