The last 24

Many of you know I was in Salmo for the West Kootenay Gathering of the Guilds. As always, it was amazing to see the amount of work produced in our area! Beautiful quilts.

It's surprising how regional the work is - considering that we're all within a reasonable proximity. Each of the Guilds does seem to have it's own distinct flavour...it would be interesting to figure out whether that's due to demographic or geography. Some groups are quite far from a fabric source, some have several within a 1/2 hour's drive. Most of the quilts shown were traditional in style, proving that the main body of quilters continue to to traditional quilts, not art quilts.

The Salmo Guild deserves a hearty congratulations as the meeting went wonderfully well, everything was really well organized. From a vendor's point of view, the day went off without a hitch!

Today our youngest had his Master Class in pre-music where he performed a song he's been working on for a couple of weeks. He did beautifully! He's not performed in front of an audience before, but did very well.

Oldest has caught the Artist's Trading Card bug from the presenters (Don Mabie and Wendy Toogood) last week at the school district Art Festival. He's been madly making cards since Wednesday, and today got to go to a bona fide meeting and trade some cards. Youngest and I joined them after music, and now we've got the bug, too!

Here are the five remaining from the seven I made this afternoon once we returned home. They're all on paper I made about a year ago (after the last art festival, using the art festival handouts, shredded cotton batting, dryer lint and bits of thread). The two in the upper corner are stitched together strips of the heavy, handmade paper, the other three are from similar sheets made from the same slurry. The one's the boys traded for are part of the 'three leaf' ones. Like most things, it called for stitching! I got to play with some of my new (variegated) thread that came from the Banquet at MQX. The lime-y green was already threaded on the machine when I came down to play with the stitching aspect (cool, as it is the same as the thread used in the paper - coincidence!). I've got lots of ideas for more and hopefully there will be some time between now and next trading meeting to get a small body of work together.

My Mom arrives tomorrow, and together this week we'll be going to Quilt BC. I'll have a booth there, so if you're around come by and say hi. I'll try to post from there, but can't promise anything!

Happy stitching,

Lisa