So Michael came through Thursday evening. There wasn't much damage in my area. We did lose power for a couple of hours Thursday night but mostly there were some flooded roads and downed trees in Hanover County. The place where we do our quilt club meetings is owned by the county and we cannot use the space if schools are closed. Because of blocked roads schools were closed Friday so we couldn't sew.

Big bummer.

​Fortunately, I'm a quilter and I have other things I can do!

I decided to use the time to quilt Antelope Canyon. I did this one with a pantograph. It's going to be a quilt for the guest bed so no need for "special" quilting.  Quilting pantographs bores me so between each row I worked on cleaning up the dye studio and I have it ready for delivery of my new washing machine tomorrow.

I was a little nervous while quilting because I didn't have a lot of the color that I wanted to use. But my quilting luck was with me and I had "plenty" left over. This might even be enough to sew on the binding. 

​But I'm not doing the binding yet....

When I quilt I think about things and one of the things I was thinking about was how quickly Christmas is coming up. I stated making some thread trees earlier this year and I'm going to make about 10 more on the edges of Antelope Canyon before I take it off the frame. This is one of my goals for the week. The other is to start organizing all the fabric and supplies that I brought home form the show and get my living room back to being a living room.

Yesterday I was back in the dye studio all day to start restocking things. It's nice to be back in "normal"mode now that the show is over. This morning I finally finished editing all of the photos from the quilt show so that's what I have for you today. Just click on the gallery to go through the photos as a slide show.

I'm sorry I went AWOL on the blog last week. I had great intentions of posting every day but my social life got in the way. Chris and I lived in Virginia Beach over 20 years ago and we have family in the area. Every day after the show I visited with either family or old friends. It was fun to catch up with my nephew and his wife and two former co-workers that I hadn't seen in years.

The show itself was an interesting experience. AQS runs a good show. Everything was where it needed to be and it's run very efficiently. Set up and take down was easy and all of the vendors are friendly. I met many of my customers and got some new ones. It was all good.

The only downside was that attendance wasn't even close to what they expected. It was slow and I think there were numerous factors. First, there were competing events in the area and the weather outside was fabulous. Fall is coming in a couple of weeks so I think people went to some of the outside events while the weather was still good. Add to that the devastation in North Carolina that probably reduced the number of people coming from the South and the fact that people living on the Peninsula of Virginia LOATHE coming through the tunnel to get to Virginia Beach and there were probably many factors contributing to the low attendance. They will have the show again next year so hopefully the attendance will be even better.

For me, it was a great opportunity to hear from my customers and see what people were drawn to. AQS even did a video interview that will eventually show up on their Quilttv Youtube channel. It will be featured sometime next year along with a product review in the magazine. That's going to be some great advertising. The only complaint that I have is that my friend gave me her cold!

The quilts were amazing, as they always are in and AQS show. Here are some more photos for you. I'll have a third set later this week. If you clock on the gallery it will open a slide show view so you can see mroe details.

The first day of the show is in the books and we had a great time! There weren't huge crowds but we had lots of people stop by and still had some time to wander around a bit ourselves. I even got to catch up with an old friend (I used to live in Virginia Beach) for a little while. We hadn't seen each other in years!

I even got to see about a third of the quilts. AQS puts on a nice event and the quilt competition is FIERCE! Here are just a few of the ones that I liked. I don't have the energy to narrate them so I just set then in a gallery so you can scroll through them. I'll have more tomorrow.

By the time this posts at 10:30 our time, we should be already unpacking all of this at the convention center. I love our Subarus, they hold a lot of stuff!

This is it. This is the last ironing that I have to do to get ready for the show next week! It may look like a lot to you but it really isn't. If I get off the computer soon I should be able to get this all done today, tomorrow at the latest.

Then the rest of my preps involve various printing and computer tasks.
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Are you coming to the show next week? If so, get a joke ready and come visit us in Booth 1730.

Mom (Glenda) and my friend, Anne, are going to be there to help me all week and they are working for free. So I need to keep them in good spirits and that's where you come in!

I want my social media followers to come by and visit and if you come with a good joke to make Glenda and Anne laugh you will get a small gift. Lame jokes that generate eye rolls also qualify! So please come by to say hello and give us a good laugh! Come early, the number of prizes is limited!

When my friend Laura comes to visit from England I'm not sure if she's coming to see me or my sewing room.....and I'm OK with either! This year she was here for a month. She came over at the beginning of August into NYC so she could meet up with Anne, Lora and me for Lora's birthday celebration then she was with us in Richmond for about a week before we headed to Maine. 

While we were in Richmond she decided to make some pillow covers for her lounge and discovered my shibori stash. You know she's a good friend if I let her in the shibori stash!

While in Maine she wanted to make a sofa quilt for a friend and my plaid stash was perfect. My Mom had made this quilt and Laura saw it while we were visiting her apartment. It seemed a good way to use a pack of plaid charm squares 

You could draft this block to any size but we selected 8" because that was the easiest for the finished size she wanted. The muslin strips are cut 1.5". The middle could eve simply be one piece of fabric.

The last time Laura visited she made a baby quilt for her niece using Mary's Quick Strippie quilt pattern. Her niece loves that quilt and sent her this message "Hey, aren't you with the quilting lady? Could you make me another baby quilt? The baby loves it and I'd like to have one at Mom's house." Fortunately there are fabric stores in Maine and she found these fabrics (plus Minkie for the back) to make another one. This pattern is the best baby quilt! She put this together in an afternoon. She'll trim it up after she gets it quilted.

This is a little better photo of the fabrics. the dark blue is more of a dark teal. THe backing is teal and white polka dots and the binding will be pink. 

She kept the machine humming while we were in Maine! She sews just like I like to: headphones on, listening to a good book and tuning out everyone else. She's also funny and wicked and kind and a great friend.

My UK friends, Ian and Laura, are here to go on vacation with us next week. We are taking the sewing machine and some projects so Laura is busy planning her projects for the trip.

She was inspired by these pillows that Karen Jantzi made and decided to make some new pillow covers for her re-decorated lounge.

Of course she has great taste and was immediately attracted to the shibori bin. I think this will be a nice collection of pillows (or cushions, as she calls them). These are leftover pieces from all the moons that I cut out recently. I wasn't able to let go of the newest shibori pieces that I dyed last week. Looking through those gave me anxiety so I had to hold them out. My generosity only goes so far! Laura is a psychologist so she understood.

Meanwhile I've been ice dyeing more fabric for the October show! This batch has some large, 108" square, mandalas that I'm very excited about.

​Time to get back to washing out fabric. 

I didn't do any quilting or sewing and I think I got in only 1 hour of hand stitching this weekend. That's it. Instead I got the last of the Color Wheel fabrics ready for the AQS Show in October. These are the fat quarter and fat eighth Color Wheel packs and there's another stack bigger than this of Shades Packs of each of the 10 colors. Each of the 10 colors required 24 yards of fabric so you can see how this has been a big part of the dyeing that I've been working on the past many weeks. So I start this week with a big sigh of relief and I'm going to find time to do some quilting today!
​I still have to wrap and tag all of these but I'll save that for another day. Today I get to quilt.

I think I'm almost beyond the panic phase of preparing for the AQS show in October. I also know that if I do future shows they will not be nearly as stressful as the first one. For one thing I won't have to dye ALL of the fabric like I'm doing this time and I will generally know what I'm doing. But this week is a big turning point. After I process the fabric this week I will have all of the Color Wheel fabrics done.....that's about 240 yards alone. Gradients are almost done and I only need 2 more Stash Pack sets. Then I'll have some Shades Packs, Shibori and Crystals and I have toe whole month of September to do all that. No problem!

All of this is to say that I don't have a ton of time for myself so I needed to search out a quilt top that could be quilted with an all-over pattern and I settled on my Stars At Sea quilt. This is a good one because it's specifically made to be a display quilt in the booth so it's got to be done by October.

I had grand plans to do some fun, sort of fancy, quilting on this but I can't do that kind of quilting yet and I decided that a pantograph will be good enough.

This is the one I settled on and I have 1 row done already. I hope to get it quilted by the weekend and get the binding started. I would love to have one finish for July!