Quilt Show Day Trip

Yesterday our Guild, Rainshadow Quilting Arts, organized a great day trip to the mainland. Each year the Fidalgo Island Quilters has a quilt show in Anacortes, Washington. This year's theme was "a garden party". We all piled onto the ferry - we did not even have to take the "red-eye" ! The red eye ferry leaves at 6:00 am. When we go for a "Costco run" we have to get up at 4:30 am in order to get in line to be able to make the 'red-eye'. The next ferry that leaves is an 8:05 - and the best part is that this is a direct ferry - so it only takes 1.5 hours to get to the mainland. Since we were not taking cars we all walked on - and that means we got to 'sleep in' on our Saturday! We were also truly lucky that the weather behaved as well. It has been unusually cool and rainy this past week, but Saturday dawned clear and, though there was a very sharply cold breeze ,we all were relieved that it was not raining!

Twenty one of us were met by a luxury bus for the short trip into Anacortes. We were dropped off by the first of our fiber fix stops at Fabrics Plus. The shop give a 20 per cent discount on everything in the store for this event each year - so you can imagine that those of us who are regularly fabric staved exercised our 'plastic' more than usual on this shop-a-holic day! The bus picked us up two hours later at the next fabulous fabric frenzied stop - The Quilt Shop. This shop also offers the discount and always has additional staff on hand to handle the extra textile hoarding that occurs each year.

Of course, many of us HAD to make an additional stop at our favorite mainland yarn shop - Anacrossstitch - for a fix of yarn, gadgets,luxurious supplies like hand dyed threads, books, perle cottons, cross stitch threads etc. This shop just keeps getting better and better. It's a fiber fanatics fantasy land.We are all really blessed to have the availability of such incredible fabric and yarn shops almost in our own back yard.

Next stop - the quilt show ! This year was, I have to say, one of the best years yet. The quilts on display were fabulous - incredible workmanship. One of the highlights of the show is always the Divas fashion Show. The Divas are a branch of Fidalgo Island Quilters that concentrate on wearable art. They are an amazing, talented group & are always doing something interesting. Thankfully my friend, Janet, hauls my lazy butt to their meetings now and then. I am always glad that I listened to Janet because I always have a great time with the Divas. I am so glad that she has accepted the position of being my social 'arranger' - without her I would probably hibernate and never have any fun!

I would love to post some photos of the amazing quilts at the show - but am not sure that I can give proper credit to all of them. I will post some photos of those whose makers names I am certain of though - next time!

Thanks especially to Bonnie, Beth & Claudia who really worked hard to insure that we all had a great care free, inspirational day of fun with friends & fabric!