Weekend Travels

I just returned from a fabulous weekend of quilt and rug hooking fun and thought I should get in a quick post before heading off to Baltimore on the Prairie. The weekend started with a trip to Bloomington, IL to see Bonnie Hunter.  What an incredible guild!  They have 300+ members and do not meet over the summer, so we were treated to an incredible show & tell prior to Bonnie taking the stage. There were so many beautiful quilts!

Bonnie's lecture was outstanding (no surprise!).  She explained her scrap saver system and shared lots of quilts with us.

While I love them all, I have to say that my favorite quilt is her basket quilt made as an exchange with an overseas friend.  I had a chance to see it up close - it is gorgeous!

I left the lecture ready to start cutting my stash into strips and squares. I love what Bonnie does with her scraps!

On Friday we shop-hopped our way down to the lake, stopping at Peace and Applique in Rochester, IL and then Homestead Hearth in Mexico, MO. I have to say that I was less than impressed by the customer service at the Rochester shop.  I have been there before and never really had an issue other than extremely slow service at the register, but the young lady at the counter on Friday was a complete disappointment. Irritating enough that I have no desire to ever go back.  Homestead Hearth, on the other hand, was wonderful as usual!  We spent quite a bit of time there and definitely did not leave empty-handed.

Saturday we headed over to Warsaw, MO for the Truman Lake Hook-in. It was our second year there and it was so much fun!  There were a lot of different vendors this year and we had a lot of fun visiting with Janice and Jim from Wooly Woolens and learning about an antique sock knitting machine from another vendor.  There were a couple of quilt shops there that I had not heard of before and I learned a new trick for using starch to prep for English paper piecing that I might have to try out.  

As usual, I forgot to take pictures... The picture above shows the booth where the EPP technique was being demonstrated. The quilts were beautiful!

After the hook-in we headed over to Saltbox Primitive Woolens for the open house and found a few more things that had to come home with us.  It is really a nice shop and every time I go it seems that they have added in a little more quilting stuff.

The weekend was filled with great food, excellent events and a lot of shopping. A great warm-up for Baltimore on the Prairie this week!