Quilt Show Ends (I can breathe again)

We initially got together on Tuesday at the club house at Reneta's to pin the smaller quilts to sheets...a system we really need to revise to make it faster and easier to set up the show.  (These pictures are all from the show site, not the club house.)  There are a number of ways to do this, including dowels, fish line and S hooks; or pants hangers and some kind of chain system to hang them.  I arrived in town at about 9:30 and picked up Mr. L so Ben would have a playmate for the day, and Sharon brought Miss O for Cammie to play with.  Emma and Hollie went shopping for school clothes at the mall and Tara played taxi driver for those girls.

Emma met up with longtime friend, Christopher, and they sat in the food court for a couple hours having a long conversation and catching up.  They're sweet on each other, but not "dating"...maybe in a couple years...  He gave her a key chain and a stuffed sock creature that he made himself.  They were supervised by C's mom, who sat just a couple tables away.

We started organizing and pinning the quilts at about 10 a.m. and finally called off the event at about 5:30.  By about 2:00, I realized that things might go faster if there was a pinning team and a layout team, so I got to work laying a sheet on the floor, putting quilts on it that coordinate together (a group of Asian, or Christmas, or bright colors), making sure that they fit nicely.  Then I'd take the next sheet and lay it right on top, and lay out more quilts on top of that, making a quilt lasagna.  At the end of the day, we didn't have time to pin them all, so we just rolled them up into sausages and figured we could finish on Thursday when we set up the show.

After we wrapped up the prep work on Tuesday, I loaded up my two youngest (Tara still had Emma, Lauri had picked up Mr. L, and Miss O went home with her mom) and we drove up to Blaine to have dinner with Mom & Dad at a steakhouse to celebrate their 48th anniversary.  Yum!

Wednesday was a day off, mostly...karate and stuff.

Thursday was setting up for the show!  We had it at the local Boys and Girls club that had a large gymnasium.  And I mean LARGE!  Two basketball courts long and wide.  They raised the nets in the middle and those that they could raise on the edges.  The ones on the wall that you can see below were fixed to the wall...ah well.



I got there about 9:30 again and we got to work setting up tables to work on.  We finished pinning the rest of the quilts while Linda and her team assembled and set up the standards to hang them up.  We got the pinning done by about noon.  Most of the cross bars were laid out where they needed them and the quilts were laid on top.  Paper plates had the directions of what needed to be hung where, weighted down by canned goods (that were later donated to the food bank).  I needed to hit the road by 2 pm, and just before 1:00, I was getting tired of not having more than two quilts hanging, so I grabbed a victim...Nicole, a young lady whose mom dropped her off to help us out (she's a riot)...and we got a couple ladders and starting hanging the quilts up.  We got about 16 sheets and whole quilts hung up by the time I had to leave.  The team stayed late and got it finished, although I think we may have needed more direction...like a supervisor assigning tasks.

Ben, Cammie and I drove up (again) to the quilt show on Friday--Emma had her first day of school and I had forgotten that I wasn't going to have a babysitter.  I drove her and her bike to the school and we found a place for her to lock it up so she could bike home after school.  When we got up to Bellingham, Cammie went with Sharon and her daughter to run errands, so it was just me and Benno at the show.  He brought his DS and a charger and kept busy for most of the show playing quietly in a corner.  People were amazed at how good he was!  Near the end of the day, he was getting squirrelly, so I made him a scavenger hunt to find the names of the makers of the quilts that, "Was covered with hands..."

"Covered with hearts..."

"Something black and white and red all over..."

"TURTLES!"

"Heron having lunch..."

"Count the Christmas quilts..."

This kept him occupied for quite some time.  I had intended to spend the night up at Sharon's, but since I didn't have all of Ben's medical equipment, I knew that we were going to have to take Ben home from the show Friday while Cammie spent the night at Miss O's.  Again.  They went camping the previous weekend and apparently still weren't sick of each other.  While she went home with Sharon, Ben and I decided to go out for sushi dinner...expensive and not very good.  I much prefer those conveyor belt places; we spend far less for better quality.  He ended up not eating the shrimp.  They soak it in ginger, so it's poisonous to me, and apparently they soak it much longer than other restaurants, which gave it a really strong flavor and Ben spit it out.  He said it tasted bad and I couldn't tell them whether or not it was good because I'm allergic.  He couldn't articulate what was bad about it. The manager was nice enough to take it off our bill after a discussion with them about how he normally eats it at other restaurants, and it's not like him to turn his nose up at it unless it tastes bad.

I got back up there the next morning and spent another day making 9-patches with the Community Service corner.  We must have finished almost 100 blocks over there, which will greatly help our community service group make quilts for our charity of the year.  Sharon printed up a big list of the charities that we have given to in the past, including a battered women's shelter, the police department, foster care, Red Cross, the churches we have had our meetings at, and many more.  I have several ideas for improvement for next time, but I will be keelhauled by the Pirates if I volunteer us again.

As we were packing up at the end of the show, KayLee gave us a gift of a box of Legos that her husband had when he was little.  They don't have kids, but decided it was time to have them go to another home.  He was going to just donate them to GoodWill, but thought it would be great if they could go to a home where they KNEW they were going to be loved.  The kids fight over them now, but it's hours of entertainment that doesn't include a TV or computer screen.  Awesome!

In the end, it was 600 miles of driving, 12 hours in the car going back and forth, and 34 hours working at the quilt show.

Now that I'm home, I'm reconciling the raffle tickets.  There has GOT to be a better way to do this.  3400 ticket stubs have to be accounted for, which means all these stubs that were stuck into the big bin to be shuffled and have one chosen at random has to be un-shuffled.  I see there are some problems with the current system, and I think we'll have to make some serious changes there, too...the biggest problem with the raffle was that we kept running out of tickets and three or four different print runs were done.  We should have just printed 3500 tickets right off the bat, and printed more IF we needed them.  We also had a raffle basket, but we printed 1000 tickets for that very late in the game.  We may or may not bother to do that again.  It's a cool thing, but it's too much trouble.

We finally got in touch with a pediatric speech and occupational therapist.  We called a bunch of them earlier this summer, including this one, and either didn't get a call back or was told they were completely booked for the summer, not taking new patients, or they were out of our network.  Great.  So we finally got hold of someone, now that we're just a week away from school starting again.  But first I have to fill out 20 sheets of paper.  I'm not kidding.  20 pages of forms.

Other than that, today (Tuesday) is all about catching up on housework--dishes, laundry, sweeping, mopping, vacuuming...