Eureka Montana Quilt Show

It somehow went from feeling like summer was just beginning to here we are perched on the edge of August. Tomorrow is the 11th Annual Eureka Montana Quilt Show. Everyone is getting ready from the guys who wash the streets to the women sorting the quilts so they will be ready to hang up first thing tomorrow.  Of course my favorite time is around 7am tomorrow when the day is still young and the crews are out hanging quilts up and down the main street, on the buildings in the Historical Village and in the parks.  The vendors will be setting up.  This year the RiverWalk committee is selling breakfast next to the Historical Village as a fundraiser so we can all get coffee and pancakes by 8am. This day really is an event that everyone participates in. The electric co-op with their trucks will hang the quilts that go high on the old buildings.  Businesses will hang the quilts on the main street and then ‘police’ them during the day (“Please don’t get your ice cream cone near that quilt, ma’am”). And the town will explode with colors. Everywhere you look there will be patterns and designs in every hue. A nine-square there and an appliqued one over there. The tiniest quilts (minis) will hang in the old library at the Historical Village. The patriotic ones in reds, whites and blues will brighten Memorial Park. You can vote for your favorite quilt of the over 600 that will be displayed in town and later these votes will be tallied to determine the “People’s Choice”. But it is always so difficult to decide.  How is it possible to compare a large quilt with pieces that look like a mosaic to a smaller one that has been hand embroidered?  Or that one that is so unusual to the one made of all different white fabrics? There must be a word when there is too much for your eyes to take in. That’s the Quilt Show.

At some point during the day, take a break in the Historical Village Museum where it will be a tad cooler and with sounds and colors muted. There’s even a sofa there to sit on as you think about which quilt to vote for.

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Midsummer

It isn’t really midsummer but it feels like that with the heat these days.  Thus when I go to quilting on Friday mornings, I tend to forget to take any photos.  It feels like enough to just sit there and stitch when it is this hot. And as it is summer, there tends to be a lot of tourists passing through the Historical Village and visiting with us which is another distraction that I could blame things on. Still here I am writing and I did find a photo that I like very much from the spring.   Lynda, Carmen and Joan stitching away. Judy going off to find something in the background. A second quilt set up behind her which is the one we are currently working on.  Summer. Judy is busy getting ready for the quilt show in August as she will surely enter a lot of pieces that she made as well as helping with the show’s organization. Joan is getting to be a wiz selling books on Amazon and putting up her usual gaggle of summer guests. Carmen has gardens upon gardens that she cares for growing flowers and vegetables. Lynda keeps things straight at the Historical Village (there was a wedding there last week!), goes birdwatching and looks after the grand kids.  It does astound me that all these women are so consistently busy, not in a don’t bother me kind of way but with activities that keep them fresh and the community a better place. And there they are in this photo, all in one place looking relaxed.