Gate City Guild -- Greensboro NC

I love Greensboro! This is either my fourth or fifth teaching visit here over the last few years -- it's great reconnecting with quilters who have taken my classes at Randy's Quilt Shop and/or the Quilting in the Piedmont event that Randy put on for several years at the downtown Marriott here.

My plane was a half hour late, so I didn't get to go to dinner with Karen Pervier (the guild program chair) at Lucky 32, one of my favorite restaurants here. They are a Wine Spectator award winning restaurant, so you can be sure I wasn't happy about missing that meal! But my thoughts were that it just wouldn't be acceptable for me to show up at the meeting in jeans, scraggly hair and no makeup, so that hour had better be put to better use than eating.

But Karen saved the day -- she brought me shrimp cakes with hot cajun sauce; sort of like crab cakes, only different? Totally yummy! Thank you, Karen!! So I got the quilts all sorted out and stacked up and then snuck into the back office and ate dinner before the meeting got started.



On the agenda this evening was my lecture at the regular meeting of the Gate City Guild which was held in Randy's classroom; they just moved all the tables out, a whole bunch of chairs in and everybody was happy to be there! They must have quite a few lectures here -- they sure have a lot of chairs!


At the beginning of the meeting, this quilt was presented to Joann Peck to be raffled off to raise funds for a local charity, Murphy's Kids. Joann and the gentleman at the left of the picture talked about the charity and some of the things that they are able to do for the people who need their help. There were more than a few teary eyes, including those of the presenters.

THEN -- drum roll please -- my favorite part of every guild meeting -- SHOW & SHARE!!



The lady who made this quilt is standing on the right -- she said she's too short to hold the quilt up! She says there is one more border left to put on, so this is going to be a really big quilt!

Lot of autumn colors in the quilts shown tonight.....



Didn't think I was going to get this shot -- Barbara almost had the quilt folded up by the time I got the camera up in front of my face to take this....Overall this part of the meeting went very quickly -- each person who shared held their quilt up, said a couple of sentences and then took it down -- no lollygagging around here! I'm hoping to get faster with the camera so that I can get more/better shots.

This lady and I were talking afterwards and she used to live in the same part of Buffalo NY that I did -- her much more recently, though...

She actually had three quilts, but one came out blurry, darn it! It was very bright -- orange, green, yellow --

A quilt made of embroidered blocks by her mah-jongg group; she said it only took a few hours to put together but it looked more complex to me -- aren't there flying geese in there??

Love those primaries! This picture just shows a small part of the quilt, but you can get an idea of the colors and the way the pattern flows.

Tomorrow and Saturday, I'm teaching a two day machine quilting class at Randy's Quilt Shop. While I'm there, I'll wander around with my camera and give you a tour of the store!