Finding Art In All The Right Places!

It's Pam the quilter reaching out to you today!  I recently had the pleasure of staying with 2 friends in a condo in the Wisconsin Dells for a week.  Yay!  Seven days of uninterrupted quilt party!  It's just our way of enjoying our fabric and friendship.  The block you see above is made by Amy, it's part of an entire quilt made of blocks both large and small.  For the uninitiated, this is part of a concept known among quilters as Block of the Month (BOM).  In this example, a local store starts a plan to make an entire quilt just a block at a time.  Somehow, that makes it seem so achievable!  So a flat fee, or monthly fee, is charged to participants, giving them the fabric, directions and unique instructions to make a block.  Next month, the whole group meets again to move on to the next block.  And so it goes!  It's a good promotional tool for the store, plus it draws in a wide variety of people and gives them steady encouragement to take on the whole quilt.  This can also be done with a group of any size that wants to sew along together on the same quilt.  It's a win-win for everyone!  And with Amy's intuitive color sense, you end up with a show-stopper like the block above!

This sewing vacation was actually mid-April, but I had not taken the time to look through pictures until now.  In the collection of pictures below, I have included some captions with pattern names when appropriate.  Hover over the picture to get that info.

These are my sewing gurus!  Nancy and Amy, always creating something new!

We had a couple of Wisconsin field trips, too.  One day we drove to Sun Prairie, east of Madison, to visit JJ Stitches.  This is a great gem of a quilt shop, lots of beautiful fabric and patterns to choose from.  We looked next door where there used to be a yarn shop, but that closed following a tragic explosion last year.  We did find the yarn shop in a new location, but the owner said she lost at least half of her stock from that explosion so decided to downsize.  Around the corner, we had a very tasty lunch at Full Mile Beer Co.  The mural below left is fabulous!
We also drove to Spring Green, WI, to visit Country Sampler. Frank Lloyd Wright's home and studio, Taliesin, are located near Spring Green. We went to the visitor center and looked around.  I liked the ceiling detail in the restaurant area (below center), and the unusual spire atop the Visitor Center.
Even in the middle of nowhere, Wisconsin, it's not hard to find new and different artforms!