I had the pleasure of meeting Phyllis Dobbs at Spring Market. She’s as exciting in real life as her fabulous designs. Here’s a picture of her and I, and you can see a glimpse of us in this video.

Phyllis has designed this cute little quilted tote bag using her latest fabric line, Its a Dog’s Life. I just love her whimsical designs.

If you look around 40 seconds in, you’ll see me and Phyllis Dobbs, followed by a short wave by from Judy Laquidara.

Video taken by Alex Veronelli of Aurifil.

(Click into the blog post to see the video, they don’t show up on the home page of this site.)

While at Spring Market, I went in search of Geta Grama’s quilt featured in the "Floral Quilts in memory of Helen Pierce O’Bryant". You can see her magnificent creation below (click the images to view the full-sized version).

I’m thrilled to announce that Geta is now offering her shadow trapunto patterns for sale via an ebook that you can download immediately after payment as been processed.

What is shadow trapunto? Unlike a usual quilt, a shadow trapunto quilt has two additional layers the top layer is organza and under it there are white motifs made of batting.

The ebook includes 20 pages of instructions with 62 detailed photos, five bonus free patterns and the Electric Quilt file. I purchased my copy yesterday and can’t wait to try this technique. At $12 USD, this is a steal.

Get yours today! For her launch party, Geta is also offering two give-aways on her site.

Geta has very generously offered one of her gorgeous shadow trapunto quilts as a prize for the “What was I thinking?” – The Ugly Quilt Contest.

I’d like to wish Geta all the best of luck with her new patterns.

After I left Spring Market and Pittsburgh behind, I travelled to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

It was a gorgeous trip, in perfect weather. Route PA30 is quite mountainous and an exciting experience for me, as it’s pretty flat here in Ontario by comparison. My ears kept popping, just like they do in an airplane.

I finally found a safe place to pull over to take a couple of photos and texted my mom to tell her I was on top of a mountain. To which she replied, come down safe. Ahh, mothers!

I arrived late in the afternoon in Gettysburg, and most of the touristy things were closed, which I expected. I wandered around the beautiful historic downtown centre for a couple of hours, read some history pamphlets and visitor books, grabbed some dinner, then off to my hotel for the night.

As luck would have, it certainly wasn’t planned, the Gettysburg National Military Park was very close to my hotel, so I headed there to see what was available. I purchased the package that included a guided battlefield bus tour, the museum and the cyclorama.

I had a great day. As you can see from the pictures below, the weather was perfect. While I’m not an American, I do know a fair bit of the American Civil War history. While the bus tour was enjoyable and informative, if I’d had more time, I would have opted for a self-guided auto tour as there were additional places along the battlefield I would have liked to stop at.

After the tour, I went back to the downtown area to do some more exploring and grabbed a snack at the Farnsworth House Inn. You can see the bullet holes in the side of the building below.

It was a great experience, and I’m really glad I was able to visit.

Congratulations to last week’s winners: #15 Christine, #31 Barbara, #7 Penny and #64 Mindy. They each won one of the gorgeous appliqué patterns donated by Sisters’ Scraps Quilt Shop from last week’s give-away.

This week’s Friday Give-Away is a pair of 8″ Fabric Shears donated by the Simplicity Creative Group.

I was very fortunate to have Simplicity as my booth neighbour at Spring Market and to meet Michele Muska there. We were able to chat at various times throughout the weekend. I am grateful for her ideas, wisdom, support and generosity.

Spring Market Booth Photos

Here are a couple of their booth photos.

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At Spring Market, I collected business cards for a contest drawing.

Congratulations to Janine from Tonic Living in Toronto, Ontario for winning two months of free advertise on the Quilting Gallery web site.

Check out the gorgeous fabrics available on her site: