Winners of the Blogiversary Party Prizes

Wow!   What a party.  Thanks to everyone who helped me celebrate by stopping by, leaving comments and blogging about the giveaway.   I have enjoyed spending each morning with a cup of coffee and reading your comments.  Sometimes you write these things and you think somebody is going to write . . .  sorry, that is quote from one of my favorite movies – You’ve Got Mail.   Seriously,  I don’t always know why you stop by and what you are interested in hearing about.  I really don’t feel like I have that entertaining of a life, so I was glad to hear that you are all enjoying the simple things, a binding tutorial, color options, how to decorate with quilts, and even pictures of my person life with cute nieces, nephews, and scenery from Minnesota.   I was surprised how many of you remembered my posts about our remodeling adventures.  A few of you even mentioned Daisy, which made Joel’s day!  One of my favorite comments (and believe me, there are lots!) was how one of the readers had showed the blog to her daughter and now she wants a sewing machine.  Now that made my day!  I guess in general, I will keep posting about the same things, as it sounds like you are interested in learning about all things quilt related.  I had several ask about learning about machine quilting.  I will have to do a post about that at some time too.

 

Anyways, enough rambling.  On to the winners, selected by the random number generator.

 

Winner of the charm packs and patterns:

quiltmom(Anna) – www.quiltmomsjourney.blogspot.com, posted at 2:38 on August 22-09

 

Winner of the Little Charmers 5 quilt:

Bev Beckman, posted at 10:21 on 8-24-09

(Seriously Bev, the number generator picked it.  I did not cheat!   Bev is a friend of mine and I just saw her last night at quilt group.)

 

Winner of the Grand Prize, the Cotton Candy Quilt:

Amber of http://alittlebitbiased.blogspot.com/posted at 12:38 on 8-25-09

 

Send your mailing addresses to hmulder@wecnet.com and I’ll ship out your prizes right away.

 

Here are a few (okay maybe more than a few!) pictures from our trip to Montana.

 

We drove through some bad weather in South Dakota to start out our trip.   We could see we were driving into a thunderstorm, but all of a sudden the sky turned green and it started to pour.  We then heard an announcement for a tornado on the radio.  Of course we were three miles from the town where the tornado was spotted.  We heard the announcement too late and ended up on the side of the road in a white out.  The truck rocked back and forth in the wind and we got pelted with hail.  Three sides of my car got dented, but  luckily we never actually saw the tornado.  I was quite terrified and had to wrap the table runner that I was binding around my head.  I was sure the windshield would break.  Joel somehow remained fairly calm.  After the storm we saw this:

A gorgeous, HUGE rainbow.   The whole event kind of reminded me of our last trip to Montana, where we blew a tire on Bear Tooth Highway.

 

Once in Montana, we went to Glacier National Park.

We usually do lots of traveling without hotel reservations and always find somewhere to stay.  That turned out to be a dumb idea during high season at the park.  We almost had to sleep in a Tee Pee.

I’m not kidding.  This was all they had left for $229 a night.  I really did not want to sleep in a Tee Pee, but the hotel clerk assured us they were nice -“With granite counter tops and everything, but no electricity.”  Seriously, who cares about granite counter tops if you don’t have electricity.   

 

We hoped to see some Glaciers in the park, but actually saw very few.  You probably can’t read the sign, but it says there used to be almost 200 glaciers in the park and now they have about 30.  Within 20 years they say they will all be gone.

 

 Instead we saw beautiful vistas

 

 and lots of wildflowers

 

 and waterfalls.

 

Joel found us a spot to have a picnic –

 

My favorite place in the park was Logan Pass.   The mountains were beautiful and there were millions of wildflowers in bloom.  It reminded me of the movie the Sound of Music.   The music wasn’t as good though.  Somehow Joel singing “The hills are alive, with the sound of music” doesn’t compare with Julie Andrews.

 

We took a hike up through the valley.  1 1/2 miles up to be exact.  One way.  That doesn’t sound so bad, but I’m only in shape for quilting at the moment and this picture only shows the flat part of the trail.  Later it turns to gravel and rock, all up hill.

 

This was our reward at the end of the hike.

 

On the way to this view, we encountered a family trying to coax a little boy to keep going.  He was sitting down on the side of the trail with his arms crossed, lip out, and a mad expression on his face.  This isn’t him – but Joel’s impersonation of him.

We kept chuckling about it the rest of the day.

 

That’s enough for today.  I’ll be back later with pictures of the quilt shops that we stopped at.