Is there a ribbon in my future?

Bah. I don't give up that easily. Especially when the idea of having to spend large amounts of money (for computer services) looms largely over my head.

That being said, I got a few of my pictures downloaded, at least mostly the ones I wanted. And I've finally started deleting, one-by-one, mind you, the duplicate photos from my iPhoto program that started out numbering at 44494. No, I am not kidding about that number. And no, I haven't really taken that many photos. The real number of photos I have stored on there should number somewhere in the 2000-3000 range, but unfortunately, my iPhoto program has problems. Obviously. After a couple of hours last night, it now numbers at 43712. Progress! Over the last several months there have been some close calls with almost losing the whole set, and we've had to transfer them back and forth from the laptop to my external hard drive, and in the process, iPhoto has wigged out on me and started duplicating the heck out of them. The good news is that I at least have all my photos still. The bad news is that I have all of my photos and then some.

The good folks at our local Apple store told me that I could easily solve this problem by upgrading to the Leopard operating system. Okay, I say. No wait, they say, oh sorry, that system won't upgrade on your specific laptop. Looks like your best bet would be buying a whole new laptop!

Golly gee whiz, good folks at Apple, here. Let me just shell out a couple grand that I have burning a hole in my pocket. And let me be wasteful and dump an otherwise perfectly good laptop that is only 2 or 3 years old on the earth and get a whole new one while kids are starving in Africa because that would show I am being a great steward of God's money.

See where this is all going?

Yep, I'm not giving up. I'm going to push my little MacBook as long as it will go. Run, baby, run. Download, baby, download...

Finally, without further adieu, the STATE FAIR QUILTS!!!!! (Click on them to see them in much closer detail.)

Here is my Old Red Barn Quilt-along quilt from this summer. I got it back from the long-arm quilters, Russ and Rhonda, just in the nick of time with approximately 24 hours to get the binding on, a label slapped on the back, and it turned into the good State Fair folks for judging the next day. There are also two sham fronts waiting to be sewn into, well, shams, duh...




It's kinda crazy with all the colors, so that's why I picked the darker grey for a border. I named it "Punky Brewster Grows Up". No, really, I did. It's on the label and everything! (Anyone else love that show growing up?) This quilt measures somewhere at 84"x96" or something like that, big enough to fully drape the full bed in my guest room. And the fabric is from my favorite fabric lady, that crazy talented Anna Maria Horner.

And the backside, a bit more modern...




And the quilt that nearly made me throw my sewing machine and all my common sense out the window, the Oklahoma Centennial Celebration Quilt.




My mom picked this quilt kit up after having seen it on a local television news show. Thing is, my mom doesn't quilt. She bought it thinking I would make it! I told her, sure, as long as you are my willing assistant. It is an "8 month block-of-the-month" pattern -- which means it took us all of, let's see, 6, no, 12, no, 15, no...hmmm, let's just say it took us over a year and a half probably, to get this sucker done, and it's only done today because I pushed us to get it done in time to enter in the State Fair. (My little procrastinating self works well under deadlines.)

It's not necessarily my favorite style of quilt that I normally gravitate towards, but I sure do love it now that we put all of that hard work into it. I did most of the piecing. My mom was the ironing mistress, a whiz with the scissors on cutting out the appliques, and the hand-embroiderer for embellishing most of those appliques with blanket stitching. And a local woman did all the custom quilting on her long-arm machine, which is all gorgeous and well-thought out.

See that little line of tiny paper-pieced log cabin blocks at the bottom? Although I may or may not have cursed them while I was doing all 13 of them, they really weren't very difficult and ended up being my favorite blocks. And they may or may not have to do with my quilt block packages I just mailed out to all my online quilting bee ladies...

Tune in next time for more sewing adventures with Valerie! (You'll have to find out if we won ribbons or not, remember?!) Oh yeah, tune in soon because this isn't all I've been running through my machine lately...