Montreal Quilt Show

Trudy, Cheryl, Jane and I went up to Montreal on Saturday for the Quebec Quilts Salon 2010 Quilt show. A few quilting friends from the Wadhans Hall quilt retreats are members of the guild in Montreal. So we went up to see the show and have lunch with them. We had gone to their previous show 2 years ago. It is a really great show - a lot of variety and really stunning quilts. I took lots of pictures. As I am on the fabric no-buy challenge I did really good and did not buy anything at the show from the vendors. Of course it is a bit easier because fabric in Canada is more expensive.

The pictures are the 2 quilts that our friend Katherine "Kat" Hornstein had in the show. She has a wonderful flair for using vibrant, beautiful colors. The top one is called "Amish All Sorte" and the second one is called "Bohemia".

The trip into Montreal went well, we didn't get lost and the traffic wasn't bad. And on Saturday there was no smoke. Today (Monday, Memorial Day) even here in Saranac we are engulfed in the smoke and smell of the large fires burning in the Quebec Province. We checked the maps and nothing appears to be very close to us but the winds are from the north so here we sit in the smoke. It really smells strongly of fire in the neighborhood. Its a great reason to stay inside and quilt. I am putting the bindings on the quilts for the nieces'.

My First ADK Mountain

I finally got around to 'hiking' an Adirondack peak. It only took ten years to get around to doing it. The Conference on Instructional Technologies was on campus this week and as part of the pre-conference activities was a group hike up Poke-O-Moonshine. We were a small group - apparently the 90 degree heat scared some off.

Having grown up in a very flat area of the world, I have been very poorly prepared for the sort of 'hiking' done here in the mountains. The hike up Poke-O-Moonshine is real more of a climb, scrambling over rocks and pulling your self up using small trail-side trees.

I blame the heat for not making it all the way to the top. But I did make it to the ruins of the cabin that the fire tower watchers lived. The photos I took do not do justice to the trail. It is very steep and I was glad that we had a guide, because the trail looked more like a dry stream bed. I would not think it was a trail at all with all the rocks. The ruin is just the fireplace and the foundation of what was a log cabin. The fire tower is still at the top of the mountain.

I figured that the trip down would be less strenuous, but I was surprised at how easy and quick getting back down the trail was. It took us about 3 hours for the trip from top to bottom.