Birthday Bash - Day One

We survived Day One of the Birthday Bash at Missouri Star, but what a day!  It was long, it was hot and it was fun!

After I closed off my blog, I got ready to move everything we needed from the storage area to where the tents were going to be set up.  I had never set up one of those pop-up tents before, but there were enough hands around to make that happen. Then to carry all our stuff up out of the basement storage area. Thankfully our tent is pretty much by the stairs.

Oh did I mention that it's hot here?  For some reason, I envisioned that it was going to be cool in the morning - yeah - cool moving boxes of stuff.  I left my sweatshirt - my grey hoodie that I wear all the time on a bench and it was only when I was getting ready for bed that I realized that I had left it on a bench outside. Oh - probably gone but I'll check. I was contemplating buying a MSQC sweatshirt and now I may have to.  No way I'm going on a plane without something to keep me warm!

We got set up and changed into more respectable clothes, although by the end of the day, we all looked pretty funny. Wait for that!

People were stopping by to see what we were up to and the event hadn't officially opened. But soon we were on our way.  There are quite a few of us (vendors - even though we're not selling anything)

I had brought a few extra quilts which turned out to be a good thing because we could hang the quilts on the outside of the booth.  Having not done an outdoor show before, I had no idea what to expect.

We needed the iPads in our booth and to my dismay when I opened one of them, it was dead!  The other one was at 15% which was weird because I know that both of them were supposedly charged or so I thought.  So I plugged in the dead one and used the other one. I had to keep swapping them out which meant I had to zip into the retreat house to our room.  It so happened that Rob - Man Sewing was using the space for his lecture. I had to zip up and down the stairs a few times while he was talking until someone reminded me that there was a front set of stairs!  DUH!!!!   Oh well!   Now I know for today but hopefully both iPads held their charge from last night and we are good to go today!

Our quilts fell a couple of times and we kept rigging them up so they wouldn't.  Let's just say that the wind picked up later in the afternoon and we were debating whether to drop the tents or what. As is usual for these type of events, the crowds tend to drift off so we weren't busy with them. We were busy with holding things down. And when one of the tents across from us literally blew up and onto someone else's tent, we called it a day!  It was 3:30 PM.   It was crazy.  I had a customer in our booth and I'm trying to get her prize to her and Patti is holding down the tent and everyone else is running around because the tents were lifting and blowing.  But we got everything safely stowed away. Hopefully we'll have something to help hold down the tents today because I hear it's going to be windy again.  No rain although it looked very threatening at one point.

And the silver lining to that?  We got to shop!  Well, we got to look around. I didn't buy anything, but Patti and I stopped by the Northcott section and we tidied it up!  We couldn't help ourselves.

We met up with Ronda and Laura and had a pretty decent burger at the little burger place in town.

Then it was onto the Charity Bake Off which was held in the retreat center.  We started at 6 and we sewed and sewed and sewed. Someone did the cutting and someone did the pressing.  Is there no end to these blocks??  When I was about finished the blocks and getting close to my limit of consciousness, it was realized that we had enough blocks to make TWO quilts.  A slight miscalculation there!   Drat - because I could easily have completed the top.  Let's just say that there were a few issues and we're not going to go there!

I volunteered to get up early and finsih my top which I'm going to quilt tonight. Then I can see how wonky my seams are!   So yes, here I am after a long day yesterday up at 5 AM today and getting the blog to you so I can go and finish sewing my quilt top.  I see that they left only ONE of the tops at my sewing station.  Someone else can do the other!   Ronda and Laura were on the same team and I think they realized the situation about the number of blocks and did NOT sew all of them, but started to work on a quilt top.

I did mention how windy it got, but I didn't really mention how hot it was. You know there is hot and then there is HOT.  This was even HOTTER than hot!   It was humid, it was hot and I know we didn't drink enough even though there was water right by us. It was hard as we had farily steady business all day and no time for a quick break and really no need so we must get more water in us today!

On that note, I'm out of here.  By the way, the ttaffic is a lot quieter this morning.

Have a great day!

Ciao!