Patricia's March, 2008 Quilt Show

Well, it is trying to become spring and the temps were obviously conducive to large numbers of people coming out for the quilt show at Patricia's Fabric House. As usual, there were a lot of wonderful quilts and tons and tons of people as she also has a 25% off sale running at the same time!!

I really enjoyed seeing some quilts that were from people I had not seen before and have included a few here for your viewing pleasure. I added a few more to my Picasa Album. http://www.picasaweb.google.com/elizabeth.brandkamp


This is the first quilt done by a local quilter who I did meet. She was inspired by the poppies on a plate that she had and came up with the design herself using a book on landscape quilts.


This quilt was done by our own Pat Berardi in a class taught by Sylvia Einstein. This was very un-Pat like and we loved it!



This was one of two lovely quilts by Mary Rankin in the quilt show. There is all sorts of lovely beading on this piece which you may see if you double click on the picture for a closeup.



This was a lovely all wool applique.

A Fun Day at Genesee Valley Quilt Club

The posts have been a little sparse lately as I keep having problems with uploading of pictures. I think it is all done and then I get a server error. Grrrr. I think it has to do with doing it at a busy time of day and it is probably timing out but very annoying. So with some luck I will get the remaining New York pictures up and then some of quilt club today which was fun.




Priscilla Kibbee had a sale table and it never ceases to amaze me that I always find new things that I have to have. As I am making a jacket next week in her jacket class, I picked up a few odds and ends to put on the jacket which will be primarily blacks and reds. It needed a focal point though so hopefully I will have found it!!

I also volunteered to help with the Programs part of Genesee Valley for next year (a behind the scenes position for sure). With a whole team working the programs, it shouldn't be too bad.



I only took a couple of pictures today but had to share this one of Teddy Ahern's chicken quilt. Teddy is a champion machine quilter and that is how she did all the chickens. She then used fabric crayons to shade them in. It is in honor of one of her pet chickens who was killed by a hawk in her yard.




I also loved this one that Pam Peet did and had quilted by Valerie Schultz who is also a wonderful machine quilter as well as President of our club. If you double click on the image, you might be able to see the detail in the light areas.

Staten Island, Brooklyn and the Circle Line Tour

Well, we did manage to get out to Staten Island to see Warren's elderly aunt which is always a treat. She is still pretty spry and has lots of stories from old although her short term memory is not doing so well. She lives in a ranch house in a lovely residential section of the Old Town area of Staten Island. It is hard to believe that such suburban looking areas exist as part of NYC.

I decided to take the 3 hour Circle Line tour my last day in New York City. I really like it so much better than the shorter trips as you get to see all of Manhattan and surroundings. The last time I took the trip was close to 25 years ago when the Statue of Liberty was clad in a metal brace while they were working on her. What a change there has been on the island of Manhattan since then!!! All for the better, I might add.

The tour guide said that they are putting up residential apartment buildings as fast as they can and are still not meeting the demand for living in the City! Hoboken and Jersey City right across the river are no longer grubby outposts but have been gentrified to take the overflow.

We decided to find Warren's father's tenement house one day. We knew it was in Brooklyn and had the address (thanks to Aunt Norma).



We had NO idea what kind of neighborhood it was now but got on the subway and headed out. I suspected it might not be too bad as it literally was next to the water looking onto Manhattan in Brooklyn. Well, turns out the neighborhood is Brooklyn Heights and is filled with those ridiculously expensive brownstones!! The tenement is still there but is now a nice apartment building! It is considered a historic district! His father would have gotten a big kick out of that! The family moved from Brooklyn to Staten Island when he was a teenager because a younger brother was thought to benefit from the fresh air of the "country".

Warren was born on Staten Island when it was still farmland and the only way to get there was by ferry. Times have obviously changed there as well! A recent look at his old address shows nothing but condos and small tightly built homes. Warren estimated there were probably 200 residences on the land his parents used to own! Now they made quite a bit when selling it, but what it must be worth now!!



This is the skyline of the financial district on Manhattan -- it looks so strange without the Towers which helped you to figure out where everything was.



This is a picture of Ellis Island where many of our ancestors first landed on American soil. I have at another time taken a tour of this island.

We Stop the Travelogue for a Brief Update of My Quilting Adventures!

Winter has arrived in Western New York -- too bad it is just a couple of weeks until spring is officially here! I thought with our numerous times away, we might escape winter entirely this year.
Well, the weather has not been behaving but I did manage to get to my friend Marcia's house on Friday for a wonderful day working in her studio with both Marcia and Priscilla Kibbee.


Priscilla has become an official quilter with one finished top she had been working on and one in process which we got to see for the first time yesterday. It was of course in Priscilla's laid back muted colors (LOL)!! It isn't done yet but we all pitched in to see if we could rearrange the blocks.



I made excellent use of the wonderful design walls and set up the rows and columns for my Depression Sherbet Extreme Quilt. I spent much of today sewing on the sashing between the vertical sides of the blocks and am quite pleased with how it is coming together. Just have to make some final design decisions on the nine patches which will attach to the sashing strips. EQ6 will get called into use yet again!

The Tour of Grand Central Station

These two pictures are from my hotel window in the evening after all the lights were on. I couldn't resist adding them to the blog. After all I have shown the view at every other time!!




Thursday Warren and I decided to split up as he wanted to take the tour of Central Park and my feet by this time were killing me! I opted instead for what I thought would be a short tour of Grand Central Station. Well, it was a great tour but not short. It is a free tour that is held by the historical society each Wed at 12:30. It was lovely in that we heard so much of the history of Manhattan as well as the history of railroading in NYC and of course Vanderbuilt.

Now when I was a kid, we lived in the Philadelphia suburbs, used public transportation and had no car. We frequently would take the train to NY into Penn Station and then switch to Grand Central for the "national" part of our trip. All that has changed as Penn Station is where the long rides originate out of now and all the local trains come from Grand Central.

Over a 15 year period, they complete refurbished and redid Grand Central to bring it back to what it was when it was first built in 1913. It is the largest in the world in terms of the number of tracks coming in and out (I believe it was 67 or 68). When they rebuilt, they actually opened up quarries long closed in Italy and Tennessee to obtain matching marble!

I remember the "before" version only as being a grubby railway station like many I had been in. The most striking thing was always the HUGE Kodak picture of the month or quarter which filled one end of the station. No, it is no longer there. They actually built a new part of the station according to the original plans which had never existed before -- on the east side. The reason it was never finished as only the poor lived on the east side of Manhattan and they would have no need for a railroad!!

It certainly has changed!!


This is the clock on the outside of Grand Central. You will see the red background on the 6 and this is actually a window that opens in the summer to keep the works cooled.


This is one of the many lights in the main section of the terminal. When they were contemplating the cleaning and refurbishing, they assumed that these were brass as they were so discolored by smoke and grime. It turned out that they were actually gilded with gold on nickel!! They are stunning.


This is a view looking up at the ceiling of Grand Central which is filled with a painting of the Mediterranean night sky from June through October. They didn't even know it was there, the ceiling was so dirty. Needless to say, they don't allow smoking in there anymore as that was 70% of the grime.



This is one of the light fixtures in what used to be the Ladies Waiting Room where women would shower and change before or after getting on the train. They are starting to do some more work in here.

A day at the Orchid Show at the Botanical Gardens

This is a view from the window of our room just at sunset. We came back to the room some days to rest before heading back downtown for a show each night.

Well, I happened to see that there was an orchid show at the Botanical Gardens so I found out which train to take and we headed off on Wednesday morning. It was very cold but beautiful and sunny. The orchid show had only opened a couple of days before.

This is me standing in front of a bank of all different kinds of orchids to give you a feel for how they were displayed. Double clicking on any of the pictures will make them bigger. I will be adding a slide show to this blog in a couple of days.


Well, they don't do anything halfway in New York City!! The Botanical Gardens are located in The Bronx just north of the Zoo. We had never been there before but will definitely go back some time when you can tour the outside gardens which cover 550 acres! We had to be satisfied with the Conservatory which was fantastic!! I am sure I haven't been in anything as well done as that ever.


I had been to Longwood Gardens many times but it pales in comparison to this. Add on top of that the absolutely fantastic orchid show -- well, it was a great way to spend half a day. Supposedly there were 2000 varieties of orchids. The display was unbelieveable -- they were woven into the permanent displays with bowers, arches and orchids hanging from trees as well as planted among the other exhibits.

It was truly breathtaking and the day was so beautiful and sunny to begin with! I have included a few pictures for your viewing pleasure but will post a Picasa album later on as I took a lot of pictures there of the various orchids.





Everything in the Conservatory is kept well groomed and beautifully maintained.


Despite the number of people, you felt many times like you were by yourself. It was a definite "must see".

The Trip to New York - Central Park Zoo and the Metropolitan Museum of Art

This is the view from our hotel room at the Riverside Towers at 80th and Riverside Drive in Manhattan -- a very cheap hotel which is clean and has a microwave and fridge but not much else except location, location, location!!!!

Well, we are finally back and exhausted from our trip! Warren seems to have come down with the flu but hopefully I have escaped at least so far but who knows! We were a little nervous about taking Delta instead of Jet Blue but it turned out wonderfully. We had thought that maybe we would be in one of those little jet props as the time to get home was double what is was getting there. But not a problem. They had built in the time we had to wait on the runway for takeoff into the time to get here so even though the flight was less than an hour on a very nice little jet, the wait time was over an hour!! There were 40 planes in line ahead of us on a Saturday night at 8:30!

WOW is all I can say about a week in New York City. Everything is bigger, better and lovelier -- it is just a city of extremes!

We went to four Broadway plays -- Grease, Young Frankenstein, Avenue Q and Chorus Line. We liked Young Frankenstein the best as the staging was unbelievable and the story is such classic Mel Brooks. Avenue Q was a delightful surprise suggested by our oldest daughter. Kind of a marriage between South Park and Sesame Street and laugh out loud funny music -- perfect for the 30 somethings that were brought up on Sesame Street and their parents who watched with them!! Very irreverent to say the least! Grease was okay as it starred the people that were picked on the NBC show. The talent in New York is astounding and many of the subordinates had much better voices than those two leads. I really liked Chorus Line on Broadway but Warren hated it.

Our first two days were spent going to the Central Park Zoo and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.



Here is me posing per Warren's request at the Children's Zoo in Central Park. We had just been through our favorite exhibit which is the Rainforest Conservatory where they have all sorts of tropical birds just flying around.


Here are some of the ducks that were outside in the Children's Zoo.

It was beautiful on Monday and the trip to the park was glorious. It is a favorite for both of us. Tuesday the weather was not so cooperative but we spent the day at the Metropolitan. I spent the entire day looking at all the Special Exhibitions and the 19th and 20th Century painters. I took a lot of pictures of art I liked and so will have my very own inspirational book of art. I had forgotten how much I liked Monet and especially van Gogh -- awesome. They have a wonderful collection of the Impressionists and of modern art at the Metropolitan. They had a couple of wonderful special exhibitions as well. I especially liked the Jasper Johns exhibit of grays as well as a private collection of modern works (we couldn't take pictures in those two exhibits).



This is probably one of my two favorites of the van Gogh's at the Museum -- Cypresses. There are two from different angles in the display.




The sunflowers were my very favorite however -- I just loved the colors. I was lucky enough to see the traveling van Gogh exhibition that toured the United States back in 1962 at the Detroit Museum of Art. Unfortunately, you couldn't get far enough away from some of the paintings in that exhibit.



This one is called Red and Yellow Cliffs by Georgia O'Keefe. I really liked this one and it was different from many of hers.






The first of these is by Georges Braque and the second is by Pablo Picasso. They were both done when the men were together in 1911 and there are two others in the Museum as well that were obviously done about the same time. I liked the use of the neutrals. This is at a time in the painters' careers when they were experimenting with the new cubism. Hard to tell them apart!! After seeing all the Picasso paintings, it is obvious that he is a master of his craft as well as being very innovative. His work always seems so perfect to me.