Quilt Show and Upper Peninsula, Part 2

I promised some pictures of the purchases I made on my recent vacation. First off, from the Fat Quarter Factory booth at the show, I got a rag rug making frame:

I went back to their booth on Sunday and saw these fabrics (modeling in this post provided by Baby Boy), and proceeded to have the kind of reaction that caused one of my friends to say, "If you drool on it, Liz, they expect you to buy it."

I also made a stop at the booth that a Hmong group had. I simply could not resist this dragon (the purse is nice, too, large enough for two small or one large paperback).

Having been thoroughly influenced recently by Vicki Pignatelli, I went hunting for dark fabrics. Of course, I couldn't resist the Japanese flowers....

As we were cleaning up the show, packing up and clearing out, I saw these bolt boards in the trash. I claimed them - perfect for wrapping large pieces of fabric and storing in the sewing room!

When we went to Sault Ste. Marie, we went to Gloria's Happy Hooker, a needlework store I'd seen mentioned on Ravelry. She's got a broad selection of quilting fabrics, notions, and patterns; she also has a very nice selection of yarns, yarncraft notions, patterns, etc.; she also has wool fabric and lots of kits and patterns for making rugs, placemats, etc. I was poking around and not feeling totally inspired (this was, after all, just two days after the quilt show!) when Hubby Dearest said, "Did you see this room full of flannels?" We went in there, and we both exclaimed over the wide variety of patterns and colors. Of course, we pulled some off the shelf that we thought would work well together in a quilt:

Actually, it was the one in the middle, with the leaves, that caught our eye first. Then, we built from there.

Finally, when we were over in the Keweenaw Peninsula, we stopped in Lake Linden at a store called Yarns and Threads. The store owner kept her store open a little late so that we could browse, except that the minute I walked in and saw roving, I really didn't look much farther; it became a question of which colors to choose.

The berry (on the left) is actually darker than it looks in this picture. Nancy has a really broad and deep selection of yarns, patterns, and notions for all things yarny. She also has some sewing notions and some fabrics (I spotted some hand-dyed fabrics). We had a really nice conversation about life in the Keweenaw; unfortunately, because the bridge between the northern and southern parts of the peninsula was due to be shut down for servicing early in the evening, we had to cut the conversation short and scamper back south.

Finally, I could not resist including this shot of the guys on the cat quilt.