We had been to Sisters before, but not during quilt week. Wow, is it busy! Here is the fabulous boondock site we found though.
My first class on Monday was on quilting with lines. We started with straight lines, then slightly curved lines, then very curved lines, then … I guess you get the idea. I enjoyed the class a lot. It was well organized. My second class was on Tuesday and was for piecing. We used a kit that had a beautifully printed panel showing the Sisters Quilt Show design for this year. The kit also had fabric for lovely little star blocks which is what we really worked on. It used a “Tri Recs” ruler, and what seamed simple was actually pretty slow at the start! I finally got a rhythm established and could do a star in about 25 minutes, having pre-cut all the pieces. My brain was so exhausted by 2:30 on Tuesday I had Kevin come to pick me up early! Recommendation: Plan on having a day to recover between classes. They are so chock full of information it is exhausting!
The kit fabrics are gorgeous. The blocks (unpressed in this photo) are 6 1/2”, so each of this little star points are tiny! And they definitely have a right and left side.
Wednesday and Thursday we just did errands and had friends out for lunch which was great fun (the friends, not the errands!). On Friday we drove the McKenzie Scienic Byway. Absolute stunner, but definitely for the truck, not them motorhome. Lots of ups and down, lots of tight curves. The size limit is 35’, and I wouldn’t want to be anywhere near that size limit to drive it! Here are some pictures from our drive with captions.
One of the highlights was the historic Fish Lake Remount Station. It has a long and storied history of many uses, the longest was as a Forest Service muleskinner location. Mules were the primary way to get goods into and out of the remote locations where rangers were stationed. The site was also the summer quarters for the Head Forest Ranger for a number of years. Some of the buildings are maintained by the “Friends of Fish Lake” organization including the one below.
“Caulked boots” means boots with spikes for foresters/loggers climbing trees
We had lunch at Clear Lake Resort operated by a USFS concessionaire. The food was good, and the lake was very popular. It is not the headwaters of the McKenzie River after a lava eruption damed the ancestral McKenzie. Deep and cold.
On Saturday we went to the legendary Sisters Outdoor Quilt Show. We got downtown by about 7:30, and quilts were still being hung. There were over a thousand! We wandered around a couple of hours and saw hundreds before it started getting too hot for us. But wow, what a show! This is just a small sampling
At 9:30 as we left, people were just beginning to throng, and I am sure it quadrupled in size before it finished this afternoon.
And I would be totally remiss if I didn’t comment on the town of Sisters. What a lovely place! There are flowers everywhere, and it is a tourist town with beautiful flowers, decent parking, and very few tshirt shops! Instead there are nice little restaurants, art galleries, etc.
We have gotten tired of the heat in Sisters though, so after we went to the show for a few hours, we packed up and went 22 miles away to the Ray Benson Sno-Park. Basically there are just a few huge parking lots you can stay in. It might sound bad, but the temperatures are at least 10 degrees cooler than Sisters, and the view out my front door isn’t bad! There is no one else staying in the lot we are in, and the place is very quiet.
We will stay here until Monday morning when we head into an Elk’s Lodge in Tillamook. The weather there is nice and cool, and it will be a welcome relief.