Hello all, Mary Ellen here.

Yesterday I went on a “back stage” tour of the Heritage Village Archives. This is a perk of being a museum member-not a part of the guild membership. I had received the same mailing about it that all members receive and decided I’d love to see what’s up in the museum ” attic” so to speak. There were only two of us in the afternoon group so we got a great opportunity to be up close to the items (this tour focused on quilts and textiles) but since there were only 2 of us Jessica and Kayla showed us just about everything. How cool is that!?!   Take advantage of these museum opportunities–there’s another tour tomorrow. Maybe there is still space-you do need to reserve a spot in these tours. Besides the quilts and garments of the same eras, I really enjoyed looking at the garments they have from the 60’s and 70’s–both everyday clothing and gowns. I remembered having things so similar to some of those in the collection. Very,very fun and interesting. I highly recommend you go on one of these backstage visits–you’ll love it!

One humorous note-as we were passing the group of office machines I commented on the very old typewriter that they have. I shared a story of being in a stationery shop which also has an old typewriter, in which they feature signs of the current special events. I happened to be in the shop one day when the owner asked one of the young staff members to roll the newest list of specials into the typewriter…and the youngster had no idea how to roll the paper into the typewriter!! Well yesterday Kayla (also so young!!) admitted she too would not know how to go about it. The rest of us laughed and talked a bit about typing with carbon paper, erasing your errors and thereby getting the papers all out of alignment, and the assorted tribulations of working with typewriters. How many of you remember those days?! I guess that makes the bunch of us old codgers, doesn’t it?!

Today in my quilty e-mail was a newsletter from Alex Anderson and Ricky Tims’ blog. Much of what they have at their site is free-I don’t pay the subscription fee anymore. Basically I’m only missing some of their videos and I find enough free ones on the web to satisfy me. Today there is a slide show of some spectacular New York Beauty quilts being featured. Several shots are shown of each quilt so you can see the piecing well and the absolutely gorgeous quilting on some of them. It’s about 11 minutes long, so brew a cup of tea and get ready for some true quilting eye candy! Click here.

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