A Truck Full of Pillows

My mom found a whole bunch of pillow forms on sale and proceeded to go crazy... sewing up 17 pillows for our quilt booth.

They wound up looking fantastic (in my opinon)!

Our neighbor, and long-time family-friend, Vicky Brickhouse, also helped with a bunch of these. See the above "B" pillow that she sewed up (B for Brickhouse). Love it!

The one above looks sort of Anthropologie-esque.

Anthropologie happens to be my favorite store, so I will definitely be claiming that puppy later!

And because I'm a dork, I spent an entire afternoon photographing this rainbow of pillows in a variety of setups/locations.

...And... because Rudy is the cutest little boy ever... he also made the cut for this set of blog photos.

Dress Rehearsal

I was going through some old blog entries today when I came across this post (that I must have forgotten to put up) about our Quilt Market booth.

Anyway, it made me laugh. So I'm putting it up now... even though its way way after the fact.

This was our very first booth for Quilt Market, and we wanted to make sure that we got it right. So we had a dress rehearsal of sorts in the DRIVEWAY, of all places, a few days before we packed everything up into a U-Haul and drove out to Kansas City. Our next door neighbor, Mac, was invaluable during this whole process. We've never built anything like this before... and so he'd pop over every few hours to check up on us... and lend his power tools... etc.

Actually, this dress rehearsal was very helpful as it turned out, because it took us a couple of different tries... and about 5 hours to get it set up this first time.

When we got to Market though... we felt like pros, as we were able to get it up in under an hour.

Decorating it was a different story. That took the entire TWO days that were allotted for the setup. Perhaps we should have done a dry run of decorating as well. :)

The Sign We Made

This is our sign for Market. We made it ourselves out of poster board, fabric, glue, and a Sharpie.

And we bought the frame at Hobby Lobby.

I love Hobby Lobby.

Lauren & Jessi Pretending To Be Construction Workers

So this year, we decided to have a booth of our own at Quilt Market in May to show off our newest line, Birds & Berries.

I'm currently living in New Jersey and my mom is down in Spartanburg SC, so I drove down to her place for a week with the goal of finishing our booth.

Not knowing where to start, we decided to just drive over to the Home Depot and take it from there.

We walked around aimlessly for a while until one of the employees asked us if we needed help.

Which we REALLY did.

I showed the guy a photo of a booth from my iPhone… which he used to draw us up a little diagram… PLUS measure out all the wood for us…

After him, we talked to 7 other employees while gathering the remainder of our supplies… each of whom taught us something new and exciting about building materials.

We now love the Home Depot and its team of incredibly helpful employees!

I have to say… throughout everything, my mom has been quite the little trooper. She didn't want to actually build a booth for our first year because curtains would have been a much easier alternative. But in the end, I think we were both really happy.

The rest of the story probably isn't that funny to any one else except us. Ha. Suffice it to say this little adventure consisted of 5 long days of the "blind leading the blind".

And… we wouldn't have finished at all had it not been for our next-door neighbor Mac McPherson checking up on us everyday to make sure that we were on the right track. :)

And actually, truth be told… we didn't QUITE finish. The basic structure is finished, and we painted our walls. But we still have yet to actually do a trial run to make sure that this puppy isn't going to topple over.