My first quilt guild meeting

I attended my first quilt guild meeting today in Houma, LA - it was so much fun! Mona and Deb, owners of Sew This! in Abita Springs, my Bernina dealer and quilt fabric shop, picked me up on their way through town this morning - we had a fun drive. The Gulf States Quilting Association, http://www.gulfstatesquilting.org/ had one of their general meetings today and I really didn't know what to expect but it was a great learning experience and I was amazed to see well over 100 quilting friends come together. Upon arrival, we signed in then proceeded to receive our first gift which was a new quilt pattern and 10 assorted strips of fabric to get us started thanks to Debbie Frank, quilt designer and owner of The Quilting Niche in Houma - http://www.quiltingniche.com/. I was very surprised to receive such a generous gift upon entering. I then proceeded to the membership desk to sign up and pay my dues for the year and learned about the upcoming March seminar and trade-show in Baton Rouge - i'm looking forward to that weekend but I don't think i'll be able to take any classes there. The oveall meeting was good, a little boring with standard guild business but the guest speaker this afternoon was Linda Griffith http://www.organizedoption.com/ who presented a great program on getting our sewing rooms organized. Linda was informative and I walked away with a few things I might implement in my sewing corner. One other thing I was surprised about was that they had a table full of books, magazines and patterns that was free for the taking -- I walked away with an issue of Fon's & Porter, a book on flying geese patterns, a book of differnt block patterns for each state of the US, an embroidery design book and a great book about oriental cross stitch patterns that I hope will inspire me to create some cross-stitched embroidery designs in the future. Here's a pic of my haul today!