High Desert Paint Box
I hope you all had a wonderful Independence Day and are enjoying Quilt Week in central Oregon! As we gear up for the Sisters Outdoor Quilt Show this Saturday, we are also preparing for our July 10th guild meeting. The July newsletter is now available on the Newsletter page. If you haven't read the newsletter yet, the biggest news is the cancellation of our August Quilt Show in the Park. Please remember that our beautiful raffle quilt, High Desert Paint Box, will still be raffled off on August 19. This is a big fundraiser for the guild and with the cancellation of the show, we now need to sell as many tickets ahead of time as possible. Please consider sharing with your friends and family to see if they might like to buy some tickets. More about the raffle quilt may be found on the Raffle Quilt page.
The following is a note from Jane Davis about the cancellation.
The August quilt show has been cancelled by the Board for 2017.
Recently, the quilt show committee learned that, due to the expected traffic congestion on the weekend before the eclipse, the Oregon Youth Challenge (under the auspices of the Oregon National Guard) will not be able to help us get the quilt racks from Sisters. As you know, each year we use quilt racks from the Sisters Outdoor Quilt Show to display at least one-third of the quilts in the show. We need the students to help us unload racks from the storage unit in Sisters, load them onto the rental truck, unload them at the park, reload them at the end of the day and then do the unloading/loading again at the storage unit. The commander of the Oregon Youth Challenge will not allow the students to leave the campus that weekend for safety reasons. After hearing this news, the committee investigated other ideas, but nothing was really workable or affordable. Changing the date for the park also was not possible.
The Board discussed all of the issues and possibilities at length at the June 26 Board meeting. A motion was made that the Guild take a "vacation" from the annual quilt show for 2017. The motion was unanimously approved.
The drawing for the raffle quilt will STILL be held on August 19th at Pioneer Park at 3:00 p.m. This is because we must adhere to the statement printed on the tickets. You are welcome to come to the park for the drawing, although it will be a brief event. The winner will be notified and an announcement will be posted on the Guild blog.
Raffle quilt ticket sales are a big source of revenue for the Guild. Thus, cancelling the quilt show means that we lose, possibly, several hundred dollars of income. Therefore it is very important that, in the time we have left before the drawing, we must try to sell more tickets. We urge members who have not yet purchased tickets to do so to help make up the difference.
There will be time at the July Guild meeting to answer your questions about this. This was not an easy decision to make. It is impossible to predict what the real impact of the eclipse traffic and visitor congestion will be like.
