I'm a Winner!

A couple of weeks ago, my friend at work asked if I would be interested in visiting a local quilt shop that was having an open house.  Can you believe there was a quilt store right here in my town and I hadn't been there?  That had to be remedied.  Never one to forego exploring new quilting horizons, I readily agreed.

Martelli's sells Janome sewing machines, has a little bit of {really lovely} quilt fabric, a long arm quilting and embroidery service, and a ton of other stuff.  But the coolest thing about them is that they manufacture really cool quilting stuff right here in my home town.

You know that Curve Master foot that everyone's talking about?  The one my very own daughter did a tutorial on last week?   Yup, it's manufactured right here on the Gulf Coast.

I bought a non-skid mat to put under the foot feed of my sewing machine. It really works!  No longer do I have to chase the thing all over the room.  That is pretty cool.

 I also bought {what I hope is} this really nifty binding toolkit.  It's supposed to be foolproof.  See the package?  Perfect binding EVERY TIME it says!  I haven't used it yet.  We'll see.

But along with the sale, and the product demos, and the general festivities, they had door prizes.  The Grand Prize was a brand new Janome sewing machine.

I didn't win that. =(

But I did win a $100 merchandise gift certificate.  There's a lot you can do with $100, you know.

I can buy that Curve Master foot.  That looks pretty awesome!

Or I could buy this nifty ergonomic rotary cutter they have that's supposed to save your wrists.  I have carpal tunnel syndrome, so that might be a really good thing.

Decisions, decisions....  Sometimes choices are just so difficult.

But this is a good kind of choice to get to make.

What brought all this to mind is that last evening, in my email box, was a post from the Play Crafts blog.  I follow her by email because its a Wordpress blog and I can't follow via Blogger or Google Friend Connect.  Anyway, she posted this cool palette builder tool she has developed to extract colors from any photograph.   You upload your photo and it instantly extracts the colors and shows you the color palette in the photo.  I suppose most people would use landscapes or sunsets for their experiments.  The first photo I came to was the photo of Martelli's I snapped the night I won the gift certificate.

I uploaded that random photo, and this is what I got...

I made it really big so you can see what it does.  And it was very fast. 

What do you think - should I make a quilt with those colors?