LONGARMQUILTER: Shaggy dog story

I spent last Saturday at the home of one of my IQ buddies. IQ stands for IntelliQuilter, which is a computerized robotics system for the longarm quilting machine. Learning all its capabilities and putting them to creative use is the purpose of this quarterly get together, so five of us packed up our IQ tablets and headed for Elizabeth City and Joy's quilting barn in her back yard.

Here are Connie and Mary preparing to start our lessons. It is truly marvelous what we can accomplish with this program. For instance, here is a quilt that I might not ever have been able to do such detail on had I had to freehand everything.

This is Carol's block of the month quilt. She added a marvelous ribbon border to it. Unfortunately, the ribbon, being cut on the bias, was stretchy, so it tested my ability to get all those borders to flatten out.

But thanks to the IQ doing all the stitching, I was able to use my hands to manipulate the cloth as it was being quilted, making everything come out all hunky dory.

But that's not the shaggy dog story.

I have two dogs. RazzMaTazz is a 71 pound mixture of Australian shepherd and who knows what -- maybe Husky? Jet is a 65 pound furball that is part Chow and part Shepherd. Both have very long coats with alot of down underneath, and they are particularly hard to brush in the summer when the shedding is so intense. So this year -- the first in their 7 years of life -- we got them a summer do. They have taken to it quite well, but Jet still won't go outside when the sun is up. He hates the heat down here and only leaves the house under duress.