It's Curtains for you Rocky, curtains...

Ever give one of those gifts that give back to you?  I did.  Amy wanted a new sewing machine and we went out and bought her a nice one.  She's been doing all kinds of craft projects and hemming some clothes she used to bring to her mother to get done.  So a natural project for me to ask her to do was to make some curtain skirts for the bottom of the layout.  We found a whole roll of black fabric on clearance at Wall-mart and she went to work on sewing my layout skirting.  She did a great job!  Boy do I love that girl. ;)

My Sweetheart working on the layout skirting with her new sewing machine. :)

As you can see the skirts came out nice.

When we bought the roll of cloth, we thought we had too much.  But as it turns out, we barely had enough to cover the main part of the layout.  I need to go out and find some more so we can do the helix and then the skirting project will be complete. :)

I'm very happy how neat the layout space looks now with the skirting up.  All the clutter underneath the layout is now out of sight.  :)

NJ LD/OP and RPM Meet a Success!

The NJ LD/OP and RPM Meet held Oct. 25th and 26th was a great success!  Though attendance was down slightly from last year, do to the meet being the same weekend as the Timonium show, we were able to raise a lot more money this year.  This time around we were able to donate $700 to help establish a scholarship for Special Education Students who want to further their education after graduating UCTECH plus we donated another $500 to the UCTECH SKILLS USA Chapter to help offset travel costs to go to Nationals this year.  This makes the school happy, which guarantees we can keep holding the meet there, which in turn makes us happy.  A win win if you ask me ;)

My friend and fellow Ma & Pa Society Member Art Kuperstein manned a table for the Society at the meet.  Art also took all the photos in this post.

Rob Hinkle put up a display showing his plans and design for his Reading RR based layout as part of the Layout Design SIG display portion of the meet.

Lots of RPM models and dioramas were on display in the RPM section.

More RPM Models.

The Commodore (Ralph Heiss) gave a hands on clinic on using Pan Pastels for weathering.

I had a display showing scenes from the prototype Ma & Pa that I'm modeling from, along with some maps and track plan.

And yes, I finally remembered to take some  pictures during a open house!

There is a lot more information and pictures on our website:

http://www.hansmanns.org/ld-op-nj/index.htm

On a serious note, we will be changing the meet logo and name next year due to the Operations SIG asking meet organizers not to have them listed as co-sponsors, or using the SIG's name or any likeness of their logo in any meet publicity.  They are concerned over liability issues.  I think it's a shame and short sided on their part because there are so many operations weekends that are put on by the SIG members and those, along with our meet, have always been used to highlight the Op SIG and the benefits of signing up and belonging.  I can only see where this will be harmful to growing and keeping their membership up.  Anyway, next year look for a new name and logo for the NJ Meet which will probably just be shortened to the NJ Layout Design and RPM Meet since the LD SIG doesn't seem to have the same worries as the Op SIG.