My first US post

I know….I know….I promised to blog every week while I’m here on my 3 month “sabbatical”!  But you know how things go…..whereas I thought I would have lots of spare time – well… things just don’t work out that way.

I’m still doing my day job – I have to – there are so many things that I wanna buy and so much fabric to collect – someone has to pay for it.  I really only have the weekends free and that’s when I do my shopping and wandering around.

I’m going to start backwards!  I’ll remember better this way.

So what did I do yesterday and today? Shop for fabric, of course!

There’s a shop hop going on right now, fortunately for me, which started on Friday.  I decided to rent/hire a car for the weekend and do the shops myself.  So with some trepidation I rented the car – fingers crossed – and drove from 9am until I came home exhausted at 6pm.  And, you know? Once you drive on the wrong side of the road, its comes easy.  I hope I don’t forget my driving skills back home.

I had my schedule all worked out the night before but Greg (the driver who picked me up for my rent car) rearranged things for me because he thought that I could cover more territory going his way!  The only downside to this day was that it rained all day!

First stop was Culpeper. The Little Quilt Shop in Madison in Culpepper.  I had visited before but needed to get my card stamped and pick up some more fabric of course.  I was very restrained here.

Next stop Virginia Quilt Museum.  Unfortunately, and I was a tad upsegt about this, no photos were allowed.  There were a couple of exhibits – one of men’s quilts which was very good (!) and the other were quilts from the Civil War – very good indeed.  Nice lunch at a café nearby after that.

 

Next stop Staunton (pronounced Stanton) and Rachel’s Quilt Patch.  I had been here before and remembered it as a big shop, but I must have been mistaken.  It was a small but very nice shop.

From there I drove to Dayton to Patchwork Plus.  I don’t know why I thought that this would be a small shop.  What a surprise.  It was a big and wonderful shop – I spent the most money there.  The women were lovely and warm and welcoming.

I had a rather long drive to the next stop – The Quiltery in Fairfield.  Another lovely shop – very friendly women working there.  They’d even heard of Aussie designers (not me, sadly)

 

And then a very very long drive home.  Stopped off at Red Lobster for a lobster, prawns, scallops dinner – yum.

And here’s what I bought!

I’ll do the another post tomorrow for my quilt shop stops on Saturday and Sunday.

Till then….