Vacation

Since I have moved to Alaska I have been blessed to be able to travel once a year to spend a week with my best friend of over 30 years (ouch) to catch up and move back into the stream of life of friends. We go wherever the whimsy takes us and do whatever there is to do there. This year we decided to have a stitchy element to the trip and make the trip coincide with the Stitching weekend organized by Stoney Creek in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.  I have never been to Pennsylvania so I was looking forward to seeing new places and doing something new with my friend. She always finds us the best places and this year was no exception. She found us a cottage on a farm in Mount Joy that was just wonderful. It was named Oasis and with good reason. It was a lovely little cottage with the view of the goats, a horse and chickens from the front porch. We had lovely weather and drove all over in search of used books. We are both inveterate readers and are rarely found without a list of books we are searching for in hand.  We found several books we were searching for and I am excited to say that I found 3 needle work related books that I have been searching out . One small store that we found had several needlework books and I had to get these as he was having a sale and that made the finds even better for me.  We ended up with more books than we had room for so we donated what we read while we were there to the local library book store for friends of the library sales. We ate pretzels, shared a pumpkin moon pie from a local bakery, and took in the Amish markets and antique stores as well as a couple of quilt stores.

 The weekend took us to the Stoney Creek festival to the marketplace. Not that either of us needed to buy anything we looked at each booth and managed to purchase a few things ( of course). It was much smaller than I had expected but each shop or presenter that was there was quality as far as I could tell.  I was most attracted to Karen Kubbla of Rosewood Manor's booth. She had a lot of her models there and all the charts with some of them kitted up and had the Valdani thread packs for some of them available. I fell in love with Quaker Spring after seeing the model even though I had not noticed it much when I saw it online. The color of the fabric is just wonderful and the thread colors are great. She had the model for Quakers and Quilts on display and made me want to get mine out and start it right away (how is yours coming Jacquie?) I could have bought so many of hers but with a WIP list like mine. I will buy Spring Quaker and do it when I get some of my WIP done. I did buy a little Teresa Layman kit as I have wanted to try these for a long time and felt now was the time.  I also bought a Stoney Creek Pattern book to do with snowmen and a Homespun Elegance Christmas ornament.  We spent most of the day looking through the shops that came and had booths and went back several times to the Rosewood Manor booth.

All too soon the time with my friend was over (where did it go) and we had to part until next year. Sigh. I am blessed with my friend and I look forward all year to seeing her. We did spend a lot of time stitching (her more than me, I read) but I did work on an old WIP that my sister asked me to stitch for her that I have procrastinated over. Finally I made some progress on it and hope to have it done by next Christmas for her. Lots of color changes but it will be different to do a picture instead of the samplers I usually do.

Enough for the first week of my vacation it was fun. Next installment, week two on the West Coast. Have some stitching in your day. Marjo