Albuquerque Quilt Shop Hop - Part 3

The third quilt shop we visited in Albuquerque was probably my favorite of all. It's called Southwestern Decoratives and is located (unlike so many quilt shops) in a brand new building with mile high ceilings.

It was the brightest, freshest quilt store I've ever seen. This picture does not do it justice at all. I think the flash must have messed up.
They had loads of southwestern fabrics, tons of batiks and a huge display of Laurel Burch.






The store ceiling was at least two stories high, and the entire upper wall area above the bolts of fabric was covered with quilts, each one more beautiful than the next. It was really intoxicating! I was especially impressed with the number of really gorgeous, southwestern flavored quilts that they had hanging in the store.
It's hard to pick a favorite, but this Native American quilt might be it.


But then again, this southwestern batik style quilt was a real knockout too! I kept wishing my friend Virginia, who loves the southwestern style even more than I do, could have been here too. I think she would have been in heaven!
I really restrained myself and only purchased a single piece of fabric; a southwestern turquoise print with kid-friendly lizards.
Molly, the woman who rang up my purchase, was happy to be part of my blog. She even let me take her picture twice so I could capture her pretty smile. This was a really great store!

The Albuquerque Quilt Shop Hop - Part 2

Getting back to the shop hop, the second store we went to was Quilting from the Heart. It was a smaller, quieter store than Quilt Works, but still had a very nice selection.






I particularly liked this quilt in the window:





Here is the classroom side of the shop. I'm guessing this is where Linda's Dear Jane group meets. It's a very nice space, with lots of beautiful quilts on the wall.

I ended up buying fabric here too. I'm going to make an abbreviated version of the "Fantasy Pony" quilt. I'm going to leave off one or two of the outer strips to make it smaller, then I'll donate it either to the USO or Project Linus. It's really going to be cute, and since it's really just a panel with edge strips it should go together really fast.

We Saw a Fox!

We went to Vail yesterday and hiked a little bit along the Gore Valley Trail, a really nice blacktopped path that follows the course of the Eagle River at the base of the mountain. We had just finished taking a few pictures on one of the scenic bridges and we saw a fox! I grabbed Larry's arm to get his attention since he didn't see it immediately. It was blocking our path off of the bridge about 20 feet away in the direction we were heading, and it acted like it was planning to cross the bridge! I managed to get several pictures of it while all three of us pondered the situation.
It started to cross over the bridge towards us, so Larry waved his arms to shoo it away. It didn't appear to be frightened of us at all. Probably it's been eating too much people food.

We waved our arms at it some more and eventually discouraged it from coming any closer. We told him that we had seen lots and lots of nature shows on TV and that he was a WILD ANIMAL who shouldn't be trying to make friends with people.

He came around to our point of view eventually and slunk off into the reeds. They really do slink.

This concluded our nature walk for the day and we headed back into town.

The Albuquerque Quilt Shop Hop - Part 1

The ladies of the Dear Jane list supplied me with three shops to visit in Albuquerque; do they ever know their LQS's! The first shop we visited, Quilt Works was really hopping. I got there just as a class got out and it was filled to the brim with loads of people and wonderful fabrics.


I couldn't wait to get inside!













The selection was just overwhelming, especially since I had such a short time to shop.







I had to call Larry back from the "Man Store" two doors down to help me down-select my fabric choices.









He was a huge help to me!








This was a very lively, pretty shop, with a very impressive selection of fabrics; I've never seen so much Laurel Burch in one place! I ended up getting some really fun flamingo fabric, some lovely half price fabric for quilt backs, some flying eagles fabric for the back of my proposed Thunderbird's, a perfect piecing video and some lovely southwestern fabric for someone who had a birthday recently (don't worry, Cindi, I don't mean you!)


Here's my hero doing the whole "payment thing".

Here are some of the gorgeous quilts they had on display!

Made it to Avon Last Night!

We made it to Avon last night after stopping briefly in Taos for lunch. I wasn't terribly impressed with Taos, but we did have an excellent lunch at Gutiz. We did a Rachel Ray and stopped at the visitors center in Taos first thing and asked for a luncheon recommendation. She recommended Gutiz and told us how to get there. Rachel knows what she's doing! After lunch we wandered around the little Plaza, where Larry bought some t-shirts.

The drive to Avon was very beautiful after we got into Colorado. Scenic Route 24 is gorgeous, without being too scary. (Lots of nice sturdy looking guardrails and the dropoffs were all on the other side.) We stopped in Leadville which is over 10,000 feet high. I didn't know there were any towns in America at that high of an elevation. We wouldn't have known we were that high up if they hadn't been so proud of it (signs everywhere); fortunately neither Larry or I had any signs of elevation sickness, headaches etc.

The room is lovely; we're storing our bikes on the porch so they're out of the way. Avon is gorgeous. The whole town is brand new, with round-abouts around big outdoor horse statues. Very pretty, though the round-abouts can be confusing in the dark when all four exit options look exactly alike.

It's 6:40am, Larry is still sleeping, but I was wakeful so I thought I'd retry uploading some of my images from the trip to Photobucket; it worked much better today than it did last night.

Made it to Santa Fe Yesterday

We did a quilt shop hop Saturday morning in Albuquerque. I have lots of pictures of that, but we're at the Santa Fe Baking Company having breakfast and looking up church times, so I don't have the pictures handy for upload yet and I'll blog about that later. We didn't have internet access at the Pecos Trail Inn last night, so I'm a little behind.

We hurried to Santa Fe after the shop hop and shopped Canyon Road. This is where the road begins:

We saw lots of beautiful pieces of art, but our current rule of "If it doesn't make us cry to leave it behind, then don't buy it" continues to save us money.

Nuart Gallery is one we remembered from our last visit in 2004; (they have changed around a lot!) We enjoyed talking to the man who works here; he went to UT and knows Kelly Fearing, the famous Fort Worth Circle surrealist.




Larry really liked these metal pinwheels. They gave off really interesting optical effects in the wind.



The best piece of art we saw all day was at the Winteroud Gallery. It was an contemporary abstract by Inez Kramer. We had a really nice chat with Alex, the woman who works there.
















We dined last night at a place called "Dinner for Two" which specializes in "Continental Fusion" cuisine. It was fabulous. We got to pick the old 2 from column A and 2 from column B thing and had Ceasar salad prepared tableside. We were both surprised that we had lost a pound this morning!





We made a really early night of it last night and slept about 10 hours. Now it's off to church at St. Anne's, then on to Taos and Avon.

later:

Mass at St. Anne's was lovely. They combined English and Spanish in one (English) service better than any other church I have ever seen. Certainly St. Andrew's back home could take a few lessons. It was a tiny church and there was only space for one side of the pews to go to Communion at a time, so they started at the front on the left, worked their way all the way to the back, then continued from the back to the front on the right. I'm glad we could just follow along what the others were doing because we never would have figured it out for ourselves. lol It was also the first church I can remember in ages not proving Communion in both species. Haven't seen that in a while! The music was terrific; there was a flute and at one point I'm CERTAIN I heard bongo drums. We'll definitely remember St. Anne's!
















We saw these cute horses in downtown Santa Fe just as we were leaving. We circled the block to go back and get a picture. There are actually four horses, but one horse is shy.

Made it to Albuquerque!

Here we are leaving home this morning at about 10am; we decided to get a leisurely start after getting everything ready the night before.
We gassed up and got on the road. We had an immediate problem surfaced as one of our bikes tried to escape before we got as far as Weatherford. Larry's sharp eyed vigilence caught the problem before it had really made its move, and we found that using the extra (seemingly superfluous) strap that we had stashed under the car seat really was a good idea.

West Texas is as exciting as ever, which is to say, not at all! However Larry managed to inject a bit of excitement when he tried to make it all the way to Lubbock on the first tank of gas. Not a good idea! With our car heavily loaded and the bikes weighing it down aerodynamically, he wasn't getting nearly the gas mileage that he expected.

We were running on fumes and were both really glad to see this gas station in Slaton, Texas about 20 miles or so before getting to Lubbock. I was really glad to not have to bike into Lubbock in 100 degree weather carrying our emtpy gas can on the first day of vacation! After this exciting episode we gassed up every time we had to stop for any reason: in Muleshoe and Fort Sumner.




We finally got into Albuquerque at about 8:30pm and found our Sheraton without any problems. It's in a very nice, new neighborhood, with lots of new shopping centers. We found a really nice sushi restaurant, then went looking (and finding) quilt shops recommended by my Dear Jane friends.

It has been a very long day. I'm much too tired to discuss my Sister and Maggie's new tattoos, my Mother's impending engagement or my Brother-in-law's recent "unemployment". Like Scarlet O'hara, I'll think about that tomorrow.

Off to Albuquerque and Points West!

This blog is about to go on the road! Tomorrow we set off for Colorado via Albuquerque.

This is a test post from home to verify I can upload images from the camera to the laptop to the blog. Here's Larry with most (not all) of our stuff for the trip. From the left we have: hiking gear, cool weather clothes, warm weather clothes, electronics, my swim gear and Larry's swim gear. Still to pack: both laptops, maps, books, quilting gear and the bikes. Yikes!

International Siggie Swap - Marjo van Oers

I got this lovely and delicate siggie from Marjo van Oers who lives in Breda, Nederland. I just love the stamp; I haven't seen one like it in the states. I sent my siggie back to her right away; I hope it gets there safely.

Pat Tillman 42 in 42 Challenge Complete

My good friend, Virginia, and I each completed two quilts for the Pat Tillman Challenge which were delivered to the U.S.O. at the DFW Airport on Friday. Our four quilts began their lives as 24 fat quarters plus backing material, because we chose to make the four coordinated baby quilts from the "Baby Fats" quilt book by Susan Jackson and Susan Zieglar.

We were both very happy with how the quilts turned out. They're so cute! See for yourself. Above, being held up by my DH is Baby Blocks, my favorite and the largest and most difficult of the four. Below, from the left are Fancy Free, Chubby Cheeks, Baby Blocks (being held up) and First Steps.

Virginia did Fancy Free and Chubby Cheeks and I did Baby Blocks and First Steps, which was probably the easiest of the four. I love how all the colors work together. We decided on a red, white and blue theme, with gold as an accent.
Here's another picture; it was hard to get them all in one frame. I really liked making these quilts; I thought all four turned out really cute!

These four quilts, along with more than 40 others, were taken to the U.S.O. at DFW Airport on Friday in advance of the Saturday due date of the Pat Tillman 42 in 42 Challenge. They will be offered to soldiers flying through DFW on R&R as part of the program where a soldier may be videotaped reading a book to his or her child. The videotape, book and blanket are then sent home to the child. As a quilting group, we were so moved by the U.S.O.'s presentation on the program last year that we have dedicated our quilting efforts since then mainly to keeping the U.S.O. supplied with blankets. Apparently the quilts are very popular and go like hotcakes!