Workshop Weekend!

On Friday, we packed up the camp trailer...(not too hard to pack up since we've been LIVING in it in the driveway all week because our hardwood floors had to be refinished...they had lots of problems with the finish to start with...dry spots...paint spots etc...).....and drove over the mountains to Arlington, WA. We camped at a lake resort nearby and the first class at Quiltmaker's started bright and early on Saturday morning! Here are a few pics of everybody hard at work...stitching away!!

Everybody was SO NICE!!! I only got pics of the first class on Saturday...completely forgot to get out the camera during Sunday's class!!! They were a great group of ladies too!! We had alot of fun, and Kim and Marty from Quiltmakers made the days so special for everybody. Arlington is such a beautiful little town...clean...old buildings...flowers everywhere....VERY old fashioned! I'd live there in a heartbeat!!! It's surrounded by beautiful forests and fields of hay, turf, pasture and one huge nursery after another!...rows and rows of trees, bushes and flowers! Several farm stands too, with fresh produce EVERYWHERE!!! They grow alot of raspberries over there evidently....raspberries for sale around every curve! Such a lovely place.....sigh!

This was a little store next to the quilt shop. They had lots of fun stuff. It's called Favorite Pastime and the little girl who was working there said that they have a facebook page...I'm going to try to find it...

After class on Saturday we were lucky enough to make it to this store before it closed. It's called Sasafrass & Company and was having it's grand opening RIGHT on the weekend we'd arrived! I was hoping each time we passed it to get to the lake where we were camped, that we'd be able to make it there before we had to leave!!!

Most of the stuff in there was right up my alley!!! I walked out with all of the things shown below. Old milk bottles....one of them was from the Yakima City Creamery! (Yakima's only about 75 or so miles from us) A red tablecloth that's almost in perfect condition, some embroidered table scarves, an embroidered tablecloth that was unfinished (I think that's so charming!) and lots of crocheted potholders (I'm going to sew them together like yo-yo's and make a pillow cover for my front porch)

This was the view in back of the store.....geez, it's so pretty there!

We had to leave for home right after the class on Sunday. I would have loved to stay a few more days and explore....I saw SEVERAL more shops and farmstands I would have liked to have visited and we never even made it down to the water (Puget Sound) though it was only a few miles from where we camped. We got close enough to see the sunset glinting off the water, if that counts! Totally forgot to take a picture....sorry, it's gorgeous! I have a class in Des Moines WA in August at Carriage Country Quilts and classes at La Conner in October so I'll get some water pictures FOR SURE both times!!!

It was BEAUTIFUL on the drive home! We don't like to take the freeways if at all possible, so we came back over the mountains over Stevens Pass (in the north/central part of the state) The mountain below is Mt. Index....I really think it needs a prettier name....something having to do with a secret, magic castle at the top or something????? It really looks magical....well....when you're not looking through power lines.....but, if you've kept up with my posts at all, you know that the car isn't actually allowed to STOP or my husband's eyes will actually pop out of his head and roll around on his cheeks............at least I THINK that's the reason I have to take all my pics out of the windows of a moving car!!???

The sun started to get really low in the sky as we went through the pass so everything gets that blue tint! These pics were taken on the east side of the pass in Tumwater Canyon. Those mountains are why the Rocky Mountains aren't terribly impressive to us....everything's bigger in Washington!....sorry Texas.....just a little Washingtonian pride peeking through!

We took a little detour after we got out of the pass and drove to Cashmere, WA to go to Rusty's Drive-in for burgers..........excuse me??????......THE BEST burgers, fries and milkshakes in the WORLD!!!! Know how to tell that I'm not exaggerating??? This is a little, little, little town (I lived here as a child by the way!) And look at that line!!!!! It never slowed down the entire time we were there. We parked in the museum parking lot next to the drive-in and just ate dinner and watched everybody pouring in to this place...little families with their children in strollers or wagons walked in from town across the river...everybody leaving with milkshakes and ice cream cones....carload after carload of people coming here straight from the lakes or the river pulling their boats...ending the day at Rusty's. If you're ever up that way, it's the place to go! It doesn't hurt that there are two big (very cool!) antique malls right across the street and the Aplets and Cotlets factory in town just across the river!

We finished dinner and headed home over Blewett Pass (yup, alot of mountains!) It was dark by the time we got off that pass and when we finally came down the hill into the Yakima Valley we were shocked to see the hills above Selah on fire! It all looked so close to the lights of town and houses, I hope that we'd misjudged where the fire was and that no one lost their homes! We'll have to watch the news tonight and see what damage it did.

Anyway! Home again....we get to move back in to our house tomorrow...YAHOO!!!!...and back to working on new patterns!

xox Meg