The Mothers Take a Road Trip, Spring 2021 Edition

I think I’ve mentioned before that my friend Susan—also known as my kids’ other mother—has a daughter currently living in Seattle, so the two of us took a road trip last week to see our children. (For security reasons, I don’t like to advertise when I am going to be away, or for how long.) We left Monday morning and drove as far as Spokane. I had some hotel points that needed to be used up and also wanted to do some shopping, so we had arranged to spend the night there. It was snowing when we left home and snowed through most of north Idaho. In Spokane, we were treated to sunshine, sleet, rain, snow, and even a thunderstorm.

I had a list of things I wanted to look for on this trip, and I confess to getting a bit carried away with the quilt shopping. As nice as both our quilt stores are, they can’t carry everything. We started at Heartbeat Quilting, where I loaded up on Signature 40wt thread and some grippy stuff for the backs of my longarm rulers:

From there, we moved on to the Quilting Bee, which is a huge store in a big barn-like building. I cannot go into this store without a list, because the sheer amount of stuff is overwhelming. I knew I wanted some of the Thatched fabric by Robin Pickens in a particular shade of blue. I’ve seen it paired with Corey Yoder’s Spring Brook line and like the way it looks. I bought that and a spool of 50wt Aurifil thread in lavender for the bobbin thread in the green and purple quilt:

We also went up to Regal Fabrics and Gifts on South Hill. This is the store where Tera and I took the collage class last November. I went in there looking for a yard of some sparkly gold fabric for binding for Christmas items, but was seduced by some Tula Pink fabric. I am not a Tula Pink fangirl, nor do I really understand the obsession. However, this fabric had sewing machines on it and I think it will make a nice quilted cover for one of my machines. As Irene, the owner, was cutting my fabric, she asked if I had seen the clearance fabric in the back room, so I popped in to take a look and found enough of a vintage reproduction fabric (at 50% off) to back the Grandmother’s Flower Garden quilt when I get that one done:

I also mined the remnant racks at Joanns and picked up a couple more yards of Kona White for the Grandmother’s Flower Garden blocks.

We finished our day with dinner at Wisconsinburger, which is a restaurant in Spokane where DD#1 worked as a waitress when she was in grad school, and then headed back to the hotel.

Tuesday morning dawned cold and foggy, and the sleet from the day before had frozen the car into a solid block of ice. As we headed out of Spokane, though—and climbed in elevation a couple hundred feet—we exited the cloud bank to find clear blue and sunny skies, and the weather was nice all the way to Seattle. Getting over Snoqualmie Pass has been such a hit-or-miss proposition this winter that I was glad we were able to sneak over when the weather was nice. I dropped Susan off at her daughter’s place and headed over to see DD#2. She lives in a duplex and the woman in the other half of the duplex runs an Airbnb in the basement studio apartment. I stayed there all week, which was perfect.

Washington entered Phase 3 of its reopening last Monday, although it was hard to tell that much had changed. Everyone there—especially in Seattle—wears masks indoors and out. I am willing to wear a mask when it’s requested, but some of this is verging on the absurd. I earned a glare from the lady 15 feet away from me while fueling my car because I didn’t have a mask on (she did). And while shopping at JC Penney—where I picked out half a dozen pieces of Liz Claiborne clothing to try on—I was informed that the fitting rooms are closed during the week but they are all open on the weekends, because apparently the virus doesn’t infect anyone on Saturday or Sunday. (Please don’t tell me it’s a staffing issue—even if they wanted to clean and disinfect after each use, I think they could still have ONE women’s and ONE men’s room open during the week.) Needless to say, I didn’t buy anything, and ridiculous policies like that are why JC Penney will eventually go out of business. Nordstrom has at least a few fitting rooms open because they want to sell clothing, not frustrate their customers.

These are only a few of my fabric acquisitions, but the rest will have to wait for tomorrow’s blog post.