one last look

As I write this I am now at home after a very long trip. We got away from Lyons by 8:30 with plans to stop at 3 more shops before we left Kansas. As we were loading the car Tootsie was laying on our stuff like  she didn't want us to leave.

I really think she was ready for to go, we had been in her space just a little too long.

The Saturday before as we were driving into Kansas on a different route than Barbara had been before we saw one of those straight water towers that usually have the name of the town, but this one said "Needle in a Haystack" and we realized this was a quilt shop. So this was our first stop.

It was a really nice shop, Barbara and Linda found a good buy on some bobbins and Cathy found a back for her Hocus Pocus on the sale table. I bought yardage of a blue I may use for a border. She told us about another shop that was only about 2 miles down the road. It was another good shop. I got yardage of both black and white. We couldn't believe how far out in the country both these shops were and yet both were very busy on this Saturday morning.

We  were very disappointed that the shop in Independence was closed. But going down the road I remembered there was a shop in Joplin that we didn't make on the trip out. So in the GPS the address went and off we go. It was a good thing we had the GPS because this shop was even further off the beaten path than the first two. The shop was called Bittersweet Quilts and it had some of the primitive items some of us were looking for, it also had the border fabric that I used on my "Laps around the pool". I knew I didn't have enough left for a binding and had been looking in every shop for more of that fabric. Finally at the 19th shop I found it.

We stopped in Springfield for Andy's frozen custard (ice cream) at about 5:30 and planned to drive on a ways before stopping for the night. We failed to remember this was a holiday weekend and ended up driving all the way to Jonesburo, Arkansas before finding a room. Over 14 hours of driving. Needless to say we slept in this morning and got back to Hartselle about 3 pm. A bunch of tired puppies. Had a great time but I won't be able to afford anything like that again for a long time. We were too tired to get final total so will save that for the get together here on Friday. To anyone coming Friday remember to bring swimsuit if you want to swim before or after stitching.