Fabric Loot: Make Your Own Shop-Hop!

No web access at home-of-friends last night. Here’s where we stayed. It’s a seriously awesome house built in the early 1930s on the Susquehanna River in central Pennsylvania.


We made a stop at The Quilt Company on the way home today, so that makes FOUR quilt shops in three states during a 72-hour span. Well, if you set the clock from when we stopped at Four Seasons Stitchery on Tuesday to our stop at TQC today, about 50 hours, but you catch my drift. As Aunt Suz said, it’s not a shop hop until you’ve seen four shops, so we just had to stop at TQC today! ☺

So now, we move along to the loot. Today is Quilting Loot Only. Tomorrow I’ll do Yarn Loot, plus the one holiday decorating thing I got.

We shall go in order of our itinerary. First stop was Four Seasons in Grantsville, Md., on Tuesday around lunch.


Three pieces of fabric. The blue strip on the top-right was sale, as was the awesome green-pink-blue batik.

Then we stopped at Jinny Beyer’s Studio on McLean, Va., that afternoon. I got a kit for Jinny’s Jewel Box Quilt,

some yarn you’ll see tomorrow and the French Braid Quilts book. This book is seriously cool. Aunt Suzie snagged the last kit for the table runner from this book, but I can pull from my stash pretty easily. I’m excited about making something from this book, I just wonder when the crap I’ll get around to it!

In addition, I finally used the AmEx Gift Card that was presented to me at my last M&Ms meeting in California. My stash thanks you, the Jinny Beyer Studio thanks you and I thank you! Obviously, as instructed, I used it for fabric!

Yesterday, we did Valley Forge, where RT got up close and personal with George Washington. I’ll recap this visit when I have more energy, because I’m just too damn tired tonight.

On the way from Valley Forge to our dinner-and-sleep destination, we decided to stop in Morgantown. Not this Morgantown. This one! We stopped at a very nice yarn store, but did not purchase. Then we stopped at Hayloft Fabrics, which was a general store that had knitting/quilting stuff upstairs.

Almost all of the fabric was about $6.60/yard (note to Knitters: That's cheap. Good fabric is usually closer to $9/yd), and they had yardage of Moda’s The Hamptons fabric line, which I lurrrve. I was all excited and ready to buy. Until I touched it. Icky griege goods. I did find one print that felt normal and I know what I’m going to use it for. It will be backing for the Row Robin I did with Carol, Lisa and Beth a year ago.

I also got a neat panel that’s an Advent Calendar. It was 20% off because it was Christmas fabric, and since it was only $5 to start with, who could resist?


Finally, today’s score. I really, really like The Quilt Company. I just wish it was on “my” side of town!!! I found a truly special batik, and bought five yards of it.


No, I have no idea what I’m going to use it for. Shut up. It’s gonna marinate in the stash, and it will be freakin’ amazing whenever it tells me what it wants to be when it grows up.

I also got sucked in on another one of their kits (Click here, then scroll down to Winter Blessings). I know. Be quiet. I will start sewing again soon!


The kit actually has a light blue background and is much “happier” than the one pictured above. I almost got sucked in on this one too, but yeesh. I have at least two UFOs that are similar, so I took a deep breath and stepped away.

So that’s about it. I can’t wait to sleep in my own bed. The air mattress at home-of-friends was good last night, but I historically don’t sleep very well the first night in a new bed, and I just had two nights with a “new” bed each night. I feel some serious Z’s coming on. I just wish I had a fake foam brick to throw at my TV so that I wouldn’t have to listen to Bryant Gumbel any more. Gawd, he’s bad as a play-by-play announcer.