A Road Trip to Gold Country with Lots of Food and Fabric

This past weekend was the mini-retreat with some of my Bay Area Modern Quilt friends at my house in Gold Country.  Five of us drove up on Friday afternoon (six if you count Boo) for a long weekend of sewing, eating, shopping, chatting and laughing.  This is Friday night's dinner:

We got up Saturday morning, went to a garage sale, took a long walk, ate yummie French toast and then went shopping.  Some people decided to sew rather than walk, but everyone went shopping!  First we went to downtown Sonora and the knit shop.  Then on to the new Joann's.  Everyone is so nice there.  They had all kinds of Denyse Schmidt fabric and we had piles of coupons, plus the sales people were so nice they gave us extra coupons.  Ruth and Sheetal created a complicated system of shared purchasing of fabric so as to maximize coupon usage.  By the end of that shopping experience, we had to stop for sustenance before we could go on.

Then we went to Bearly Quilting (the LQS) to see what they had and what was on sale.  I also was able to pick-up 2 quilts that my long arm quilter friend Dee Small had finished for me (more about that in another post).  More shopping was accomplished at Bearly Quilting and then we went "up the hill" to Twain Harte to shop at the Twain Harte Pharmacy.  Here's a photo of the group before they went in.

I wish I would have thought to take photos in the store, but I was too busy rooting through fabric to remember to do so.  You'll just have to come up and visit the Pharmacy yourself sometime to know what fabric goodies are there.  Lots of older modern fabric for $3.99 yard and newer modern fabric for $7.49 to $8.99.

After hours of shopping, we rolled down the hill and back to my house for snacks, looking at all our purchases and discussing what we should have bought that we left behind.  Amanda made wonderful fresh guacamole, which allowed us to put dinner off until about 8:30.  We had steaks and baked potatoes and salad and fresh strawberries and whipped cream.  Yum!  I'm pretty sure there was some ice cream eaten along the way with homemade blueberry sauce.

   

 I did not stay up late - opting to go to bed early-ish as I was making so many mistakes assembling my quilt back that it was clear I needed to stop.  Others continued to work and make progress:

On Sunday we got up and sewed as long as we could before the group had to start going home.  Amanda and I had to run to Joann's for emergency items.  Ruth and I stayed the longest, leaving about 2 for the Bay Area.  It was a fun filled weekend even if I didn't get as much sewing done as I had hoped - sometimes you have to trade off sewing time for fabric shopping time. 

Aaaanyway, that's it from the Robertson household.