Our 2011 Western Washington Quilt Shop Hop
We greatly enjoyed participating in the Western Washington Quilt Shop Hop extravaganza late in June. Son-in-law Sean was the booster for this, but alas his foot surgery precluded his actual participation.
It was quite a gas (and would have been a guzzler had it not been for snazzy hybrid the youngsters are now sporting - I found paying for the gas quite tolerable). This whacky venture involves 50+ fabric stores spread all over Western Washington and all eager for our business. The way it works is that there are some custom fabrics developed just for the event and each shop designs a quilt block around those fabrics and offers each shopper at least most of the fabric for their block, as well as their own embellishments in the way of other fabrics and perhaps other refinements, the latter sometimes at a price.
You equip yourself with a "passport," to be stamped by each vendor you visit. If you visit 16 shops you are qualified to compete for prizes, some pretty consequential (multi-day quilting workshop, sewing machines, $100+ variety bags).
The "Hop" was a remarkable experience that will stick with me. This was well outside of my normal envelope in several ways. For one thing, as we played it, it was a multi-modal event in terms of transportation. Eric graciously took us to the train station early Thursday for Amtrak to Vancouver. In anticipation, I had printed out USGS topos of key route portions of interest to me, e.g., the stretch from Tacoma through Tenino. Between maps and my gps, there was no time for R-&-R. This stretch includes a tunnel that opens on shoreline a bit north of the Tacoma Narrows bridge(s), leading on through fascinating saltwater verge to Dupont, where apparently an amazing amount of explosive material was exported down through the years. From there it was on to the recently greatly-enhanced Nisqually Delta (no view of that alas) and the interesting and confusing transect of the mixed US Army-Tribal territory east of Lacey that eventually leads to the "East Olympia" station and Tenino, the place-name for fascinating patches of weird regularly-spaced mounds 15' or so high. Not to mention the site of a terrific rock festival (Charles Lloyd!) that I fortuitously got to attend back in '69 or so courtesy of failure of split-rivet causing outboard motor prop to fall off in Anacortes marina on the way to the San Juans. (A story for another day!).
It was not quite the full John Candy panoply - i.e., no planes (and mercifully no JC - okay, neither of 'em!) - but we did maneuver through three forms of transport before our Hop was over.
As it happened, my mother chanced to also be on this train, on her way to a J. S. Bach music festival in Eugene. We were in the first passenger car, she in the last. I wended back - a surprisingly long walk - pretty early on (Boeing Field - Auburn?) and we had a nice chat, but alas I did not repeat the visit. There was a good stretch paralleling I5 that was prime, but I was dozy and she had admitted to the same.
It was a little offputting to find train station in Vancouver chock-a-block with major recycling facility. And, as too often, these unfavored NIMBY eyesore-undersides of our "civilization" can tend to be unhappily planted right next to major water-bodies, in this case the Columbia River. We tried to look the other way, but that was made more challenging when we learned Mara was trapped no more than a few hundred yards away behind long immobile freight train. Eventually that train moved, only to have another train further delay her arrival. But eventually we were united.
As any routine peruser of my posts knows by now, I avoid the wide concrete whenever there is an option. The train helped with that, while paralleling route we have driven innumerable boring times. I rode this route at least once before, and Marg has done it several times, but there are always new observations possible. It was fun to actually this time notice the strange transitions where the rails end up briefly between the I-5 North and South lanes.
But shop location alone dictated some Big Highway time. Marg and I had already checked out the great shop in Castle Rock, which was probably the sixth stamp on our passports after Vancouver, Kelso, and Longview. And there were shops in Centralia and Chehalis, one previously visited, one not (the latter excellent, the former not so much), as well as Tumwater and Olympia, both winners. That kept us on the freeway a bit longer, not allowing for my original fantasy Tenino bypass, heading for several shops a way up the Nisqually watershed on the backside of Fort Lewis: e.g., Yelm, Eatonville, Graham, Orting. Some of that was entirely new territory to me. I found even the familiar parts unfamiliar as my prior transits had almost exclusively involved goal-oriented north-to-south travel with the Mt. Rainier vicinity as my mono-maniacal destination and these modest burgs as annoying slow spots in the road.
So there were also revelations available there for me. Aside from the occasional need for a meal or gasoline, I rarely have had occasion to even notice these Small Towns. Some are pretty ignorable, I admit. But some are pretty darn intriguing. Orting comes to mind. My impression is that this town, which I may never have even passed through before, may be built on several hundred feet of mudflows from a long-ago Rainier event (i.e., a lahar). It features a very scenic setting near the junction of two major Rainier-draining rivers (the Carbon and Puyallup), a Veteran's home, a great two-story fabric shop, and very friendly folks.
In general, on this strange event, I experienced some frustration that our collective mania did not allow for more than minimal photo-ops. I will have a few up here, but given all the visual splendors, outdoors and in, that we were privy to, my inner PicMan was and is sorely distressed.
My original naive concept was that we would bust our butts Friday and hightail it for home that night, to lick our wounds and/or savor our fabrics and fire up the sewing machines. Oh no! My ladies had their designs on Saturday shop-hopping as well, to the point that we almost wandered off-track late Friday in the interests of finding a domicile that would support our needs.
We found that in Silverdale, allowing for access to Kitsap County shops, but with the timing precluding shops in Tacoma, as we had to hightail it across the Tacoma Narrows. (It also meant for an eventual ferry ride, mode three, ka-ching.) We pulled into a nice mall shop in Port Orchard just a few minutes before closing time. The owner was quite accommodating, to the point of eventually having to rescue us when we found ourselves outside the shop but locked inside the mall.
I don't remember too much about our motel in Silverdale. I botched the freeway exit, making minor backtracking necessary.. I think we had a view of tideflats with scavenging GBH. The captive restaurant seemed a work-in-progress, with basically no wait-staff during the dinner hour and 2/3 of our chosen entrees unavailable.
Saturday found us visiting some great Kitsap County shops, the ones at Kingston and Pt. Gamble already familiar to Marg and me, from Port Angeles trip this Spring and Marg's junket with Mara's chum Jean-Babtiste in the aftermath of Mara and Sean's wedding. By this time we were fully committed. There was no mention of retreating home via the Kingston ferry. The wrinkle here was that we learned more-or-less on arrival that there was a Civil War reenactment underway at Pt. Gamble, a wonderfully reconstructed historical site. Intriguing conjunction, quilting and blunderbusses. The occasional astonishingly loud cannon-fire was very disconcerting, to say the least.
And our arrival in Port Townsend could hardly have been worse-timed. Long ferry wait, and no practical way to retreat and visit local fabric store. We consoled ourselves with a nice seafood lunch.
Time lost in Port T made for painful choices for the rest of the afternoon, given 8PM closure for the shops. I was reminded that Mara inherited a highly competitive spirit on both family sides. We foraged up Whidbey and Fidalgo Islands, did Mt. Vernon but not Stanwood, then Everett but not Arlington, figuratively screeching tires as we hooked up with Eric, who'd graciously agreed to feed us.
By this time we were totally in thrall I guess. Bellevue, Woodinville, Duvalle, time-out for memorial service in Federal Way, and another shop in Des Moines (!). Intense, bordering on obsessive?
Towards the end I suspect an observer might have remarked on semi-OCD behavior, from the standpoint of trying to fill in a second passport and increase our prize chances (as if). Mara managed to get her second passport stamped by some remarkable pick-up of those shops we'd missed in Tacoma on our transect Friday, desperately seeking Port Orchard and Silverdale. Marg and I ended up one or two shops shy of two completed passports. In the end no prizes were won by any of us anyway, but it was one heck of an interesting adventure.
It was quite a gas (and would have been a guzzler had it not been for snazzy hybrid the youngsters are now sporting - I found paying for the gas quite tolerable). This whacky venture involves 50+ fabric stores spread all over Western Washington and all eager for our business. The way it works is that there are some custom fabrics developed just for the event and each shop designs a quilt block around those fabrics and offers each shopper at least most of the fabric for their block, as well as their own embellishments in the way of other fabrics and perhaps other refinements, the latter sometimes at a price.
You equip yourself with a "passport," to be stamped by each vendor you visit. If you visit 16 shops you are qualified to compete for prizes, some pretty consequential (multi-day quilting workshop, sewing machines, $100+ variety bags).
The "Hop" was a remarkable experience that will stick with me. This was well outside of my normal envelope in several ways. For one thing, as we played it, it was a multi-modal event in terms of transportation. Eric graciously took us to the train station early Thursday for Amtrak to Vancouver. In anticipation, I had printed out USGS topos of key route portions of interest to me, e.g., the stretch from Tacoma through Tenino. Between maps and my gps, there was no time for R-&-R. This stretch includes a tunnel that opens on shoreline a bit north of the Tacoma Narrows bridge(s), leading on through fascinating saltwater verge to Dupont, where apparently an amazing amount of explosive material was exported down through the years. From there it was on to the recently greatly-enhanced Nisqually Delta (no view of that alas) and the interesting and confusing transect of the mixed US Army-Tribal territory east of Lacey that eventually leads to the "East Olympia" station and Tenino, the place-name for fascinating patches of weird regularly-spaced mounds 15' or so high. Not to mention the site of a terrific rock festival (Charles Lloyd!) that I fortuitously got to attend back in '69 or so courtesy of failure of split-rivet causing outboard motor prop to fall off in Anacortes marina on the way to the San Juans. (A story for another day!).
It was not quite the full John Candy panoply - i.e., no planes (and mercifully no JC - okay, neither of 'em!) - but we did maneuver through three forms of transport before our Hop was over.
As it happened, my mother chanced to also be on this train, on her way to a J. S. Bach music festival in Eugene. We were in the first passenger car, she in the last. I wended back - a surprisingly long walk - pretty early on (Boeing Field - Auburn?) and we had a nice chat, but alas I did not repeat the visit. There was a good stretch paralleling I5 that was prime, but I was dozy and she had admitted to the same.
It was a little offputting to find train station in Vancouver chock-a-block with major recycling facility. And, as too often, these unfavored NIMBY eyesore-undersides of our "civilization" can tend to be unhappily planted right next to major water-bodies, in this case the Columbia River. We tried to look the other way, but that was made more challenging when we learned Mara was trapped no more than a few hundred yards away behind long immobile freight train. Eventually that train moved, only to have another train further delay her arrival. But eventually we were united.
As any routine peruser of my posts knows by now, I avoid the wide concrete whenever there is an option. The train helped with that, while paralleling route we have driven innumerable boring times. I rode this route at least once before, and Marg has done it several times, but there are always new observations possible. It was fun to actually this time notice the strange transitions where the rails end up briefly between the I-5 North and South lanes.
But shop location alone dictated some Big Highway time. Marg and I had already checked out the great shop in Castle Rock, which was probably the sixth stamp on our passports after Vancouver, Kelso, and Longview. And there were shops in Centralia and Chehalis, one previously visited, one not (the latter excellent, the former not so much), as well as Tumwater and Olympia, both winners. That kept us on the freeway a bit longer, not allowing for my original fantasy Tenino bypass, heading for several shops a way up the Nisqually watershed on the backside of Fort Lewis: e.g., Yelm, Eatonville, Graham, Orting. Some of that was entirely new territory to me. I found even the familiar parts unfamiliar as my prior transits had almost exclusively involved goal-oriented north-to-south travel with the Mt. Rainier vicinity as my mono-maniacal destination and these modest burgs as annoying slow spots in the road.
So there were also revelations available there for me. Aside from the occasional need for a meal or gasoline, I rarely have had occasion to even notice these Small Towns. Some are pretty ignorable, I admit. But some are pretty darn intriguing. Orting comes to mind. My impression is that this town, which I may never have even passed through before, may be built on several hundred feet of mudflows from a long-ago Rainier event (i.e., a lahar). It features a very scenic setting near the junction of two major Rainier-draining rivers (the Carbon and Puyallup), a Veteran's home, a great two-story fabric shop, and very friendly folks.
In general, on this strange event, I experienced some frustration that our collective mania did not allow for more than minimal photo-ops. I will have a few up here, but given all the visual splendors, outdoors and in, that we were privy to, my inner PicMan was and is sorely distressed.
My original naive concept was that we would bust our butts Friday and hightail it for home that night, to lick our wounds and/or savor our fabrics and fire up the sewing machines. Oh no! My ladies had their designs on Saturday shop-hopping as well, to the point that we almost wandered off-track late Friday in the interests of finding a domicile that would support our needs.
We found that in Silverdale, allowing for access to Kitsap County shops, but with the timing precluding shops in Tacoma, as we had to hightail it across the Tacoma Narrows. (It also meant for an eventual ferry ride, mode three, ka-ching.) We pulled into a nice mall shop in Port Orchard just a few minutes before closing time. The owner was quite accommodating, to the point of eventually having to rescue us when we found ourselves outside the shop but locked inside the mall.I don't remember too much about our motel in Silverdale. I botched the freeway exit, making minor backtracking necessary.. I think we had a view of tideflats with scavenging GBH. The captive restaurant seemed a work-in-progress, with basically no wait-staff during the dinner hour and 2/3 of our chosen entrees unavailable.
Saturday found us visiting some great Kitsap County shops, the ones at Kingston and Pt. Gamble already familiar to Marg and me, from Port Angeles trip this Spring and Marg's junket with Mara's chum Jean-Babtiste in the aftermath of Mara and Sean's wedding. By this time we were fully committed. There was no mention of retreating home via the Kingston ferry. The wrinkle here was that we learned more-or-less on arrival that there was a Civil War reenactment underway at Pt. Gamble, a wonderfully reconstructed historical site. Intriguing conjunction, quilting and blunderbusses. The occasional astonishingly loud cannon-fire was very disconcerting, to say the least.And our arrival in Port Townsend could hardly have been worse-timed. Long ferry wait, and no practical way to retreat and visit local fabric store. We consoled ourselves with a nice seafood lunch.
Time lost in Port T made for painful choices for the rest of the afternoon, given 8PM closure for the shops. I was reminded that Mara inherited a highly competitive spirit on both family sides. We foraged up Whidbey and Fidalgo Islands, did Mt. Vernon but not Stanwood, then Everett but not Arlington, figuratively screeching tires as we hooked up with Eric, who'd graciously agreed to feed us.
Towards the end I suspect an observer might have remarked on semi-OCD behavior, from the standpoint of trying to fill in a second passport and increase our prize chances (as if). Mara managed to get her second passport stamped by some remarkable pick-up of those shops we'd missed in Tacoma on our transect Friday, desperately seeking Port Orchard and Silverdale. Marg and I ended up one or two shops shy of two completed passports. In the end no prizes were won by any of us anyway, but it was one heck of an interesting adventure.
posted by Sir Gumbo at 10:44 PM
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