Colorado memories

Our week in Colorado went by much too quickly, and now we are back to "life" - grocery shopping, mail, laundry, to-do lists.   But we had a fine time with Mom and Jenny - a ballet honoring the Harlem Jazz Age, a visit to a Dutch artist's studio, a Vietnamese lunch with the Indo-Dutch group, and a trip to Leadville, the highest municipality (over 10,000 feet) in the USA.  We took a tour of  the Matchless Mine shack where poor Baby Doe Tabor spent her impoverished last 36 years, and we stopped at the public library which had an extensive local history collection.  Lunch was super there - delicious grilled cheese, tomato and bacon.  In fact, we ate too well the entire week, and now it's back to watching our intake again.  :-)


We also visited the Rocky Mountain Quilt Museum in Golden where there were two outstanding exhibits - one of Russian quilts and the other some amazing thread painted pieces by Jill Kertula.  There were quite a few Russian quilts using traditional American patterns like Trip Around the World.  The fabrics were muted even though they used a lot of red.  Many of the appliqued quilts showed scenes from folk tales, but any words were not translated, unfortunately.

I'm sorry I didn't get any photo of the Kertula quilts - they were outstanding - but a couple of Russian ones caught my eye.  The logs in the log cabin quilt finished at less than 1/2" and many of the centers were grass green satiny fabric.   It ends up looking like an oriental rug.

The appliqued quilt was pieced first and then appliqued with butterflies, yo yo flowers, etc.  I think the background was mostly hand pieced, too.

 There was a fun display of Matryoska dolls, including one featuring the Washington Redskins football team and another featuring heroes of the Soviet Union, with Lenin being the smallest.

The gift shop in the new museum location has grown considerably, and pretty soon they'll outgrow the space.  I didn't buy anything, but I admired the Laurel Burch scarves and t-shirts, and Mom got greeting cards and fun socks.  In fact, I didn't buy any souvenirs at all.  We were too busy to shop!

We love to go to the movies when visiting Mom because there are two multi-plexes nearby.  We saw BlackKKlansman, a Spike Lee film about a black cop infiltrating the KKK in Colorado Springs in the 1970s, and Crazy Rich Asians, a very lightweight romantic comedy with great music - familiar pop songs sung in Chinese.