Naulakha

On Saturday we drove two hours south to Dummerston where British author Rudyard Kipling lived for a time back in the 1890s.  His house and outbuildings, "Naulakha," are open to the public one weekend a year for Rhododendron Weekend.   The rest of the time the space is reserved for overnight guests in a sort of B&B arrangement.  

The highlight for visitors on this particular weekend is the rhododendron tunnel as long as a football field.  Once inside, it is amazing!

It was an overcast day, which means it was a little humid, but it didn't rain until the afternoon when we were well on our way home.  We had a tour appointment for 11:00 and found that only about 25 cars fit in the parking areas down the hill from the main house.  It was all very well organized with volunteers directing traffic,

All three main buildings were open for view and all are available to rent during the year.  The main house sleeps 8 and all of the bedrooms looked comfortable and inviting.   I took this photo from the upstairs balcony.  The views of the mountains were very nice.  The main house had a billiard room on the top floor, which was impressive considering how the staircases wound upstairs.

People were encouraged to bring picnic lunches, and drinks (water and seltzer) were complimentary.   Of course, everyone ventured into the tunnel.  I took this photo about halfway through.  We have a rhododendron at home, but it is much shorter than these which must be as old as the house.

There is a pavilion area at the end of the tunnel which must have been a nice spot for cocktails in Kipling's time.  We could see a tennis court down the hill from there, and we heard voices in the woods behind.  We couldn't find a path to walk out there, however, and I thought it was a bit buggy.  June is black fly season for Vermont, so I didn't want to attract any, having already been attacked in our yard a few weeks ago.

We enjoyed our visit very much and talked about renting the house some time with family.  It has the potential for a peaceful, fun weekend.   After about an hour, we had seen it all, so we ventured back toward Brattleboro and stopped at Panda North, a delicious Chinese restaurant, for lunch.  

Now that we're home, we are still curious about why Kipling was there.  He wrote several of his more famous books there, including Captains Courageous.  Paul ordered a book, of course!

Packing, cleaning, and more

This afternoon I'll be packing for our trip.  I have lots of stuff gathered or thought about and just have to fold them neatly to get into suitcases and tote bags.  I don't like to do it too early in the day in case I change my mind or take too much that I never use.  I'm not looking forward to three days' drive, but I do like to have our car with us.  When we're going for a while somewhere, I like to take food, coffee, things to do (knitting, reading, etc.), chargers, and guidebooks.  Paper towels and disinfecting wipes come in handy on the road.

This morning, I made my RSC blocks for the month.  The color for March is red and I have already made a bunch of red log cabin blocks.  I just had to make a couple of red Traffic Jam blocks.

I had to cut some more 2" and 3.5" squares of red this time.  I have a box of 2" squares that makes this the perfect block for the RSC most months.  I hope the next color will be purple or orange.  At the end of the year I'll make some brown/beige/black ones to fit here and there.

I put away all of the Wensleydale blocks just to keep them together.  I have more pieces cut for when we get home.  It's fairly easy once I get the rhythm of cutting and paper piecing.  I may even finish before summer if I keep at it.  I hope there are a few quilt shops on our trip as I need a small transfusion of holiday fabrics.  If not, I'll order some when I get home.

Chris and Marad are coming by this afternoon, no doubt to find out if we have any last minute requests for watching the house.  I hope they will fill our windshield washer fluid for me.  I need to clean the inside car windows, too, as well as the headlights and rear windshield.  As usual, we will be hoping for a little rain to wash the rest of the winter dirt away.  

Proceding with Wensleydale

 I've made ten Wensleydale blocks so far and pinned a second row over the previous blocks.  Today I cut out a few more, but I may just sit down a read for a while now.  I gave Paul a haircut and helped my neighbor use my Elna machine to fix a bathmat.  Then I made blueberry pancakes for lunch - yum!

Last night we watched the movie Train Dreams which was a somewhat sad but sweet film about a lumberjack in the west who lives through the world's "progress."   William H. Macy is up for an Oscar (best supporting actor) in it.   He's always one of our favorites.

Tomorrow I'll be doing one last load of laundry and then will start packing for our trip south.  We hope to leave early on Tuesday and make it to Wilkes-Barre, PA, by midafternoon.  With the advent of daylight savings time, it's again quite dark in the mornings, so we will definitely wait until the sun comes up.  At least the longer days will be nice for traveling.

Cooking and planning

We had a very nice day yesterday, but it didn't involve any sewing at all, unfortunately.  We did some grocery shopping very early so that I could spend time cooking for today's Indonesian dinner with Pauline and Bob.  It's actually a lunch so this morning I'll be doing last minute cleaning and cooking.  They are bringing their two little dogs, which should be interesting.  It should be nice weather, so maybe we'll take them for a walk after dinner.

After some intense work in the kitchen, Paul and I went out to lunch at Azteca, a new Mexican restaurant, with four friends, Bill & Diane and Fiona & Chico, for Chico's birthday.  At Bill's urging, our group tradition has become that the birthday person tells a little biography, and Chico's is quite interesting since his family left Cuba when he was a boy and the Castro regime was just beginning to take hold.  He knows firsthand what an authoritarian government is like.  The waitstaff sang a Mexican Happy Birthday which was quite fun, too.  The food was great and plentiful, so we had a snack for dinner.  Our weather has been super

Tomorrow, I hope to get back to sewing, including making a couple of blocks for the Pat Sloan March block-a-day project.  The blocks are easy and great leftover scrap busters - 12" quarter log cabin blocks.  I'm using the same black fabric for the beginning 4.5" locks and dipping deeply into my string basket.  30 blocks will make a nice quilt for Bags of Love.  When we get back from Virginia, I want to start back on my modern Dear Jane quilt.  I have quite a few rows (six?) left to make.  I also have some smaller projects to work on, including a small duffle bag.  I don't enjoy making three dimensional items, but it's nice to have a project that gets finished sooner than my usual bed quilts.

We have been monitoring the weather, and we shouldn't run into snow going south or returning, so we'll leave here on Wednesday and make it to Harrisonburg on Thursday.  Friday morning we'll visit the new Virginia Quilt Museum and then continue on to Staunton for two plays and a backstage tour at Blackfriar's Theater.  Even though our snow here is melting, we'll surely get a little more before winter is truly over.  It will be nice to have a bit of a break from it all.

Asheville and Hershey

It was a long drive from Staunton to Asheville, but the scenery was very pretty.  I loved seeing the green grass, trees budding, and daffodils blooming in profusion along the interstate.  Driving through this area, we were reminded of past visits to Bristol, VA/TN, and to Alabama where we hope to spend a week or two next winter.  It is so nice to get away from the snow and cold at least a little while in winter.  We like to walk, and that's iffy up here a lot of the time.

We went up and over some mountains to get to Asheville which is a busy place but very interesting.  Unfortunately, Thomas Wolfe's home was closed Sundays and Mondays, so we could only look at the boarding house his mother ran.

I had used the GPS on my phone for the first time with much success, so used it several more times during the rest of our trip.  I feel so smart!  On Monday we took a trolley tour of the city, which was very interesting.  We walked over to the American Pinball Museum, which was the highlight of the trip for Paul who got to play with "Godzilla."

I liked the falafel we had for lunch so was willing to hang around in the darkened storefront full of ten year old boys and grown men for a while.  We also visited "Gantt Plaza," named for the uncle of a friend.

On Tuesday, we headed north for home, about 1,000 miles from Asheville.   There were some long days on the road, but we did enjoy stopping in Hershey, PA for lunch with some distant cousins - Bernie, Joice, and Walt - I hadn't seen in over 50 years.  All of them had worked at the Hotel Hershey in their teen years or during college vacations, and it was an elegant place for lunch, too elegant for my sneakers.  

It turns out that Joice (far left) is a quilter who showed me a picture of an amazing quilt she'd made for her granddaughter who designed it.  Hershey has changed quite a bit since I was a kid, and I look forward to returning to look around and continuing to get to know my family.  

Once home, there was a mountain of laundry and a bunch of loose ends to pick up.  There is snow on the ground but it's melting fast.  I know we'll still get some more but hope to see a robin outside soon.

Jinny Beyer

 We got back from our southern adventure on Thursday just before lunchtime.  It is good to be home, but it was also fun to be on the road, especially in warmer (to us) climes.   We had some chilly days in Virginia and wore our mid-weight winter jackets most of the time.  Still, a change of scene is always a good thing.

In Harrisonburg, Virginia, early in the trip, we visited the Virginia Quilt Museum, and I marveled at a retrospective exhibit of master quilter Jinny Beyer's work.  She is retiring and recently closed her shop in Virginia across the Potomac from where I grew up.  I have enjoyed using her fabrics over the years.  

Most of the quilts in the exhibit were pieced and quilted by hand, and the fussy cutting was amazing!  My pictures do not do her quilts justice, but I thought I'd share a few anyway.  Up close and personal, they show Beyer's incredible mastery of the craft.  The medallion quilt above appears to be queen-sized, and the blue/green one was a wall hanging.  I love the way it flows.

Just south of Harrisonburg is Staunton, another place we had visited before.  We had tickets to two plays at Blackfriar's Theater and stayed in a hotel right next door.  It's a charming town, perfect for walking, and we enjoyed discovering Trinity Episcopal Church with its lovely Tiffany windows.

On Friday evening, we enjoyed Shakespeare's As You Like It, with just seven actors playing multiple parts.  I love the recent trend of diversity in casting.  This group worked well together, as was seen the following evening in a modern version of Eurydice.  Before each performance, they entertained us with several songs, and after Eurydice we stayed for a "talk back" with the cast and crew which was very interesting.  We hope to get back to Staunton again.  

[more on our trip to come!]

A Sunny Friday

I was up early today so Paul and I got his pills ready for the coming week before going grocery shopping.  I take him along these days so I don't have to find a staff person to reach the top shelves.  Everything I buy - bread, selzer, milk - seems to be unreachable on the top shelf.  We got some road food for our brief trip south.  We plan to leave Wed. and spend the first night in Wilkes-Barre, PA.   I no longer have relatives that I know of there, so it's just our usual stop on the way south.   

Thurs. we'll be in Virginia in a couple of spots and then Sunday we'll head further south for a few days.  We have no reservations for post-Virginia.  Just hoping to encounter some spring!    On the way home, we'll stop in Hershey, PA, for lunch with cousins I haven't seen in 50+ years.  I went out to a sugarhouse after grocery shopping for some maple syrup to give them.   

I doubt if I'll get much if any sewing done today, but it's OK.  I've been working diligently on scrappy Hunter's Star blocks most mornings this week.  When my machine was in the shop, I cut out all the pieces I need to finish with my Go Baby die cut machine.  This is contrary to my usual way of doing things when I cut, sew, cut, sew, until done.   I can get 5 or 6 blocks done each day this way - I have 39 blocks made so far, and I'm hoping for 56 or so.

Today, though, I have things to do before we leave for the trip.  I made some little portable greenhouses and planted cosmos and zinnia seeds.  This is an experiment using gallon milk jugs that I cut crosswise leaving the handles.  I punched some holes in the bottoms and filled them with potting soil before planting seeds.  I used duct tape to close them up again and put them on the back porch where they'll get sun and a little rain or snow.  A friend told me she does this every year with great success.  We have the milk jugs, so it's worth a try.

After that, Paul and I took a walk around the neighborhood.  We've had so much gloomy weather that it is a treat to be out in the sun.  Walking is important because I've been keeping a close eye on my activity level and food intake as part of my Preventing Diabetes class.  It's via Zoom and, although we started with about 20 people, we were down to about 8 in just a few weeks.  I haven't really learned a whole lot new, but it does help keep me focused.  It's sponsored by our local hospital, and Zoom makes it easier because I don't have to drive up there in iffy winter weather.

Our mini-vacation

We returned from four nights in Washington, DC, yesterday afternoon and, while we were gone, it snowed quite a bit.  I suppose what's on the ground now will stay until spring, unfortunately.  We stayed in a B&B on Capitol Hill and could see the domes of the US Capitol and the Library of Congress from one of our windows.  It was a "basic" place - no frills with dormitory-type furniture and make-your-own-breakfast - but at least we had our own bathroom and the location was perfect, once we got oriented.  The first night, we wandered around looking for a restaurant and finally asked some cops for a suggestion.  The Union Pub turned out to be just what we needed - a crabcake sandwich, fries, and a nice glass of wine for me.

The next morning featured wet, sloppy snow, making the charming brick sidewalks a little treacherous to walk on.  We went a few blocks to the Folger Shakespeare Library and had a wonderful tour.  No other tourists were there, so our docent, Sarah, took her time (2 hours!) to tell us about the Folgers and their collection.   The library owns 81 First Folios - amazing.  We saw the little theater, the reading room, and a Churchill-Shakespeare exhibit, too.   After lunch in a diner we reached by walking through a downpour, we rested a bit before dinner at Café Berlin with Paul's old friend Dave.  They met while working at a college library in Tennessee many years ago, and now Dave is preparing to retire from the DC Public Library.   We discovered the restaurant only 3 blocks from our B&B, almost across from the Union Pub that we had taken a circuitous route to/from the night before.

Friday morning, we headed down past the Capitol to the Newseum, which is quite an interesting place but also a magnet for school groups, busloads of them.  There were quite a few interesting journalism memorabilia, including remnants of the Berlin Wall.  The graffiti'd side was on the "free" side, while the plain side was on the Communist side and had been painted white to reveal anyone trying to climb/escape.  There was a "death tower" on display also, but I couldn't get a good picture.

The Newseum also has a piece of the Twin Towers, original copies of US newspapers with important headlines, Pulitzer and other prize winning photos, and lots of videos about the role of the press in important moments in US history, such as the Civil Rights movement.

After such bad weather Thurs., it was a lovely day to be outside, and my Fitbit registered over 11,000 steps Friday.

Saturday was equally pretty, and we took the subway over to Arena Stage near the Waterfront in the late morning for brunch followed by Anything Goes.  It was a fabulous production with excellent singing and dancing.  On the way home we couldn't resist stopping at Café Berlin for dinner again.  The taxi picked us up Sunday at 6:45 am for National Airport, and we were back home in the frozen north by 1 pm.   We were happy to have had time in the "big" city, but, despite the winter, there's no place like home!

Quilters' bus triip

Saturday, I was up and out the door before 6:30 am to meet Jan and Marilyn at the Park 'n' Ride.  I drove Jan's car to Lebanon, NH, where we met a group of other quilters bound for Massachusetts.  The trip was arranged by the Northern Lights Quilt Guild, and it left slightly early.  Guess we quilters are an eager bunch. 

Our first stop was the Quilted Crow in Bolton, MA, where we were greeted with coffee, lemonade, goodies, and a free fat quarter.  The rather large store offers a variety of styles, from Kaffe Fasset to Jo Morton, including a great selection of hand-dyed wool.  We were all like kids in a candy store, and the line to cash out was long but offered a nice opportunity to chat with some of the people we were traveling with.  I got some fat eighths and a scrap bag of wool before heading out onto the lawn to eat a sandwich.

Our driver ably navigated what looked like a very busy highway to get us to Lowell, MA, and  the New England Quilt Museum.  The town was the site of many textile mills and still retains some cobbled streets and abandoned brick factory buildings in its downtown.  The museum used to be a bank and has enlarged its exhibit space since I was there about 20 years ago.  Its two shows were fabulous. 

First was an exhibit of the best quilts from various guilds throughout New England.  Viewers were asked to vote on their favorite, and next year the winning guild will be invited to show there.  Most of the quilts were fairly traditional, so I loved them!  This New York Beauty features a lovely border design.  My favorite quilt was a sampler, mostly paper-pieced, of Cape Cod, but it was difficult to stand back far enough for a photo to do its justice.

The other exhibit was called Threads of Resistance and depicted some very creative, yet often angry scenes related to our country's current political situation.  One consisted of many colored squares with a hot pink pussy cat hat front and center.  Another showed an American flag with a quote from Theodore Roosevelt, noting that patriotism means supporting the country but not necessarily the president.

After the museum (which has a great gift shop!), we wandered down to a couple of art galleries which had special quilt-related exhibits, including one with quilts on the theme of "the little black dress." 

The National Park Service Visitors Center offered an overview of the sites, which are all fairly walkable, including the artist Whistler's home, now a museum.  Jack Kerouac, who also grew up in Lowell, was featured on a panel, and I was pleased to see several familiar books about nearby Lawrence's Bread and Roses strike.  I would have enjoyed a full day in Lowell, but we had to board the bus at 3:30 to get us home before 7 pm.  All in all, it was a very fulfilling day, a true quilters' holiday.