A Break from my Studio

Sometimes a break from your studio compells you even more to get back in it. My husband's cousin came to visit recently and never having been to NC...we gave her the royal tour...for 9 days!...We were all so tired but happy campers. Here are some highlights...

We do love to go to downtown Asheville...such a pretty and manageable city. This is the Grove Arcade...

and of course the famous iron sculpture of an iron. Every quilter that comes here wants to see the iron.

We love the Battery Park book exchange and champagne bar. We have some of our PTA fiber group meetings here...You can reserve a space like the one in the upper left, sit and read, have some sweet goodies and wine...it's a wonderful idea. You are surrounded by used and "in wonderful condition" books.

We also went to the Biltmore Estate....everyone needs to see this at least once.

Our luck, they now have an exhibit of the costumes from the movie - Titanic

They also feature a picture of the scene the costumes were used in.

Eating lunch in the stable is always fun....food is good and the ambiance - wonderful!

Very impressive...more than 250 rooms in this estate..only a small percentage is open to the public. The rooms chosen for the tour give you a good idea of life on the estate from the upstairs aristocrats to the downstairs help.

The hothouse is one of my favorite things...plants are lush...

And as luck would have it, we got to see the tulip festival going on...only lasts a short time so we picked the perfect time.

We also went up to Little Switzerland on the Blue Ridge parkway...a beautiful ride but avoid 226A...My husband knows how badly I react on these twisty snakelike roads...apparently I'm not alone. Not only do they have a sign and large snake (on right) but t-shirts you can buy saying you survived 226A...that about says it all.

At such high elevations on the parkway, we saw some beautiful sights with fog and ice crystals on trees...

I got some great pictures of trees for my file...lots of possibilities for quilts and silkscreens.

Another place we like to go to is the Grove Park Inn...a nice way to end the week.

We have been going to this place since our Marietta Georgia days...we happened on it on one of yearly leaf peepin trips to Asheville...we've been going ever since...a magical place.

You can see the city of Asheville from the back of the Inn....and it never gets old. It was a busy and fun week....now time to get back in the studio.