Grovepark Inn - Birthday celebration

The Grovepark Inn in Asheville is a beautiful (and our favorite) place to go.

It's a 5 star hotel that has hosted many presidents and other well known people.

You can just go and walk around or eat in one of their restaurants...

We were celebrating a birthday so this was the choice.

This is looking out the back - the city of Asheville...

Quite breathtaking....

and the sunset. We always manage to have our wine just as the sun is going down.

myself and hubby.....who turned ______ yesterday!

and our son Mike who loves to come here too...It's always a wonderful time and even though it's not sewing related, I love for it to be in my blog book when I have it printed each year.

Making Kits

Recently our Fiber Junkies group met for an unscheduled meeting to make kits. Mary has been trying to find good homes for a pod full of fabric gifted to her from a dear friend.

 Some of the fabric would make good community quilts. This is one of the projects our PTA group does each year......sooooo.....we decided to make kits for this meeting. We had lots of tables to hold the Accu Quilt machines, places to lay fabric for color selection etc.

 Here we are spreading out and getting ready to do some cutting....

 Meetings would not be complete without a glass of bubbly.

 Denny has the strip cutter along with an electric cutting machine making our work go faster.

 So much fun to see those long strips coming out all at once...

 and Mary our ironing person.

 I think we did a good job putting fabrics together. We wound up with many different color ways which will make into some pretty quilts.

We wound up with 8 kits....a good days work and lots of fun to do with friends.

Eco Cards

The leaves are blooming again and time to get back into Eco Printing...so I managed to squeeze in a day to play with this wonderful technique. I've explained in previous blogs how to do this so today's post is just a short show and tell...

 I love doing bookmarks with all the smaller pieces left over. I didn't know how popular they would be with so many people owning kindles or listening to audio books (myself included) but...

They do well and people seem to enjoy them ........

I loved doing the large prints that make into cards - some Maple and Redbud above...

Maple and fern....

More Maple

Oakleaf Hydrangea on left and Eucalyptus on right.

All are good for printing and make into beautiful cards or book covers.

A happy camper now that the leaves are on the trees again....I look forward to doing lots this summer.

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.