The Traveling Quilter Goes to North Carolina

I'm in North Carolina this week for spring break. The real purpose of the trip was for Taylor to do some research for one of her classes. She is studying Frederick Law Olmsted. The father of Landscape Architecture. So here we are at the Biltmore mansion looking at his work. I did find some time to do a little bit of shopping though. Originally, we were going to travel to Mary Jo's outside of Charlotte. The Detroit airport decided they didn't like that plan. After a major scramble trying to keep our plans on time, the airline routed us to Knoxville instead. We did manage to find a quilt store that wasn't too terribly far from our hotel.

The Asheville Cotton Company sells Bernina and Baby Lock machines in addition to lots of fabric. I found out about the shop via a brochure on the Fiber Fabric Bead Trail. The tag line for the shop is "keeping the mountains in stitches." The ad for the shop states that it has over 8000 bolts of fabric. Now, the shop is large but I don't know about the 8000 bolt bit. The shop gals were very friendly. The store sold a lot of the big designer names like Riley Blake and Amy Butler.

 
While you drive around the countyside, you may stumble upon one of the barns that has a quilt on the side. I saw three or four but only was able to get one picture. If you are traveling down south, I know that you will find info on the web on where to find them. And they're not limited to North Carolina!

Finally, this morning we spent time at the North Carolina Arboretum. Unfortunately, there wasn't a lot blooming. As we were walking the grounds, we came upon the quilt garden. Each year is dedicated to a different quilt block. How wonderful it would have been to visit during summer to see this. There are two educational buildings on the premises. We were told that one of the buildings usually has quilts on display but  during our visit, there were dolls there. The Asheville Quilt Guild invited Eleanor Peace Bailey to the quild to give a class on doll making and the guild members dolls were on display here. The dolls lined three corridors.