Michigoose's gander at quilts & life: Dairy Barn and Nelsonville Quilt Company

Today, Chris Landis and I took a little trip to Athens, Ohio to see an exhibition of Amish Quilts at the Dairy Barn Art Center. It was an absolutely glorious day, and unmarred except for panic-ridden calls from my dd who swore the spaghetti sauce I made for the cross country pasta dinner at my house was burned (it wasn't).

As usual, no photographs of the quilts were allowed, but they did have a catalog available. Drawn from Pennsylvania, Ohio (predominantly Holmes County, but with others) and a few from Indiana and Iowa it was an excellent show. Dee Dadik and Molly Butler (appraisers of "I Have a Quilt") curated the exhibition. Chris Landis is a professional long-arm quilter and she and I particularly enjoyed looking at the differing quilting motifs and how they handled problems of turning corners, etc.

I love the play of light on the Dairy Barn. I also love the ever-changing sky of Ohio. It is really remarkable. I hope that I will be coming back in the spring. The Quilt National quilt submissions are due soon and Lori Gravely-Novello has been working hard on her pieces and they are absolutely stunning. Lots of art quilters are sweating trying to get their works done, photographed well and submitted. I'm not ready for that yet.

We drove around Athens a little bit. I was a little familiar with it as Ohio University was one of the college visits I made with my daughter this spring. Although she is concerned that it is highly rated as a party school (and what school isn't?), and that her friend who is attending this fall would think that she is just following her, I hope that she will choose OU. Of all the schools we've looked at so far, this one seems like it is student oriented, and other than Ohio Northern, it was the only school to include the library on the campus tour. I was also impressed with how human the campus seemed rather than sterile or industrial in nature.

We stopped for lunch in Athens. Then on down the road. Even though I have sworn that I wasn't going to buy a lot of stuff and certainly I don't need fabric....we stopped in Nelsonville at the Nelsonville Quilt Company. You can visit the shop online here.

This is a great shop, one of the best that I have been in in Ohio. They have a wide variety of fabric types and lots of good notions and tools. I was able to get my Needle Grabbers (I affectionately call them Needle Nabbers--round rubber disks which help you pull needles through obstinate fabric).

The owner of the shop, shown here, is too modest to nominate herself to the top 10 quilt shops which appears in Quilt Sampler twice a year, so she's not in this issue, but I promised her she rated in my top 10 Ohio shops and would highlight her shop here.

I was amused because while I was in the shop, this woman with the turquoise top (one of my favorite colors) was there and she and I share a name, so when the shop owner called "Lisa!" I whipped around....only it wasn't me.

The lady in the lime green top was visiting from New Zealand, and although I was aware of the prices they pay in Australia and New Zealand, she was commenting on that topic and once again, I took a deep breath. Even though the $9 and $10 per yard is now common and hard for this brain who started purchasing quilt shop quality fabrics at about $3.00 per yard, having to pay what they pay would be really painful.