DEL QUILTS: Kitty Pippin

Saturday, June 2, 2018

A visit to La Conner, WA 06-02-18

Mabel and I visited the small water side town of La Conner, WA, on Thursday, May 24th. It was a beautiful sunny day and there were quite a few tourists visiting this charming little town. Our first stop was Seeds for a delicious lunch. They had curried asparagus soup, very tasty and a first for me. Then we checked in at the Pacific Northwest Quilt & Fiber Arts Museum www.qfamuseum.org which is located in an historic house with quilts in every room and lovely views from the top floor. There is also a ground floor gift shop with many original items and packaged Japanese fabrics. The current exhibits are man made quilts and I was honestly disappointed. Too many negative themes for me. But there were a few outstanding quilts that I took pictures of.

From there we visited Sylvia Pippen's shop "Indigo Stitch" down on the waterfront. I wanted to just stay there - forever! Such gorgeous work in sashiko and applique from the creative minds and talented hands of Sylvia and her mother Kitty. But the samples are not for sale, just the patterns and the materials to create them. I was reluctant to photograph inside the shop so you will have to visit yourself to enjoy the wonders. Here are two websites that talk about Sylvia and the shop.

https://okanarts.com/kitty-pippen/
https://okanarts.com/indigo-stitch/

We also spend some time browsing through the "Wood Shop" which has a wonderful display of everything it is possible to make with fine woods, or so it seemed. I left some money to support the economy and to supply my Book Group with bookmarks made from wood.

We drove back to Mt. Vernon for dinner and then off to a meeting of Mabel's book club to talk about Jodi Picoult's book "Small Great Things". The book is a fiction about racism and the discussion among the dozen ladies was interesting. It was a full day, but also a great day.

A very nice quilt that my eyes kept going back to, I'm sure it deserved the prize.

Outstanding workmanship and a really lovely quilt in the traditional manner. Amazing hand quilting, too.

Indigo Stitch, the shop.

Indigo Stitch, the shop, and Mabel Huseby.

Finds from the Wood Shop - a toothpick holder, a sinuous pickle fork, and one of the bookmarks.

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Thursday, May 7, 2015

A lovely day in Washington State 05-07-15

We visited friends in Bellingham and waaaay outside Bellingham - muffins with lemon curd and crème fres for morning snack, followed by viewing of lovely quilts in progress. Ending in a tour of the house and yard which Suzanne has transformed with a year of labor. It is so beautiful; I particularly enjoyed the birds. Goldfinch, swallows, towhees, house finches, robins, starlings, etc. The hummers dive bombed us because we were too close to their nesting area.

These goldfinch pictures were taken through the breakfast room window.

He posed very nicely at first....

..but I guess he didn't like being photographed and turned his back.

On the grape arbor by the front door is a hummingbird feeder, but I couldn't get close enough to catch a hummer. They were mostly rufous.

We drove to LaConner for a late lunch at "Seeds", definitely on my list of fabulous restaurants. It occupies a building that was once a seed store and has a lovely deck built around this ancient beech tree.

They call it a European Beech, but I wonder if it is a "Copper Beech".

Lovely with the sun shining through the rust colored leaves.

Then we drove over to the La Conner Quilt & Textile Museum, just a few blocks away.

This amazing tulip was blooming in the flower bed along the house. It was pretty droopy so Reynola held it up so I could take a picture.

We attended the reception for Kitty Pippin (on the left) whose quilts are hanging in an exhibit in the downstairs gallery. We also visited upstairs where there are contemporary quilts by Denise Oyama Miller and Nancy Ryan.