Final Shop Hop
Day, Sunday, June 23:
For years I’ve wanted to go to Island Quilter on Vashon Island, but it
never worked out. On the shop hop it was always a ferry ride too far from other
shops.
In March, Island Quilter had a booth at the Sewing & Stitchery Expo.
Shelves packed with bolts of Kaffe Fassett fabrics attracted me to the booth. I
talked to the shop’s owner and she told me that Kaffe (rhymes with "safe") had held classes in her
shop twice before. While he was there, he said they have the largest collection
of his fabrics anywhere. She also said that they were trying to get him to return
to teach another class. I made sure to sign up on her email list because if
Kaffe comes back, I’ll be catching the ferry there. So, that March day a summer
shop hop visit to Island Quilter became
one of my top priorities.
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| Eye candy: just a few Kaffe Fassett fabrics. |
There were two quilt shops in
Seattle. John could do the city driving. He’s good at parallel parking under
pressure. I usually get frazzled, fail and have to make a second attempt while
a line of traffic waits for me. From there we could cut across Mercer Island,
jump on I-405 and head up to Bellevue. Potentially we could push on further to Duvall,
Bothell, and Everett.
Over breakfast and a map, I told
John my plan. The only drawback was that I really liked Harbor Quilt’s block, but they were in Gig Harbor. Maybe we could
go to Gig Harbor first, then double back to Tacoma to catch the ferry to Vashon
Island and continue on. The ferry left every 50 minutes, so it would be easy to
fit our plan in.
John proposed another plan. He was
leaving on a business trip to California the next day and hadn’t packed yet. He
didn’t feel like dealing with Seattle. His route took a different loop: go to Vashon
Island, and get off the ferry at Southworth on the Olympic peninsula instead.
We could drive up to a shop in Poulsbo, one of our favorite towns, and then stop
in at a few more shops wrapping up with the shop in Gig Harbor, and then
heading home. That sounded good. That’s the plan we went with.
The weather prediction wasn’t good.
It was supposed to be cool and overcast, but lucky us, the forecast was wrong.
The clouds did clear out and it turned out to be a good day to be on the road as
well as on the water. Five minutes before the ferry started loading at Pt.
Defiance, we were in line, a little shell shocked at the $25.90 fare. At least it
was a roundtrip fare. The ferry wasn’t full so the “cruise” was relaxing.
We had no problems finding Island Quilter. I was excited to finally be at the shop/gallery
that had been a featured shop in Better
Homes and Gardens Quilt Sampler magazine last year. The tall shelves of
bright fabrics were arranged in a maze, but it was one that I didn’t mind
getting lost in. John looked for the cupcake fabric while I basked in all their
Fassett fabrics. The 2012 shop hop had unintentionally evolved into my personal
Kaffe Fassett tour.
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| Island Quilter, Vashon Island, WA. |
Half of the shop was a quilt
gallery. I overheard the shop owner tell another customer that they had asked
quilters to submit quilts from previous shop hops to display in the gallery. None
came in. At the last minute, they went with the quilts that were now hanging in
the gallery. I comforted myself with the thought that maybe nobody else had
finished a shop hop quilt. Like me, they had the blocks, but hadn’t found the
time to sit down and sew the quilts. (Out of nine shop hops, I’ve only made one
of the quilts--the one from 2003, my first shop hop.)
I bought a Kaffe Fassett book and
of course some of his fabric, got stamped, got the block, and then it was off
to the ferry at the north end of the island. This time as we pulled up, the
ferry pulled away, so we had to wait for 25 minutes, but that gave me a chance
to look through the Fassett book.
When we landed on the Olympic
peninsula, it became apparent that lots of other people agreed with our idea of
visiting Poulsbo on what had turned out to be a beautiful, sunny day. It was
crowded. We took at least three laps around the municipal parking lot before we
got a space. On our way to The Loft
restaurant for lunch, we passed by a Great Blue Heron who was wading in the
water also looking for his lunch.
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| Great Blue Heron |
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| View from the deck at The Loft restaurant. |
We were seated up on the deck
overlooking the waterfront marina. Unfortunately, the group seated next to us
spent the whole time cataloging their various surgeries and health problems. We
tried to turn our ears off. John’s
bucket of clams and my fish and chips were tasty, and the sun felt great
shining on us.
Afterwards, we stopped at Sluy’s
bakery and then walked over to Heirloom
Quilts. While we were waiting to get the block, the stamping lady mentioned
to the quilter in front of us that the shops closed at 5:00 today, not 8:00. Uh-oh!
That meant that we’d better get a move on. I mentally crossed shops off the
list that we were planning on visiting. We got stamped and ignored the stamp
lady’s attempt to convince us to go to the Kingston shop. It was in the wrong
direction.
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| John in Poulsbo, WA. |
As we left her table, I told
John to keep his eyes peeled because there would be a good chance of finding
the cupcake fabric in this shop. We rounded the corner, and sure enough, there
it was! We got the two yards needed for two aprons, and then hustled to the car
to head to our next stop, Material Girls
Quilt Shop in Silverdale.
By the time, we pulled into Material Girls we were in “stamp and go”
mode. The sales people in the shop were feeling that way too in the waning shop
hop hours. A group of them were chatting at the cutting table. We wandered
around for a few minutes searching for the stamping lady before she noticed we
were carrying passports and gave us our blocks.
Rochelle’s in Port Orchard was one of the shops that I sadly
deleted when we lost three hours of shop hopping time. It’s a little way off
the beaten track, and I really wanted to get the Harbor Quilt’s block with the chickadees. So we hurried south, Gig
Harbor-bound.
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| Harbor Quilt's 2012 shop hop block. |
We got to Harbor
Quilt with a half hour to spare. They had rearranged the store to
accommodate a new long arm quilting machine. It was stationed in the back by
windows looking out on the water. I didn’t shop, just stamp and go again.
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| Tacoma Narrows Bridges, Tacoma bound. |
It had been a leisurely day out
on the peninsula, in the beginning anyway. As we drove
across one of the Tacoma Narrows bridges aiming for home, I tallied up the blocks I’d collected
this year: four today, three on Saturday, five on Friday, and nine on Thursday
for a grand total of 21 over four days. I had managed to hit 21 out of 54
participating shops, not too shabby for someone who started out without much of
a plan.
Laura Keolanui
Stark is gloating over and sorting through her shop hop booty. She can be reached at
stark.laura.k@gmail.com.
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