Quilt progress, gifted smalls, and Friday's road trip

I am now 34% done with the quilting or 25.3 square feet done. I am almost to the corner!

I made two smalls to gift to a reader who has sent me fabric for tote bags and two cross stitch charts. I have sent her a couple of my project bags and by request, a small. I didn't think one was enough, so I made two. Cherie, also sent me a plaid cotton fabric that I used on the back of that vintage rail fence quilt top I recently finished. She got home from her trip and the package with the smalls was there for her. Here are the smalls I sent her. And yes, she like them!

Another blog reader, Linda, sent me two big boxes of fabric for making totes. I felt I needed to send her something - the postage to ship all that fabric to me was not cheap! I sent her a couple project bags and she was very happy! She was going away on a short trip and transferred her cross stitching into the bags for her trip.      Now my road trip. My girlfriend arrived and we headed to Sugarcreek, Ohio. We were going to have breakfast at Dutch Valley Restaurant, but there was a 35-minute wait. Mind you, it is a Friday morning at 9:30. We decided not to wait and headed to the bulk food store in Sugarcreek. I got some spices, cocoa powder, nuts, and other baking supplies. Here was what was in one of my two bags.

Next, we went to a fabric store down the block. They carry quilt fabric and all kinds of sewing stuff. I picked up three cones of quilting thread and two skeins of floss. I like this Signature quilting thread and the shop hasn't raised the price yet. This is good thread, and they only charge $10.75 for a 3000 yard cone! The floss is for a cross stitch project I need to get kitted up.

There aren't any restaurants in downtown Sugarcreek so we headed to Walnut Creek. There were people everywhere! We eventually found a place to park and started over to the one restaurant. We passed a couple ladies that told us the wait time was 75 minutes! Geeze! Forget that! We saw an antique place so we walked thru there. I found a couple things.

We were really getting hungry and Walnut Creek was such a madhouse, we left and headed to Chestnut Ridge Sewing Center outside Berlin so I could pick up my scissors that they had sharpened. The lady at the store gave us a couple suggestions about where we might get something to eat. We decided not to go to Berlin and just head back, because if Walnut Creek was busy Berlin had to be crazy too. We passed by both places the girl had suggested because they were both packed. We ended up heading back and went to the Mexican restaurant in Strasburg. There was no wait there so finally at 12:45 we got to sit down and get something to eat. I forgot to take a picture of my plate; the food is so good there and we had the nicest waiter. There is a thrift store in the same plaza, so we went to see if they had gotten any more picture frames. I had bought some there before for framing my cross stitch. I didn't find any frames, but I did get these cute salt and pepper shakers, and this cute acorn decoration all for $3.00. There were two of those acorns, so my friend bought the other one and now we have a memory of this trip.

After that we headed over to the quilt shop in Mineral City to see my friend who was at the quilt shop for a sew-in day. I did check out the clearance shelves and found a few pieces. Wendy, the store owner, always had good stuff on her clearance shelves. The fabric was $6.00 a yard then it was an extra 25% off! That hand fabric will make a great back for a Halloween quilt. I emptied the bolt and got 10.75 yards.

We hung out at the quilt shop for an hour and a half then headed back to my house. It was a 166 mile trip. My friend stayed for another couple hours then headed home. I was exhausted, but we had a great time.