The family (minus the sheltie) traveled to Fairborn, OH, this weekend for a second cousin's graduation. We are the only relatives on her mother's side of the family who live on this side of the Mississippi and are young/healthy enough to travel so we got to represent the whole extended family. For once EVERY set of directions I created by studying maps online worked perfectly! :-) We ate at an Amish-style restaurant on the way down; any place that lists noodles served over mashed potatoes (a childhood favorite) as their specialty gets my vote of approval. Graduation was very nice and DD sat through it reasonably well for a toddler.
I had taken the annoying stamped-Aida bib and got a huge bit of work done on it. I had to leave the motel room and work in the lobby because DD just wouldn't go to sleep with the light on. At 1 am the night clerk came over to me and asked if I was ok. She said no one had ever just spent time out in the lobby at night like that before. I think she liked having the company since she sat down and talked with me until her audit finished running (and I went to bed) around 4 am. Even though the bib is for a baby who is due any day, the end is in sight and I just might get it done in time.
We checked out of our room Saturday morning and headed over to The Daisy Barrel. Wow! This shop has very high ceilings and all of the out-of-reach wall space is covered with beautiful stitched models and quilts. The models are numbered to correspond with the chart racks so you can easily find the pattern of your choice. Good thing too because there are tons of charts here. I didn't go over to the east side of the shop because it looked like it was mostly quilting. I am wondering if you can buy needlework fabrics cut to order on that side. The west side only had pre-cut pieces although the selection (colors, counts, fiber content) was nice. They were doing an inventory of fibers at the time so I'm not certain what all they carried. I didn't see much silk or any rayon but they could have been working on those while I was there. I was sorely tempted by some Victoria Sampler charts and accessory packs on the discount table but behaved and got out of there with nothing more than a Mill Hill ornament kit (Icy Snowflake). I did show DH several things that I've admired online so maybe for Christmas... All in all, a very nice LNS. There were also other shops of interest in downtown Fairborn so we did a little very early Christmas shopping. Then we had a wonderful time at our graduate's reception and headed home.
The grad's mom also does needlework so we (only half-jokingly) talked about loading up all of our stash and meeting half-way to do some swapping. Just imagine if we all loaded up vehicles and had a giant stash swap meet somewhere...swoon!