Travels with Sandi

by Featured

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Bear Lake, Utah near Garden City.

Sewing with Sandi is fun, but travels with Sandi is fun,too! What is more enjoyable than taking a trip vicariously through someone else, and seeing how they spend their money?

I love to travel. I love to go to quilt shops. My husband is a sweetheart who doesn’t mind if I go to as many shops as I want to while we travel, as long as I don’t expect him to go in with me (seriously, why would I want that! I don’t want him to know how much I spend in those shops!)

When we go on a trip, my first thought, after deciding where we are going is to go to the internet and find quilt shops to explore. If it is Row by Row season, it’s all the better because I can go to Facebook for that state and see what the rows looks like and choose based on the rows I want to collect or the license plate saying that I can’t live without.

We actually went to Utah to visit my daughter who is interning there for the summer at the Utah Festival of Opera and Musical Theater. She is a costume and wardrobe design person and has one year left at UNO in that field. While we were there, we attended performances of Newsies and Mary Poppins that were both absolutely fabulous! If you have a chance to go to a show in Logan, do it!

The unfortunate part of our trip this time was that it had to occur over the 4th of July due to my husband’s job. Therefore, we traveled on the 4th, when everything was closed, and on Sunday, when everything was closed. This severely limited my ability to hit quilt shops along the way, but I did manage to do a bit of damage with the old credit card anyway!

My first (and sadly only) stop in NE was at Prairie Point Junction in Cozad, NE. I absolutely love the shop. Julie has everything from wool to flannel to Kansas Troubles to 1930’s to all kinds of fun Moda fabrics. I never miss a chance to stop there when we travel west. I made sure to grab their adorable Row by Row kit with cherries on a log cabin block, and quite a few other items, as you can see from the picture above.

The next shop that I got to was My Girlfriend’s Quilt Shoppe in Logan, UT. It is owned by the twin sister (and her husband) of Kim from KIMBERBELL!!! What an adorable little shop! Of course they had plenty of embroidery patterns from Kimberbell, but they also had beautiful wool items, fun Elizabeth Hartman Gnomes, Christmas fabrics, and a wide selection of Baby Lock sewing machines (my personal favorite!).

My second shop was Jewel’s Fabric Stash in Bountiful. It is north of Salt Lake City, not too far. The staff was super friendly and knowledgeable. I have to love a shop that right as I walk in the front door I am looking at a wall of Tula and Kaffe! The entire shop was filled with beautiful samples, and they had such a variety of piecing techniques from One Block Wonder to Elizabeth Hartman to Judy Niemeyer’s paper piecing. It was obvious that the owner LOVES hedgehogs as much as I love flamingos because they were everywhere! The are adorable 🙂 She also loves batiks! I think this is one of the few shops I have ever been in that has more batiks than The Quilters Cottage in Kearney, NE. My mom would have been in absolute heaven in this shop! She loves batiks so much! I bought some shot cotton FQ, some unicorn fabric for my granddaughter, a super cute Row by Row kit with jars filled with home grown products from Utah (did you know that their official state snack food is JELLO?) and several other FQ of things that caught my attention.

The final stop was also in Bountiful. It was only a few minutes away from Jewel’s and was called the Quilter’s Attic. Their tastes were a bit more to the primitive side, but still they had brights for the fans of that aesthetic. They had some really beautiful wools, and a full line of my favorite Moda blenders, Grunge. They had a really cute ice cream (of course) Row by Row that is going to stand alone as a wall quilt for my kitchen in the summer. If you look at the pic of the finished quilt, it’s the one that looks like a sign hanging from a building and says, “Ice Cream Scoops”—so adorable!

And there you have it! Travels with Sandi. All three of these shops are a “visit again” if I am ever in the area. Stay tuned for the next issue of “Travels with Sandi” in August when we take our family trip to Colorado Springs 🙂 That one might be a tad more tricky since the entire family will be there. They aren’t all as patient as my long-suffering dear husband! Happy Summer travels to you all! Be safe, and shop along the way!

See the Beauty!

Sandi Griepenstroh

Sandi Griepenstroh

Founder

I started quilting in the early 90's as a young mom while I was still teaching high school social sciences and English. Now it is my full time job, and I love sharing the joy that quilting has brought into my life through lecturing, trunk shows, teaching everything from piecing to machine quilting, and longarm quilting the pieced quilt tops that others have made. I am a maker through and through, and I can't wait to meet my fellow makers and talk quilting!

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