Road Trip: Row by Row

Last weekend I went home to celebrate my mom's 75th birthday, which meant a road trip. My sister and her daughter came along and they were amenable to stopping at quilt shops along the way.

Have you heard about Row by Row? It's a new type of quilt-along that started a few years ago and has swept across the country and into the world! Participating quilt shops offer a free pattern and a kit you can purchase on that year's theme. This year's is "Home Sweet Home." All designs must be 36.5" wide (or tall) so you can fit them together in the same quilt.

The patterns are available for a limited time and if you are the first one to bring a quilt with at least eight rows to a quilt shop, you win a prize! I have been following this program for a couple years, but this was the first year I really collected any patterns.

I think it's ideal for a road trip to collect as souvenirs.

I would have been happy to stop at three stores but apparently once you get my sister going on a list, she wants to do them all! We didn't quite get to all 21 on the list (ha ha) but we did visit five shops. Besides picking up some fun patterns, I discovered some great quilt shops!

Here are the rows that I picked up patterns for: (all pictures from the Row by Row Michigan Facebook page)

The Hen House of Charlotte

The Pincushion, Imlay City

Second design from the Pincushion

Stitchin at the Barn, Imlay City

RMC Quilts, Port Huron

Sew Elegant Quilt Shop, Fort Gratiot

And then, once at my mom's, I discovered the quilt shop in my hometown. It was my first visit and I enjoyed the lovely shop. They also had a great pattern:

The Stitch Witch, Cobourg, Ontario

I don't know when or how I'll put these together but it was fun to collect them. You can get some good ideas looking at the Row by Row Facebook pages where they show the winning quilts and any other quilts people bring in to the shops to share.

And of course, I picked up some lovely fabric at almost all of the shops too.

It's hard to resists rows and rows of lovely fabric!!

It's not something I'll do on every trip home (although I did miss all the stops in Ontario, so maybe...) but I sure enjoyed doing it this time.

Addendum:
I didn't show the patterns when I talked about my trip to the UP, but here are the patterns I picked up then:

Village Fabrics & Crafts, Paradise

Cardinal Creations
Lake City

Delphine's Quilt Shop, Gaylord

Ausable Fabrics & More, Grayling

And I have a few more from local shops when I drove to Shipshewana:

Calico Point, Goshen, IN

Six local shops collaborated on nursery rhyme themes and it would be fun to collect them all. I think there's another local road trip in order! I have until September 6 so I'd better look at my calendar...

Cotton Corner, Shipshewana, IN

Yoder Department Store, Shipshewana, IN

Sew Creative Threads, Elkhart, IN

Pumpkinvine Quilting, Middlebury, IN

The Quilt Shop at Essenhuis, Middlebury, IN

Fortunately these shops were a little closer together so it didn't take long to hit them all!

There and Back Again

I don't know if I mentioned that we were going away, but we spent a lovely week on the shore of Lake Superior in Michigan's UP. About 15 of my family was there and we were able to stay in three cottages (and a couple tents) on the same property. My sister was firmly informed by the border guard (coming in from Canada) that they call them cabins up here. Ok, then...

Troy and I had about six hours of driving time and I was looking forward to some prime making time! Now that we have the GPS unit, I am off navigating duties and I can sew, knit and whatever to my heart's delight. Or til my hands give out.

First up was to finish these socks that have been neglected for far too long:

All I had to do was work in the ends. Done. Just last night I gave them a bath and they are now drying on my sock blockers. I made them smaller than usual because I'm tired of having my hand-knit socks be too loose. Of course, then I was worried they would be too tight and scrunch my toes. But they fit the sock blockers (which are just my size) very easily and I am relieved.

I then pulled out the Farm Girl Vintage block for the week and finished up some embroidery that the block needed:

I won't show you the whole block yet. Since I was getting together with Kim, we skipped Skype and revealed them to each other in person. We covered three weeks while we were there so I'll be posting those separately when I can get to it.

And then I also sewed on the binding of my Mt Robson landscape quilt.

Oh, did I not tell you that I finished all the quilting before we left? Yes, I did. And it felt great to get it done. I'm even pretty pleased with the results. I pushed myself so I could then sew on the binding with the machine and have it ready for the hand sewing when I knew I would have all this time available to do it. I also "unvented" a way to sew the binding that's even more invisible, but I'll get to that when I show you the whole quilt.

While I was at the cottage cabin, I continued to work on the Mt Robson quilt. I finished sewing the binding and I worked on burying all the ends.

There were a lot of them! I saw a great method for how to bury them without having to rethread the needle all the time on some quilting show or online video and was glad to put it to use! I couldn't find the original source, but this video on youtube shows the same thing, if you'd like to see. It works just as well on really short ends, which I needed because sometimes I didn't cut long tails as I moved from section to section.

Even with a really great method, it was still a lot of ends to work in! I didn't finish at the Lake but have since finished that task at home. Pushing through those multiple layers of the heavy double adhesive backing used for the applique was not a joy.

When I wanted more fun at the cottage, I worked on some of my red nine patches. Here are a couple sewn and one in progress:

I did not want to do a random layout so I matched nine squares together (sometimes all the same fabric, sometimes not) and then safety pinned them together. Now I have lots and lots and lots of blocks that I can sew together.

I did the math and I need 288 blocks--that's 2,592 individual squares to cut! I have pieces cut and matched up for about half that many blocks.

On the way home, I worked on one of my Farm Girl Vintage blocks. I had finished one more at the cottage and this was the last one I had with me to do.

That accounts for the block that was due the day before we got there, the day after we got back and today. So I'm on schedule and will start the next block next week if I can tear myself away from the nine patches!

Although I had less to stitch on the way home, I made up for it by stopping at three different quilt shops!

I'm intrigued by the Row by Row program that started a few years ago and takes place each summer. Participating quilt shops have a free pattern and a kit you can purchase for a row that is 36" long. The idea is that you can pick them up while you're traveling and assemble them into a quilt because of the uniform length. (They also have very active Facebook groups for each state/province and it's fun to see everyone's quilts.)

Suffice it to say, I mapped each quilt shop on the way and warned Troy to allow for extra time! :) I had planned to catch a few on the way up, but all of them were closed on Sunday. So the way home was it. I was happy to hit three and by then we were bumping up to closing time for most of them. I discovered new quilt shops and a very nice one (pictured above) is right on the route we take. Easy to hit next time!

I have a few Row by Row patterns now and I'm still not sure I'm going to do anything with them. There are a lot of applique designs and I'm not sure I'm up for it. But it was a fun way to collect some souvenirs of the trip.