The Texas Quilt Museum in La Grange

Last week I took a little trip down the road from Austin to visit the Texas Quilt Museum in La Grange, a place I've been wanting to see since it opened in 2011.

It is housed just off the town square in two old brick buildings that have been carefully restored and repurposed as open, light-filled galleries.  One of the buildings was formerly a furniture store, as testified by the tile entryway.

The museum is not currently a collecting entity, relying instead on traveling and specially created exhibits.  At the moment, in addition to a display of eight quilts from the personal collection of Karen and Werner Gundersheimer, you can see the museum's first juried exhibition, "Butterflies and Their Beautiful Kin," and an invitational exhibition, "A Flutter of Butterfly Quilts."  The butterfly theme celebrates completion of the museum's garden, a lovely spot adjacent to the main building.

The Museum garden

The Museum's mural

Museum policy prohibits taking photographs of any exhibits so you will need to look at the museum's website to see some of the quilts on display.  I especially liked Caryl Bryer Fallert-Gentry's piece, Lepidopteran #3, which focuses on the fascinating detail of a butterfly's wing and is executed with Fallert-Gentry's usual painstaking precision and attention to detail.

I was familiar with Fallert-Gentry's work after seeing an exhibit of her work last fall at the International Quilt Festival in Houston.  Here is one of my favorites from her Fibonacci Series.

Fibonacci Series #15, by Caryl Bryer Fallert-Gentry

You can see more of her work on her website.

A bonus to visiting the Texas Quilt Museum was finding a lovely new shop, The Quilted Skein, right next door. As the name suggests, they cater to both quilters and knitters.

The shop carries an array of fabrics, including an extensive collection of Kaffe Fasset prints with their trademark deeply saturated colors.

Wander towards the back of the shop and you'll find a large selection of more traditional and reproduction fabrics.

Throughout the store you'll find completed projects to offer inspiration and comfy places to sit and work or peruse one of the many books or patterns they offer for sale.

They carry an equally large range of yarns.  My friend admired a sample scarf made from Blue Heron Yarns Soft Twist Cotton so I bought a skein to make one for her.  I began it with a provisional cast-on and am knitting it in a knit one purl one rib so I'll be able to make it into a mobius scarf with a seamless Kitchener stitch join of the beginning and end.  The rib has the added benefit of making the fabric lie flat, unlike stockinette stitch which I find rolls at the edges even after blocking.

We grabbed an inexpensive but tasty lunch at Reba's, a few blocks east of the museum.

And spent the remainder of the day wandering around La Grange which is at an interesting stage of charismatic decay and rebirth.

On the La Grange town square

Detail of building on the town square

Midway between Houston and Austin and near Round Top which is known for its music and antique festivals, La Grange has become a popular destination and weekend getaway with shops and restaurants popping up to cater to visitors.  For example, Richard Schmidt Jewelry, right on the square, has a carefully curated and displayed collection of wares, from his own beautiful jewelry designs (of course) to home decor and vintage boots.

Inside Richard Schmidt Jewelry

Our drive home was as colorful as our day in La Grange.  Central Texas just can't be beat for wildflowers!

Indian Paintbrush

Bluebonnets and Drummond phlox

A Good Time of Year to Stay Home

Spring is a wonderful time to be in central Texas!  The mornings are cool, the afternoons are mild, and the skies are mostly blue.  Best of all, it's wildflower season.  Bluebonnets, our state flower, are popping out all over town.  I see them in my neighbors' yards, along roadsides, and in open fields.  If you take a short drive in any direction out of town you can find truly spectacular displays.

We are fortunate to have some nice displays at our lake house.  The best one is just above the water's edge in a bed of red sandstone.  When Texas isn't in drought and Lake Travis has a normal amount of water this area is part of the lakebed, so it is clear that bluebonnet seeds are hardy enough to survive several years of being very wet.

They are especially pretty, as so many things are, at sunset and sunrise.

In shade they have a very blue cast.

In morning light they look more purple.  If you get up very close you can see that the petals are iridescent.

You can find beautiful color in central Texas in more than just the wildflowers. I love the Tiffany blue of these eastern bluebird eggs! Sadly, this nest was abandoned when its nest box was knocked down.  Fortunately, we have over a dozen other nest boxes, nearly all of which appear to have been used this year.

Eastern bluebird nest and eggs

If you've had enough of blue, here is a little relief in the form of a Hymenoxys flower.  There are dozens of other yellow flowers - Texas star, coreopsis, scrambled eggs, zexmania, and Huisache daisies to name just a few - but Hymenoxys are the most prolific at our place at the moment.  Such a wonderful sunny yellow!

Hymenoxys

Much as I enjoy being home at this time of year, I am still thinking of future travel adventures. Where in the world might I go next? Appropriately my current hand-stitching project is a quilt top that brings to mind indispensable tools for the traveler, maps and compasses.  The blue points of individual blocks look like compass markers and when the blocks are joined the yellow portions make a circle and look like the projection of lines of longitude on a globe.  

The pattern is from "The Quilter's Book of Blocks and Borders" by Jinny Beyer.  When I chose the pattern I didn't appreciate that sixteen pieces of fabric would intersect at the block corners.  They have been a challenge for me and really demonstrate the need for precise work from start to finish. 

These blocks, which finish at about nine inches square, will make only a 45 inch square top, so I still have a lot of work to do on borders to make it large enough for a bed.  Perhaps I'll make a plain white border with stars in the corners and then a strip of triangles repeating the blues and yellows from the center.

Moosely Mornings, Snowy Days

One Thursday evening last month we arrived in Jackson Hole in the midst of a snowstorm and I was more impressed than ever with the skills of pilots who fly large jets in and out of the Jackson Hole airport.  Situated within Grand Teton National Park at about 6,000 feet of elevation, surrounded by mountains (hence "Hole" in the name Jackson Hole), and having only one short runway, which, by the way, cannot be salted due to park regulations, the airport has more than its share of exhilarating landings, especially when the weather is bad.

Fortunately, Jackson Hole has plenty to entice the winter visitor to put up with potentially scary travel.  Abundant wildlife, magnificent scenery, and fabulous skiing combine to set Jackson Hole apart from other ski destinations.

So much of the valley is national park, national forest, or other protected land that it has an abundance of wildlife.  During our short stay we saw a variety of waterfowl as well as deer, elk - both inside and outside the National Elk Refuge - and moose.  In fact, we saw moose every morning of our stay, the most notable being a large bull browsing right outside the house in which we stayed.

Moose are incredibly well adapted to cold climates.  With seemingly leisurely strides, their long legs move them rapidly even in the deepest snow.  More remarkable is how they survive by eating the young parts of trees and shrubs.

Bull moose browsing on aspen branches

Cow moose on the lookout for tasty branches

Jackson Hole is, of course, well known for its scenery.  During this visit heavy snow obscured the big peaks of Grand Teton National Park and made us focus on the valley's more intimate scenes. 

Dinner time along Spring Gulch Road

Bar BC Ranch fence

I used the snowy day palette of pale blues and white with brown and green highlights to make another top to practice my long arm quilting skills.

Practice quilt, machine pieced and machine quilted

As a ski area Jackson Hole stands out for its extensive, varied, and steep terrain and for its snow.  We were fortunate to have from 6 to 18 inches of fresh snow each day that we skied.  Wow!  With almost non-stop snow the light was rather flat so we stayed mostly in the trees, which afforded better visibility and numerous beautiful lines through uncut powder. 

Along "Slalom," one of the few open runs we skied

I imitated the sinuous curves of ski tracks for some of the quilting.

Toy Joy, an Austin Treasure

Toy Joy is one of those places that immediately comes to mind when I hear the line "Keep Austin Weird."  It is a store filled with both toys and joy.  And sadly, it appears that it will be closing, or at least, no longer be under control of its present owners.

We made a pilgrimage there yesterday to show our support and to soak up it's wonderful atmosphere.  With South by Southwest underway and a Saturday article in Saturday's Austin American Statesman about its closing, the store was buzzing.

This is not your average toy store.  No Barbies, no Legos, really none of the things you find in the toy aisles of places like Target and Walmart.  Instead it is filled with an enormous, but lovingly selected, array of toys and oddities from around the world. The proprietors have wonderful senses of humor.  I especially enjoy the toy bin labels.

Many of the displays are quirky.

Others are sweet.

But they appeal to all audiences.

The decor is as much fun as the merchandise.  Originally a small army of these nuns adorned the outside of the building which formerly housed the store, but they were too tempting for thieves and so had to be  brought indoors.

I hope that this window display remains accurate.

No matter what happens, I  wish Lizzy and Trevor all the best.

Lizzy Newsome, Toy Joy proprietor

Sights from the Southern Hemisphere

If you just glanced at the photos in this post you might think I had made another excursion to parts well south of Austin.  In fact, I went north.

As I noted in my last post, we took a little trip to Boston.  While there we stopped in at the New England Aquarium, where we were greeted with two new-to-us species of penguins, little blues and Africans, along with one previously seen species, rockhoppers. It is always fun to watch penguin antics and these guys did not disappoint.

Little blue penguin

African penguins

Of course, the aquarium had many other things to see besides penguins.  I particularly liked the giant ocean tank and coral reef which forms the centerpiece of the main exhibit area.  A circular ramp takes you all the way around from bottom to top and is the next best thing to donning SCUBA gear and diving in.  Myrtle the green sea turtle, weighing in at an impressive 540 pounds, is the largest inhabitant.

Myrtle, the green sea turtle

The seals and sea lions, which are in a separate exhibit area outside, were great fun to watch too.  It took me a minute to realize that the little turtle this one had is a plastic toy!

I'll finish this post with a final scene from the southern hemisphere, my just completed quilted wall hanging inspired by a scene along the Antarctic Peninsula.  I began this piece during a class taught by Valori Wells at the Modern Quilt Guild's first QuiltCon here in Austin in February, 2013. It was a terrific class and I hope Valori will return for next year's show.

"Mysterious Antarctica," (cotton, machine pieced, hand quilted, 36" x 24")

I used the etched glass design on a ceiling light in Tulsa's Pythian Building for one section of the quilting.  You can see a photo of the ceiling light on my April 8, 2013, post.

Detail of back

I plan to hang the quilt along with a print of the original photograph.

Sunset along the Antarctic Peninsula