St. Charles, MO Sept. 8, 2007

Saturday morning greeted us with heavy, dark rain clouds, so we quickly made our way to downtown St. Charles and drove over the wonderfully bumpy bricked Main Street that was lined with stores, restaurants and shops.   Main Street runs parallel to the park that sits on the banks of the Missouri River.  St. Charles is such a neat little town that you can't wait to park the car and walk the streets to get a close up view, and on this particular weekend there were quilts hanging outside from porch railings, from wires strung on sides of buildings and draped over fences.  So much to see and do and such ugly gray clouds hanging overhead, so we hurriedly walked down the street with the goal to see as many of the quilts before the rain began to fall and the quilts were taken inside -- we managed to see about half of them.

The Patches Etc. Shop is located in one of the charming old buildings that line the bricked street.  This business is actually two stores that are linked together; one is the quilting store and the other is On this particular day the shop was bulging with women who were busily looking at the shelves crowded with packets of fat quarters, bundles of coordinated fabrics that were tied up with ribbon, the bolts of  fabric that lined the walls, and the drawers of unusual and old buttons.  There was a line at the cutting tables and at the check out counter but no one seemed to mind the wait or the rain falling outside.  I found a couple of green fabrics that I thought might go with the latest quilt design that I had in mind to make -- a very traditional pattern that I want to make in vintage red and green prints.  It turned out that those greens were too green but they can be added to the stash for another project.

The second quilt shop we visited in St. Charles was in the process of closing down due to the poor health of the lady who owns it.  This store had no particular charm but had a considerable quantity of fabric bolts that she was anxious to sell off, so the conversation would go something like this, "You need a yard of that?  At  this price you might as well get at least 2 yards.  Actually, why don't you get the rest of the bolt?"  She was so convincing that we each made more than 1 trip through the check out line and took home large amounts of fabric. So far I had managed to not get carried away on buying very much on this trip, but my bags were filled with enough of the Civil War style greens and reds that I had been looking for to make at least 2 large quilts.  Way more than I'd planned to buy, but it was a good deal!