These are Black Eyed Susans, Maryland’s official state flower, growing outside the front door of the Crabby Quilter in Annapolis (near the stadium for the famous Naval Academy).

Barbara, Patty and I had a fun outing on Friday instead of our usual Sewing Together time. As usual, Barbara drove us around to four ‘local’ quilt shops on the MidAtlantic Shop Hop circuit. We picked a pretty dreadful summer day to do it – hot and very hazy with the overcasting smoky ruins of Canadian forest fires ramping up the bad air quality. 😛

Oh, but the car had a/c and we had fun. It is really amazing to me how tiring it can be sitting in a car all day shopping! I spent most of today (Saturday) recovering. Drinking liters of cold water and eating very little. Should have been petting all my pretty purchases, eh? Mostly I focused on buying embroidery threads though a couple of pretty pieces of fabric did find their way into my shopping tote.

We started at Cottonwood in Severna Park:

What a friendly shop! It was one of my favorites the last time we Hopped and this time, too. Nice staff, great inventory with all kinds of diverting goodies. Not only lovely fabrics but art supplies, yarns and embroidery threads, books of all kinds – plenty of inspiration. I bought a number of threads and joined the annual ‘membership’ group – enticed by a really nice canvas apron (had a choice of several different prizes and 10% off any time I come).

We admired the flowering plants all along our path – I particularly focused on all the beautiful red crepe myrtles blooming along the roadways. We had dinner, after our trip was finished, at a CrackerBarrel in Waldorf – but their flowers (which were so lovely the last time I visited) were heat blasted, poor things.

Our second stop was at The Quilting Parlour in Crofton:

This is the site of the former Tomorrow’s Treasures (under new ownership) and they, too, were friendly and cheerful. Saw plenty of nice fabrics and panels there but only bought some spools of Sulky Blendable 12 weight thread in nice variegated colorways. Embroidery fodder. 🙂 I did take one photo of a cute pouch sample they had:

Upside down pic – sorry. This little pouch is shaped/colored like candy corn which was my daughter’s favorite treat as a child (I’m pretty sure she doesn’t eat it anymore:). So cute – I thought maybe my grandson’s would enjoy having one of their own. 🙂

Next on our stop list was the afore-mentioned Crabby Quilter:

I’ve been going to that site for many, many years (since the mid80s when it was Cottonseed Glory) and it was interesting to take in the newest changes. Beautiful fabrics, helpful staff – Barbara and I bought a nice handful of Australian aboriginal prints from their three shelf fulls of choices. I also bought a nice two yard length of a light print I hope to use as the background for my next bright quilt.

The last stop on our trip took a while to get to – mostly because of the dense traffic driving south to Material Girls in La Plata:

I’ve been a customer of Robin and Amy since they opened – bought my current Bernina machine there. Always enjoy going in to see the airy, friendly place. Managed to score a handful of pretty lace trimmed zippers on sale as well as some fabric to use with my Eagle project (I hope).

Getting to Waldorf from La Plata isn’t usually too difficult – it’s not far – but the traffic load as we were just hitting the rush hour crowd made our drive northward somewhat painful. Dinner was, predictably yummy at Cracker Barrel. 🙂

It was 9 pm by the time I got home and flopped into my easy chair, grateful for the air conditioning and my own cosy nest. 🙂 What a great day out, with great friends!

🙂 Linda