Shop Hop

One of my avid hobbies is fabric colllecting. I do eventually hope to make something with all of the fabric that I collect but mostly I just collect it. My mother in law and I joke that we are part of the Fabric Acquisition team, hehe. I love to visit quilt stores, and my friends at work even poke fun at me because they say that if they give me the name of a state I can probably tell them where the quilt stores are in that state. Well, it's almost true. I am quite familiar with most of the stores in Texas, although they almost always are in teeny tiny towns that are difficult to remember. There is one in Waxahatchie, which is where the Spring Renaissance Festival (my other hobby) is held, we drove past that store, it's in an old, OLD wooden building that used to be a general store. Unfortunately it was closed by the time we got there, but at least I got to drive past it. Plus, they have a very good website to visit. There are at least five well established stores in San Antonio, and three in Austin. Somewhere, sometime, someone figured out that it would be fun to create an incentive for quilters to visit more than one quilting store in a few days, thus, the Shop Hop was born. Actually, I have no idea if it really originated with quilting or with something else, but the only time I have heard about it is from the quilting stores. So here's how it works, several area quilt stores are put on a list and they basically promote the shop hop and promote the other shops as well. They put the list of shops in their e mail news letters and on their website, and on a printed flyer in their stores. This is three days of extended hours to allow the "shop hoppers" to visit all the stores. The Bluebonnet Patchwork Trail Shop Hop 2007 includes 12 stores between San Antonio, New Braunfels, Austin, Fredricksburg, Kerrville, and Castroville. Now, that's a pretty large area of land to cover in just three days (and the third day, is Sunday and they are only open 12pm to 6pm) but my mother-in-law and I are hoping to visit ALL 12 stores. Why, you may ask, would we want to break the bank on gas costs alone just to visit 12 stores in 3 days? Because! If we visit ALL 12 stores and get ALL 12 stamps on our "Trail Pass" then we get entered into a drawing to win a basket of quilting STUFF from one of the 12 stores worth over $1200!!! And since both my mother-in-law (MIL) and I will be entering, that DOUBLES the chance of winning. Now, I don't know that I could ever win such an amazing prize, but I will tell you this, with gas prices on the rise and a large group of 12 shops that span a VERY large area (everything in Texas is big and it takes at least 30 minutes to get to any of the shops outside of San Antonio, most of the time more than that), I am hoping that the number of "hoppers" who actually make it to ALL 12 stores is going to be very small, which will increase our chances even more. I will be sure to take my camera along and try to take pictures of all the shops which I will post on my flickr site at some point. This shop hop is the only thing that has willed me out of bed each morning in order to get through the day and be one day CLOSER to SHOP HOPPING! And the weather is probably going to be pretty nice as well! Oh yeah, did I mention that I recently purchased a really nice laminated map of south central Texas in order to map out the best routes between stores? Well, I did and tonight I plan to mapquest the directions to the stores that are in Austin so that we can get there faster and have more time to SHOP (heehee). My husband doesn't even try to resist (he knows resistant is futile) so he gives me a budget, (thank goodness for e filing that tax return) a kiss on the cheek, and says "Have fun dear." His mother (my shopping buddy) really trained him well. Yeah! Ok, more thoughts later.

QRT