Fiber Festival

We had a wonderful time on Friday! The traffic was not fun, but the trip itself, even so, was worth it. The Botanic Gardens are such a beautiful setting! The courtyard of the building the show was in has bonzai trees on display. I thought this one was so beautiful with the fall colors!

Inside this was one of the hallways with displays. Later we were chatting with one of the hostesses, and she commented on how the beauty of the setting enhances the quilts too.

We did get a chance to do quite a bit of shopping. Each of the three guilds represented had an area that had things to buy from their specialty. I was totally captured by the beauty of a hand dyed silk shawl. I tried it on, and it was with the greatest difficulty that I took it off and put it back on the rack. It was a gorgeous, flowing aqua, and the artist showed me a new way to tie knots in the corners to make a sort of a shrug.

I didn't buy it.

The quilts were the most interesting to look at. I love the colors in this leaf quilt, and the different sorts of leaves, several different species of oaks, and ginkgo and maple leaves. This was a big quilt.

The best way to look at the woven stuff was to look at what was for sale. They had some beautiful things too. The weaving guild had the best participation opportunity. They were teaching weaving on small drinking straw looms.

I started a bracelet, and I will show you when I get it finished. They had tubs of donated yarn for people to choose colors from... Karen and I had fun picking out different theme colors and textures.

When we were done looking at the show we took a couple of minutes to walk around in the gardens. There is beauty around every corner and such different things to look at. We walked to the Japanese garden. Here is the group we were with:

Karen, Elizabeth, and Cathy. You can see that it was chilly in the breeze, but in the sheltered areas it was lovely.

This is a longer view of the Japanese Garden.

Here is a vista across one of the waterways. If you enlarge the picture, you can see a heron stalking along the hillside.

This is from the Waterfall garden. Here too, every couple of steps brought you to another view of a waterfall, each one different, and each one lovely. I took tons of pictures.

Going home was an adventure... it took 2 hours, and we thought we were lucky it didn't take longer. Our GPS ("Susie") took us through the highways and byways on the way home, but we made it!

It was a lovely day.