The past two weekends, dozens of quilt shops ranging from southern San Diego all the way up to Ventura County participated in the annual Southern California Quilters Run. If you don’t know what a quilt run is, it’s a bunch of shops getting together, and offering sales and raffle prizes  (and free block patterns, snacks/drinks) so that quilters can run around and see what shops are available, and check out new shops they’ve never seen before.

You get a passport and get stamped off for each shop you go to. For this quilt run, each shop has a $300 value prize basket, and each AREA (there were four… um… “Southern California” covers a lot of space—if you don’t believe me, google the distance between Chula Vista and Lancaster, the southmost and northmost shops participating) had another big prize. I think in the San Diego area it was a $100 gift certificate to each participating shop. There’s another prize if you get to ALL of the shops, but I didn’t make it halfway.

Why was I there at all? Well, my mother is a quilter. So, I’m used to this sort of craziness. For me the weekend consisted of a lot of driving, and then stopping to take pictures of fun things, and snack on cookies and mini cupcakes. Some shops even had hot dogs—these shops were the treasures of the run for me.

I do like looking at pretty fabrics, though…

Like this. Big old kits full of coordinated batiks. Batiks are about my favorite fabrics, full or rich vibrant colors. (The basket I wanted the most was from this shop, and had one of these batik beauties in it).

A…hem. Anyhow. A quilt run means a LOT of quilting ladies. And occasionally husbands being dragged around to collect goodies (like mine… sorry hun).  (He enjoyed the hot dogs too, though.) Me? I enjoyed myself a lot. Quilting is something I’ve only been marginally involved with—but I’ve been marginally involved in it my entire life, and use the basics all the time in my Etsy shop. It’s a whole different type of creativity than writing, and something that can be quite satisfying so far as finished products go.

The other great thing about quilt stores that you might not know?

They have cats. Well, some of them. That’s an incentive to go in and of itself. Or maybe that’s just me. 🙂