Day 14 A Visit to Lowell

We had a couple of places to visit today. First, was The Quilted Crow, which is a quilt shop in Boxborough, MA just a short drive away. It's always amazing to me how close things are in New England, When we lived in Florida it took 2 days of driving just to get out of the state.  I regress----The Quilted Crow looked like a large home on a side street. The entrance was to the right and it had a lot of rooms, including a nice classroom with a big flat panel TV.

 

This shop had tons of hand dyed wool and wool kits and threads. A tremendous selection. Also, there was needle punch and good quality fabric. I looked around for a long time. Had I not had a couple of wool projects already started I would have been tempted to buy a new one. They had fabric arranged by collection and had a lot of Jo Morton, Kansas Troubles, French General and others. Very nice selections. No Kaffee and wild and crazy stuff.

Then we traveled north to Lowell to visit the New England Quilt Museum.      http://www.nequiltmuseum.org/

It was located in busy downtown Lowell. This is a picture of the back on the building. The building is shaped like a triangle and sits on a corner. It was originally a bank.

The museum has a really nice gift shop with books, cards, finished quilts, FQs, jackets and other items for sale to benefit the museum. The quilts collections on display are upstairs. While we were there the collection was cheddar quilts. Most are from the 1700s to 1800s, but there are a couple from 1900. You can take as many pictures as you want for personal use, but I'm really not supposed to post pictures. Since I can block out access to my blog and no one looks at it except a few I think it will be OK. Hope so anyway. 

Lots of old cheddar quilts. It's so hard to find this true cheddar color today.

 

 

Where's the cheddar??? I didn't see any. This was in a different room.

 

 

 

 

 

Also on the second floor was their lending library-----yes a lending library of QUILT BOOKS and magazines. You can even borrow from out of state and they will mail them to you. They have a large selection. Most everything is donated and they receive books and magazines on a regular basis. What do they do when the get too many donations? Have a sale, of course with the proceeds going to the museum. There was such a sale going on and so I had to look through the sale items and I did find a few good books for $3 to $5. They are all older books most of which  are out of print. I found 3 Elly Sienkiewicz books for $6. The one I really wanted, "Spoken Without a Word" is out of print and a collectors item was in the gift shop for a mere $300. Oh well. The other books were a terrific find.

We wish we had an extra day here. In Lowell, there is a NPS Historic area of the old textile mill area. Unfortunately we had missed the times for the tours, but it would be really nice to see this area. Maybe next trip.

We are headed to Rangeley for more fun and hopefully more quilting.