Monday and Tuesday in the Lancaster Area

Monday and Tuesday was my day to visit the local quilt shops.The first one on my list was Burkholders Fabrics in Denver, Pa. They are the farthest away from where we are staying, but I have visited them before and they have a great selection of good quality fabrics. So we programmed the GPS and off we went. I had received an email saying they were having a wagon sale of fabrics at great prices and they did not lie. Outside in the parking lot was a wagon of about 400 new bolts of fabric. The catch was, you had to buy the entire bolt (15 yds). They had Hoffman batiks at $5.00, yd sand several other name brands (Westminster, Free Spirit, etc  at $2 to $3 per yd. But 15 yds of one fabric was a lot of fabric. It was fun to look though. I did end up getting a pattern on sale and some FQs. I almost never buy FQs, but they had some bundles of 20 FQs for $32. I found a nice red, white and blue for a QOV. Kim doesn't carry that brand and it would make a quick QOV. Also a nice bundle of whites for an applique background. Back outside near the "wagon o fabrics" was a field of deer and their babies. So sweet.

Next stop was another trip to Shady Maple (since we were on the way home) for food for dinner.
Great shop and good prices. We just can't get over this store. We love it so much. Of course we needed more Whoopie pies, but the produce there is incredible.

They must have 30+ varieties of apples alone.

I counted about 15 counters of bake goods (excluding breads). Sweets overload!!!!!

Next visit was to Zooks in Intercourse. The owners owned Zooks and Sauders which was way out in the country located in a basement with bulk foods. Recently they merged both stores into the one in Intercourse. Previously they both had tons of fabric with both carrying more collections and novelty fabrics. I was a bit disappointed in the merged store. The fabric did not seem to be as good a quality and I really saw very few collections. I also missed having the lovely Mennonite ladies cutting the fabric for me.

Across the street was The Old Country Store which has always been a little more expensive, but an excellent shop. Great variety of fabrics all in order by color or collections. They have a nice selection of patterns, notions, books and also a gift shop with local items and quilts.

After fabric browsing, I had to go to the home made soft pretzel store next to Zooks. You have to have their fresh pretzels, they are fantastic.I almost forgot to take the picture before I ate the whole thing.

  In the afternoon when it was a little cooler we sat outside with the kitties in their play pen.

While we were sitting there we heard someone with a lawn mower that seemed to be getting closer. We were across the street from Sam's Farm, an Amish run farm that covered many acres which is all plowed and worked with teams of horses and mules. Well, Sam has a LOT of kids. We kept seeing them of all ages galloping up the hill on horseback or driving a wagon up the hill. These were kids 9 to 10 yrs old and by themselves. As the lawn mower sound got closer we looked up and there was one of Sam's boys with a horse and cart pulling a gas operated lawn mower behind him mowing the grass next to the road. Why push a lawn mower up the hill when you can have your horse do it?

We wished we could stay here a few more days, but my quilt meeting starts on Wednesday.
More later