Adventures in the Bluegrass

My annual trip back to Lexington, Kentucky always leaves me completely spent, but as always, a good time was had.  The main purpose for the trip is BreyerFest, the convention for collectors of model horses.  Since I lived in Lexington for five years, there are places that I got to know that I must revisit.   

This year, I planned to spend half a day in the beautiful Lexington Cemetery.  I have been playing with making rubbings of interesting gravestone carvings with crayon on fabric.  On previous visits to the Lexington Cemetery, I discovered several graves that had long, profound poems carved into them.  Way back, I made some rubbings on paper of them that I now cannot find.  I want now to make some art quilts incorporating those poems.  Of course, I never wrote down the sections where those graves were located.

 

Even at 9 AM, it was awfully hot and humid.  I wandered through a couple a sections, and made a few uninspired rubbings.  One was a nice Celtic knot pattern:

I drove to another part of the cemetery, wandered a bit more, still not finding what I wanted.  By accident, I found the resting place of the notorious General John Hunt Morgan.  I have a tenuous connection to the Confederate general – I’m fairly certain that Morgan passed by the property I now live on during his brazen Ohio raid.  At this point, I realized that I would have to come back in cooler weather for the sole purpose of finding the graves I wanted.  I had thought that I would have a nice start to a new art quilt featuring gravestone rubbings, but not yet.   

Then it was on to another favorite Lexington spot, The Stitch Niche.  This is a nice yarn and cross stitch shop, but I do not knit, crochet, or cross stitch.  As I’ve indicated in other posts, I use all sorts of funky yarns as embellishments, and there are a variety of fancy threads marketed for cross stitch that are also great for hand sewn embroidery (think crazy quilts, Carol Ann Waugh’s Stupendous Stitches, etc.).  I have really gotten to love the varied lines put out by Rainbow Gallery, and the Stitch Niche has a small selection.  I think I bought at least one of each of the different lines that they had:

 

It is raining now, much needed.  Since I cannot attend to the garden, I will be trying out my new fancy threads.  I need to start a crazy quilt sample for the upcoming shows.