Gallery Travelogue


St. JCN wrote 10 pages in her journal about our adventures on Friday. I am not sure I will be able to keep up with that!

In the morning, we set off from Denver towards Golden, after carefully planning our adventures (some plans for a special tour had fallen through, unfortunately), so as to maximize what we could see in one part of the area. I did not want to be driving back and forth across the Denver metro area in a crazy way.

I was shocked at how close Golden was to Denver. We have a map of Denver metro the size of a double bed and it made the drive look like an hour. We were at the Primedia Gallery in about 20 minutes.
The Primedia Gallery is really called the CK Gallery now, but as you can see, the sign still says Primedia on it. I wouldn’t call the gallery large, but it is a nice open and airy space behind the reception desk. There is plenty of space for a smallish exhibit. Photography allowed, which was really nice.
Gallery (back to reception desk) looking left. Conference room is through that glass window.

Gallery (back to reception desk) looking right.

The exhibit was called ARTQUILTImages and was a collection of art quilts. They were good quilts to look at. There was one about the futility of war and it depicted guns. St. JCN and I talked about it and she thought that all the gun imagery kind of celebrated guns. She also pointed out that with the advent of photo transfer, people don’t have to be subtle about their message and, as a result, their message can easily be distorted. In this quilt, all you see is guns. For me, gun imagery does not promote peace. I will be glad when St. JCN gets a blog, because she can explain the subtleties of her argument better than I can.

This is a punched tin cabinet. The designs on each door, as you can see, are different quilt blocks. We were each looking at a different one and I was talking about the Ohio Star-ishness of one while St. JCN was saying that it was not an Ohio Star. It turns out we were looking at different areas of the chest! DUH!

This is the conference room and I liked the way they had their magazines displayed. If I had a big wall that I was willing to devote to something like this, I could see putting books and magazines I wanted to use for inspiration in such a layout.

After the Primedia/CK Gallery, we headed up the road to the old part of Golden, where the Rocky Mountain Quilt Museum lives at 1111 Washington Street. I loved the Howdy Folks! sign. I thought it was fun and cheerful. I am sorry I cut off part of it, but I was in the middle of the street taking the picture, so I had to be quick.

If you haven’t been to the Rocky Mountain Quilt Museum, put this trip on the top of your list. Not only were the quilts great, but the staff was fabulous, too. Joanna, after taking our entrance fee (that is her job), gave us a personalized tour. It was interesting to hear about specific points of the quilts. The museum has a start quilt on right now. There are a lot of fantastic star quilts in the exhibit, but, excuse the pun, the star of the exhibit is Irene Berry’s Lone Star. Unfortunately, RMQM doesn’t allow photos so I can’t show the great use of fabric and the wonderful mix of hand and machine piecing.

As I mentioned in my previous post, a great quilt store, the Golden Quilt Company, is located right across the street! This detour would be a two-fer!

Jessica was the highlight of our trip in the people department. She is the store manager of the RMQM. She steered us towards Harriet’s shop. We met her yesterday at the Great American Quilt Factory, too. She is a great personality and totally willing to share her knowledge.

The RMQM also had an exhibit of Ellen Ann Eddy’s works. She is a quilmaker who knows how to use threads and her machine. I heard QA will be reprinting her book.

In the same gallery as EAE’s works, they filled out the space with a few quilts from their permanent collection. I have to say that simplicity is highly underated in quilt design. I think people need to to get back to the basics in terms of design.

New Fabrics from Denver and Seattle

I am in Denver for a conference related to my work work. I took a day off to hang out and relax a little bit. St. JCN came to join me and brought me these nice fabrics. The cups are, dare I say, cheerful! And the bonus is there is NO brown. See, fabric manufacturers, brown is not mandatory in coffee fabric.

The other thing about these fabrics is that they are not very good for my quiltmaking, except for the dots, of course. I just don’t use conversationals, but they are fantastic for napkins. Periodically, in the past, I have made napkins out of two fat quarters of fabric sewn together with a decorative stitch. Often, the napkin project became a big drag, because of the corners, usually. You can read a little about my last napkin foray here. With my recent Teacher Pillow experience, I am beginning to think I am just a quiltmaker and not much of a crafter. That is, however, a whole different subject and I am not getting into it now.

What I am getting around to is yet another reason for St. JCN’s nickname. She said she would make me napkins out this fabric. HOORAY! New napkins. What a saint!

The first shop we visited was after our gallery tour was the Golden Quilt Company. The Golden Quilt Company is across the street from the Rocky Mountain Quilt Museum (very convenient, because I was ready to touch some fabric after seeing the exhibit). What a friendly crowd! Not only did I find great fabrics, but we were allowed to take photos of whatever we wanted in the shop. Nice!

GQC had lots of brights and clear colors. The space was open and airy and on a quaint main drag in a nice looking small town.

As you can see, I branched out and bought non-dot fabrics.

Another shop that we visited was called Harriet’s Treadle Arts.


This is the shop of Harriet Hargrave, the machine quilting queen. The shop has been open for nearly 26 years, which seems like a long time in quilt world to me. Kim and Kari helped us in the shop and were extremely friendly. We heard all about their projects and the samples they made and they heard about our projects. The shop is medium sized and in a stand-alone building on W. 44th Ave in Wheat Ridge, Colorado. I didn’t find it on Google or on Yahoo Local. It also was not mentioned on any of the web lists that I found before my trip. We were directed there by Jessica at the Rocky Mountain Quilt Museum. The store is decorated with lots of medium – dark wood and carries lots and lots of reproductions. However, the store does not exclusively have reproductions. As you can see, there were plenty of dots and brights and batiks to satisfy me. They carried lots and lots of tools, had a medium sized classroom, lots of great samples and a huge selection of books. I was pleased to see that they carried solids and Perl cotton as well.


I pretty much cleaned out their dots selection. 😉

I have done a lot in the past few days and will continue the travelogue another day.