Adventuring in Virginia: Part Two

Just down the road on I-81 from Leesburg is Harrisonburg. We'd visited this town once before, when Anastasia was playing a solo there. We'd stayed at an elegant B&B and dined at a couple of awfully nice places. We also discovered the Quilt Museum of Virginia.

The museum changes its featured exhibits three times a year and I'd read somewhere that the current feature was African art.

We left our no-frills hotel and went over to James Madison University which sports a Starbucks on the ground floor of its library, and after breakfast got to the Museum shortly after it opened.

There are three floors and we visited all of them, of course. There is a permanent collection of very small antique sewing machines which Himself found fascinating. And there were the quilts.

This is Runaway Slave Mother; horrific in subject, masterful in craftsmanship.

There was a special exhibit of very beautiful offerings which you may recognize as the work of Hollis Chatelain. I don't think of what she does as quilts but rather as fiber/fabric art. Her process was explained: She draws in colored pencil, then the drawings are enlarged and printed on fabric. Finally Hollis does intricate, tiny, heavy machine quilting. 

This masterpiece is part of the Museum's permanent collection. There was a sign that someone was working on a pattern which would later be for sale.

Here's a close-up of a block. With sufficient graph paper, colored pencils, and hours, I believe one could work it out!