Quilt Shop: Susan's Quilt Paradise, Beaumont, CA

Well, you know I was devastated at the prospect of visiting yet another quilt shop. We had some errands to run yesterday that took us north to Palm Springs. That meant driving through Beaumont, where I knew there was at least one quilt shop. I knew because I'd visited there before. Checking Google, I found another that I'd never visited, and so we stopped in there. It was easy access from the freeway with plenty of parking, and so we stopped off at Susan's Quilt Paradise.

It was located in a sort of strip mall, and here's the front of the store.

Walking through the front door, it looks like this:

This is a new shop, only open since last August, and so it was fun seeing it in its very beginning stages. It's a small shop, and there wasn't a lot of fabric, but what they had was beautiful. She had some pretty batiks and some gorgeous florals.

Also, I liked the way the fabrics were displayed in wooden crates and wooden spools.

What would you call these? Aboriginal prints? They were very interesting...and tempting...I just wasn't sure what I'd do with them. Many of the florals reminded me of Hawaii.

She had a nice wall of patterns, and there was thread and a wall of notions available too.

There was a long-arm machine set up in here. I had an idea that this might be Susan's long arm business, and the quilt shop seemed a natural follow-on. There was also a small classroom toward the back of the store, and she was helping someone work out the proper way to use a Go! cutter there.

My sole reason for visiting was to find another background fabric for the new project I want to start, Friendship's Garden. This one should do nicely.

And I chose this one for my regional print. There are date palms everywhere in this part of the world, and so this one seemed like a good choice.

You might recall that I chose a similar fabric when we visited a shop in South Carolina. The colors were reversed, but I believe the print is identical. When I was in South Carolina, I was looking for something "palmetto" for the "Palmetto State." It works either way.

So if you're visiting the area or live here already, I'd encourage you to stop in and visit this new shop. Susan (I'm assuming I was talking to Susan) was as friendly and helpful as could be, and I enjoyed my visit there.

Okay, in other business, it's time to choose my monthly goal for:

This month, I'll make it easy on myself and choose a goal I absolutely positively know I'm going to finish. It's my fabric postcard for the postcard exchange.

As I mentioned, my prompt was "Irish," and that's an easy one. Our postcards can be no larger than 4 x 6 inches, and so there isn't a lot of room to work with. I chose a shamrock image online and resized it for applique. It'll be a bugger to cut this out, but I think I can do it.

I'll applique it to the center of my postcard and then add a green stripe and an orange stripe on either side to represent the colors of the flag of Ireland.

With this being such a small project, I'll probably do it in a quilt-as-you-go style before adding the backing fabric. On the back, we are to write a message to our partner, and I have some Irish quotations picked out for that. Should be fun.

Rain moved into the area last night, and we're expecting more rain today. It might be a good day to get started on this.